Church Signs

[this is too funny!! from glenda.]

"You've seen them - the signs in front of churches, with a witticism or a pun that made you groan. I think they're hilarious, often unintentionally so. I've decided to start collecting the ones I see around Austin and on the web. If you'd like to contribute a picture, e-mail it to me and I'll post it here, credited to you."

Funny Church Signs
http://www.aboyandhiscomputer.com/churchsigns.php
Church sign generator:
http://www.aboyandhiscomputer.com/churchsigngenerator/index.php
Other Generators:
http://www.in4mador.com/index.php?cat=generators

Forced Repatriation -- Just Punishment?

[a heartbreaking narrative that questions whether justice is being served, where we draw the line, and competing and overarching rationales for setting rules and boundaries. also, why is it that we often only appreciate something after it is taken away...]

In a Homeland Far From Home
By DEBORAH SONTAG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/magazine/16CAMBODIA.html

One witless day forever changed the life of Loeun Lun, a Cambodian-American who fled the killing fields as a baby and grew up in a crime-ridden housing project in Tacoma, Wash. It was not even a whole day, really, but an afternoon, a costly afternoon at the mall.

Lun himself doesn't remember the exact date. With his wide eyes and steady gaze, he is a gentle, somewhat passive guy who doesn't bother with facts and figures, even if they are the data that define him. Is he 27 or 28 years old? Lun gets it mixed up. His life, from the time he was a baby, a bag of bones in his mother's rucksack on a forced march through rural Cambodia, has been profoundly disorienting. Most of the time, Lun just tries to go with the flow.

According to court records, the particular day on which he stumbled into his fate was Aug. 20, 1994. Lun had been in the United States since kindergarten, one of the lucky Cambodians who survived Pol Pot's genocidal regime, a harrowing flight through a mine-laden jungle to Thailand and years in squalid refugee camps before making it to America. By 1994, he was a rudderless teenager, acculturated, like so many of the Cambodian refugee children, to the American inner city.

On that particular afternoon, Lun bumped into a drifter selling a nickel-plated .25-caliber handgun for $20. Unlike many other Cambodian-American guys his age, Lun had never sought refuge in a gang like the Loko Asian Boyz or the Royal Cambodian Brothers. He was a loner by nature. He had no criminal record and an aversion to risk-taking. But he was tired of being harassed in the projects and worried about his widowed mother's security. He bought the gun.

Lun then set off for the Tacoma Mall in search of basketball shoes. Once there, Lun said, a group of black teenagers began ranking on him and a friend, saying ''stuff about how we like to eat cats and dogs.'' Lun and his friend insulted them back, but outnumbered, they headed for an exit. Lun said one adversary raised his shirt to flash the butt of a gun. Lun and his friend ran outside. In a rare act of impulsiveness and violence that he has never stopped regretting, Lun punctuated his departure by firing off his new gun. Lun told me that he shot into the air; several witnesses, who were using a cash machine by the exit and found themselves in the line of fire, maintained that Lun had aimed at the black teenagers. A glass door shattered. Lun ran. The black teenagers ran, too, and the police never located them. But officers easily tracked down Lun.

Although many were endangered, nobody was hurt by the incident -- except Lun. In 1995, to the shame of his refugee mother, he pleaded guilty to assault charges. He spent a sobering 11 months in the Pierce County jail, and when he emerged, with what he thought was a clean slate, he pledged to set his life straight.

In no time at all, Lun got himself a minimum-wage factory job and fell in love with Sarom Loun, his younger sister's best friend. She was a smart, robust Cambodian-American young woman and a great influence on Lun, who never again committed another crime. Quickly, the couple settled down. Sarom Loun graduated from college and began an M.B.A. program while working in sales for a Boeing subcontractor. Lun continued on in factory jobs. They had two daughters, Emilee and Ashley, rented a suburban house and bought two cars and an enormous wide-screen TV. Lun's mother began to believe that the negative karma hovering over her son -- Cambodian Buddhists take karma seriously -- was dissipating.

As fate would have it, though, Lun's wife, who was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and had never set foot in her homeland, desperately wanted to visit Cambodia. She urged Lun to acquire citizenship so that he could get a passport. He had been eligible for naturalization since childhood, but his parents, like many Cambodian refugees, knew little about their rights and responsibilities under American law. America had granted them permanent residency, and that's all they thought they needed. They never knew that there was any advantage to acquiring citizenship and passing it on to their children. They never knew that a teenage refugee who got in trouble with the law would be protected if he were a citizen and might face deportation if he weren't. After all, the United States had not returned any refugees to Cambodia (or Vietnam or Laos) since the Vietnam War, and most Cambodian-Americans believed that refugees were protected from such punishment.

Similarly, Sarom Loun had no idea that she was jeopardizing her young family's future when she scheduled an appointment for her husband's naturalization. After all, Lun himself assumed he had no reason to avoid open, honest contact with immigration authorities. During his naturalization interview, he freely acknowledged his past offense (and his numerous traffic violations). He also took and failed the citizenship test despite having attended American schools from kindergarten to 12th grade.

Off and on for the next two years, unaware that Lun had unwittingly set in motion an investigation of his case, Sarom Loun tried to schedule a makeup exam. Finally, one official suggested over the phone that her husband report in person to the Seattle immigration office. At 7 a.m. on March 12, 2002, Lun did just that, accompanied by Sarom Loun and their two small daughters. They took a number and waited all day. When Lun was finally called, an immigration officer told him, ''You are under arrest.'' Three-year-old Emilee burst into tears. ''Daddy will be home soon,'' Lun told her.

That was the beginning of Loeun Lun's return voyage to Cambodia. Ten days after he was taken into custody, the Bush administration signed an agreement with Cambodia that allowed the repatriation of Cambodian nationals who had broken the law in America. The agreement blindsided the tiny, powerless Cambodian-American community. It quickly made some 1,600 former refugees, most of them fully Americanized young men, deportable to a country that is little more than a fuzzy memory for them.

In May, 22 years after Lun first flew to America, he took the second plane trip of his life, back in time. He was handcuffed, placed on a government jet, shipped back to Phnom Penh and barred from ever re-entering the United States.

A few months after Lun's deportation, I met Soun Dok, his wizened, featherweight mother, in her daughter's ranch house in Tacoma. The sofa swallowed her up. Soun Dok, who is 67, wore shimmering jewel colors, which contrasted vividly with her faded self. Eyes watery and unfocused, she grabbed my left hand in both of hers. ''This punishment is too much for me to take,'' she said in Khmer, through a translator. ''I cannot tell you the pain of a mother whose son is taken from her. Sometimes I cannot breathe. Sometimes I feel so light I could float away. Maybe I'm going to die without ever seeing my son again.''

Lun's deportation is unreal to her. Cambodia is a place that exists only in her past and in her nightmares. It is frozen in time, in the turmoil and trauma of the 1970's: the civil war, the deadly U.S. bombing campaigns in rural Cambodia and finally the reign of the Khmer Rouge, whose deranged ultra-Communist social engineering scheme left about one-fifth of the population dead from disease, starvation and execution. When Dok thinks of Cambodia, she says, she has visions of babies being speared on bayonets. She cannot fathom Lun back in a place that he barely made it out of alive. The Khmer Rouge had a goal of breaking up families; now, she said, the Americans are finishing the Khmer Rouge's work for them.

''The deportations really rattle these mothers, more than Americans could possibly imagine,'' Paularita Seng, president of the Cambodian Women's Association in Seattle, told me. ''During the Khmer Rouge time, the soldiers would take away their sons and their husbands for 're-education,' and they knew it was a death sentence. Now, once again, the authorities are at the door for their men.''

Dok's lower jaw jutted forward as she recounted a litany of horrors that would have seemed incredible if it weren't for the documented history of what was one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. While she talked, though, assorted relatives sat in the same room watching a Seattle Mariners baseball game. As Dok described tortured bodies rotting on sticks, the younger generation cheered and booed. The elders' stories of the killing fields have been the soundtrack of their lives, and sometimes they tune them out for their own sanity.

Dok came from Battambang province in northwestern Cambodia, where she grew rice and peanuts and her husband worked as a police officer. When the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975, she was very pregnant with Lun and gave birth to him in the midst of intense chaos. She and her family were evacuated from their village and began three years of forced wandering from labor camp to labor camp. She remembers Lun burning with fever and crying so pathetically that it drew the attention of three foreigners, who gave her medication that saved him. She said that sometime later she was forced to witness the torture of those same foreigners, who were tied to poles and speared with sticks. She also told me about paddling through bloated corpses when she was sent to pick water grass and about digging a grave for her 5-year-old niece after the niece was tortured, her eyeballs plucked from their sockets, her fingernails pulled out one by one.

Finally Dok described how, starved by a diet of rice gruel, she tried to cut down bamboo shoots for a furtive meal. Caught, she was buried to the neck in mud and left to die. One Khmer Rouge soldier later crept back, dug her out and returned her to her husband, who ''cried without tears'' before washing the caked mud from her body and handing her Lun to breast-feed.

Dok's husband, who was widowed before he married Dok, fled Cambodia with her only reluctantly, leaving behind a grown son from his previous marriage. He was a sickly, inconstant presence during Lun's childhood and died when Lun was about 13 or 14.

Dok described in painstaking detail the ''three years, eight months and 20 days'' of the Khmer Rouge's rule, her exodus through the jungle with a malaria-infected, skeletal Lun and a harrowing few years in refugee camps. It took Dok but a few minutes to sum up her 22 years in the United States. Once she got her children safely to America, she was spent. Illiterate in her own language, she never considered herself capable of learning a language as alien as English or adapting to American life. She simply hid away in a housing project in Tacoma, making outings to the local Buddhist temple, where she prayed that her next life would be better.

Refugees are not immigrants. The United States recognizes this in its admissions policies, if not in its deportation policies. Refugees do not leave their homelands voluntarily. They flee repression, persecution and violent chaos. Often, they do not arrive poised to pursue the American dream but traumatized and depleted instead. They need assistance, and this country does give them some, although the attitude governing our refugee-resettlement program is that refugees are survivors who need but a jump-start to adjust and thrive. ''In the U.S., we have this new frontier mentality, the notion being we can pluck you from the Cambodian jungle and drop you in a housing project in the Midwest and after a very, very crude orientation you're on your own,'' Arthur C. Helton, an expert on refugee issues, told me last summer. (Weeks later, Helton was killed in the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Iraq.)

Indeed, many refugee populations, especially those who are educated, skilled or taken under wing by an established ethnic community of their own, do fare extraordinarily well. The Cambodian refugees, however, were singularly ill equipped to adjust to America. Many were illiterate or barely literate peasants (the Khmer Rouge targeted educated people and professionals for execution). Many were single mothers. And most were doubly traumatized by having endured and survived not only a genocide but one inflicted on them by fellow Cambodians.

Some 145,000 Cambodian refugees were admitted to the United States after the war in Indochina, with most arriving between 1980 and 1985. The United States accepted them for both humanitarian and geopolitical reasons. ''We didn't invite them in because we like illiterate, unskilled peasants,'' Helton said. ''It was a gesture of generosity, but it was also an act of revenge toward the forces that ousted us from Indochina. We wanted to underscore the brutality of the new Communist regimes and to assuage our own guilt at leaving behind supporters.''

Like all refugees, Cambodians were sponsored on arrival by church groups and voluntary agencies and scattered around the country. The sponsorship arrangement ended after a few months, and the Cambodians moved closer to one another, forming ''Khmerican'' hubs in Long Beach, Calif.; Lowell, Mass.; and the Seattle/Tacoma area. They received welfare benefits or short-term cash assistance. But there were few Khmer speakers at schools, clinics and job centers, so they got minimal institutional guidance.

And they did not adjust terribly well. ''The Cambodians are manifestly the greatest failure of the refugee program in this country,'' said Lavinia Limon, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees. ''Mistake No. 1 was that we didn't treat the Cambodians as different. The scope and breadth and depth of what they endured -- the only thing you can compare it to, was the Jewish Holocaust. What they went through is not something you bounce back from without a lot of tailored and targeted and expensive help. Especially if you're a non-Western peasant.''

In the late 70's, Limon was based in Thailand, where refugee workers used to conduct ''atrocity runs,'' going to the border to interview Cambodians crossing over. Their stories were numbingly horrendous, but what made them harder to take was that the world, burned out on Southeast Asia, ''didn't give a damn about the Cambodians,'' she said. ''The fact that we failed in resettling them is a microcosm of the way the world failed in turning a blind eye to the atrocities in the first place.''

During the Clinton administration, Limon directed the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In 1996, a survey by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles of its Asian Pacific population crossed her desk. She felt sickened when she read it. The Cambodians had come in last on virtually every social indicator that was measured. Their per capita income was $4,369. Some 46 percent lived below the poverty level, compared with 15 percent of the greater L.A. population. Three-quarters of the Cambodians didn't speak English very well. Only one-third of the adults were part of the labor force. The overwhelming majority had not acquired citizenship.

Even successful Cambodian-Americans remain burdened by the past. Few sought or received mental-health treatment, although, as Paularita Seng told me, ''our whole community needs therapy.'' Seng herself choked back tears during our conversation when describing how American bombs wiped out her village decades earlier. Then she covered her face with her hands.

Many Cambodian refugee children were left to fend for themselves in this country while their parents worked around the clock at menial jobs or buried themselves in their communities, drinking wine-based herbal potions to combat depression, praying at temples, playing cards and gambling.

''My mom never promised us anything when we got to America,'' a handsome, soft-spoken 27-year-old named Many Chout Uch told me. ''There were no dreams, just freedom.'' Uch, who shares a lawyer with Lun, is more typical of the Cambodian-American deportees because he was a gang member. He is less typical because he is singularly introspective, constantly groping to express himself.

Uch's parents were separated during the chaos that followed the Vietnamese occupation in 1979. His mother assumed his father had died; his father assumed he had lost his family and eventually started a new one in Cambodia. Like many of his buddies in the projects, Uch was raised by a single, shellshocked mother. ''Sometimes I wonder if it would have been different if I had a father around,'' he said.

Last spring, while Khmer ballads played in his car, Uch gave me a tour of his housing project in Seattle, darting through alleys where the police used to chase him. He wore a long-sleeved jacket that hid his forearm tattoo of Angkor Wat. A Khmer Pride sign, which he macrameed while he was in prison using shoelaces and the elastic from underpants, dangled from his rearview mirror. Every once in a while, his cellphone interrupted. ''Yo, wassup?'' he'd answer.

Unlike Lun, whose project in Tacoma contained only two other Cambodian families, Uch grew up surrounded by Southeast Asian refugees. ''We were a bunch of poor Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotian kids, hanging around without much adults,'' he said. Although Uch did relatively well in school, it never occurred to him to aspire to college. ''Your friends have dropped out of school, everybody in your community's working minimum wage or on welfare,'' he said. ''There's nobody to push you, nobody to look up to.''

As Uch described it, there was a kind of adaptive inevitability about his childhood group evolving into a gang. It was a way to acquire standing and to defend themselves against those who teased them for being small or poor or foreign. Uch and his buddies hung out, smoked, drank, did drugs, sold drugs, stole cars, traded weapons. One month shy of his high-school graduation in 1994, Uch, then 18, was arrested for driving the getaway car in the armed robbery of a rival gang member's house. The school mailed Uch's diploma to his mother.

Refreshingly, Uch doesn't claim that he was innocent or that his crime was a fluke in an otherwise upstanding life. ''There are plenty of things I did that I didn't get caught for,'' he said. He does claim that prison was the best thing that ever happened to him. ''I'd probably be dead by now if I didn't go to jail at the age of 18,'' he said.

During his three years in state prison, Uch grew fond of the interlibrary loan system and read anything he could get his hands on. He aced some community college courses like Critical Thinking, Bookkeeping II and Achieving Your Potential. Like Lun, he nurtured a vision of starting over. But his prison release date, unlike Lun's, came after Congress passed a strict new immigration law in 1996, which required deportable aliens to go straight from prison into immigration detention so that they wouldn't abscond. Theoretically, Uch was being locked up pending deportation. But at that time there was no deportation to Cambodia. So his imprisonment was going to continue indefinitely. Outraged, Uch decided to become ''a freedom fighter.''

Using the detention center library, he figured out how to prepare a habeas corpus petition, successfully encouraging other detainees to do the same. He also led hunger strikes, wrote letters to the press and tried to stage a riot. Finally, Uch got in touch with an assistant federal public defender in Seattle, Jay Stansell.

Stansell, 49, has a long blond ponytail and luminous blue eyes. In the late 90's, he began representing and helping win release for hundreds of ''lifers'' in the immigration detention system, including Uch, who got out after 26 months. Stansell grew particularly close to his Cambodian clients. Several turned into ardent fans of his son's Little League team, and Stansell and his wife were treated like family members at Cambodian weddings. Finally, Stansell helped win a June 2001 Supreme Court ruling that immigration authorities could not detain aliens indefinitely if their countries were not planning to take them back.

It was a Pyrrhic victory, though. After Sept. 11, the Bush administration redoubled the government's efforts, which began in the late 90's, to negotiate repatriation agreements with Southeast Asian countries reluctant to take back Vietnam War-era refugees who had committed crimes in America. ''It is the position of the United States,'' a government lawyer explained in an affidavit, ''that other countries are required as a matter of international law, to accept and repatriate their citizens who are excluded or expelled from this country.'' Cambodia proved especially susceptible to pressure.

While reluctant to accept responsibility for what it saw as young men made into criminals by the American way of life, Cambodia was eager to be considered a nation in good standing. ''We were more than willing to comply with international laws and standards,'' Major Gen. Meach Sophana of the Cambodian police told me. I asked him if the American government had pressured the Cambodians by threatening to withhold American visas or to stand in the way of international loans, as Cambodian officials have said privately. ''In any negotiation, there are tactics,'' he said.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, a onetime Khmer Rouge defector who has been Cambodia's leader since 1985, initially declared that Cambodia would simply lock up every returnee. That never happened. But Sophana said that the government sees the Cambodian-Americans as a risk to law and order. ''The Americans need to understand that they can't just send us the real criminals, the junk,'' he said. ''In order for Cambodia to go along with the process, they need to balance hardened criminals with people of good quality.''

Perhaps Lun, a working, married father who was completely rehabilitated, fit that bill. In May, he became a guinea pig in the fledgling repatriation program, along with others convicted of crimes as varied as manslaughter and public indecency.

One day last summer, Many Uch drove me from Seattle to Tacoma to meet Lun's wife. During the drive, Uch seemed even more pensive than in the spring, when I had seen him last. He told me that he had been awaiting deportation for too long. He couldn't commit to anything. He wanted to go to college so that he could break out of the minimum-wage rut. He wanted to marry his fiancee. He wanted to start a Little League team for Cambodian kids living in the projects. But why start anything when he had one foot out of the country? ''I'm ready for that American dream,'' he said. ''But it ain't mine for the taking anymore.''

The deportations are proceeding slowly, and Uch is right to be anxious about the limbo period dragging on. So far, only 67 Cambodian-Americans have been sent back. At the current rate, it would take about a decade to deport those 1,600 already eligible. Some welcome the delay. Uch, however, told me that he just wants to get his deportation over with. ''Maybe it's my destiny, you know,'' he said. ''Sometimes I think I have no use here anymore. I'll always be an ex-con. Maybe I can do better over there. Maybe I can do something humanitarian, for my people.''

I asked Uch, who intends to live with his long-lost father in the countryside, what he would miss most about the United States. I expected him to say his mother, his fiancee, his sports teams, the doughnuts he munched on. Instead he said, ''The constitution, man, the freedom to assemble.''

Despite his bravado, I took Uch at his word. There aren't many others who have embraced their punishments as he has, immersing himself in Khmer history and language. Lun certainly didn't. But then Lun was leaving behind a wife and children, and he lacked Uch's self-confidence. His wife is the can-do one in that family.

Sarom Loun and Loeun Lun's relationship had an inauspicious start. She asked him to her prom, he accepted and then he failed to show up because he didn't have anything to wear. Fortunately for Lun, Sarom Loun was persistent. She liked his gentle manner and the respectful way he treated his elders. She liked that she could talk to him and that he would open his calm face to her without passing judgment. Greatly disappointing her mother, she fell in love with Lun, became pregnant and settled down at the age of 18.

''He was actually my first and last boyfriend,'' Sarom Loun told me. ''I tend to be more American because I grew up here, but my culture is Cambodian, and I believe you save yourself for your husband and then you stick by your husband, no matter what.''

Sarom Loun was 6 months old when her family moved to the United States. She speaks English like a native, not with the accented awkwardness that her husband exhibits. Sarom Loun comes from a close-knit family and grew up in a nicer section of Tacoma than her husband. She bursts with immigrant confidence. When I asked what she aspires to do after she gets her M.B.A., she said without a moment's hesitation, ''Looking at it long-term, I want to become a C.E.O.'' Given that her husband dropped out of high school, she always expected to be the major breadwinner in their family. ''I've always been kind of like the man of the house, taking care of him,'' she said. ''I tell people I have three kids: my two daughters and my husband.''

After her husband was deported, Sarom Loun moved out of their rented house and into her parents' home. Emilee, 5, and Ashley, 1, started calling their grandfather Dad. During our conversations, Sarom Loun dissolved into tears twice, but she told me that she never cries when she talks on the phone with her husband in Cambodia. ''He never sees me weak,'' she said. ''But sometimes I get to the point where I can't do it anymore.''

The deportation, nine years after her husband committed a crime as a teenager, infuriates her more than it does him. Her American sense of entitlement and her protest instincts are keener. ''Why after all this time, where you give someone a chance to start a life, would you take it away with one snap of a finger?'' she said. ''Loeun knows what he did was wrong. But he has never done anything wrong since. What does breaking up his family accomplish for the United States of America?''

At first, Sarom Loun imagined that she and the children might join her husband in Cambodia after he settled in. Now she is doubtful that will ever happen and envisions a telephone marriage sustained by occasional visits. ''Don't stress,'' she tells Lun. ''If I have to work for the rest of my life to support you, I'm going to.''

Maybe in 40 years' time, she told me, she will retire to Cambodia, and they can reunite for good.

Tourists to Cambodia usually make two stops, at the medieval temples of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap and at the killing fields of Choeung Ek outside Phnom Penh -- the apex and the nadir of Khmer culture. When I visited early this fall, the temples were filled with Japanese tour groups, and the killing fields were desolate. At Choeung Ek, as I approached the pagodalike memorial to the dead, a glass tower filled with skulls, raggedy children swarmed around me. ''One dollar, we go away,'' a small boy said. I gave him a dollar. The children continued to move with me around the chilling monument. ''One dollar more,'' the boy said as he was joined by an adult amputee, probably a land-mine victim.

From Angkor Wat, I called Lun to tell him that I had arrived. He was staying in a small village, so we decided to meet first in the provincial city of Siem Reap. Lun said he didn't really know his way around and couldn't read signs in Khmer, so he picked a personal landmark: the Western Union where his wife wires him money.

Lun told me I might not recognize him from his family's pictures. The sun had darkened his skin, and he had lost weight. But I knew him instantly. It wasn't just that he was the only Cambodian in Siem Reap wearing wide-wale corduroys on a 100-degree day. However discombobulated he felt, I told him, he still looked like the same person who had been forced to leave America five months earlier. He shook his head. ''I'm a zombie now,'' he said.

On that March day in 2002, after the immigration officer took him into custody, he told Lun that he'd let him go if it were up to him. ''Hey,'' Lun said he told the officer, ''you're just doing your job, man.'' Lun doesn't like conflict or stress. He told himself that ''probably something will happen positive.'' He spent the next nine months in federal detention, until Stansell won his release in December 2002.

Lun's employer, a company that makes plastic film and packaging products, took him back on the 12-hour graveyard shift so that he could look after his girls during the days. He enjoyed stacking 80-pound rolls of plastic, preparing ink for the printers, checking printed materials for smears, palling around with other workers. It was a tranquil few months until Stansell called in late April and said that Lun had to report for deportation in three days.

''People in the Cambodian community kept saying to me that we need to tell the government that this is unconstitutional,'' Stansell said. ''But it's not. Look at the Chinese Exclusion Act,'' a 19th-century act of Congress that was the first significant law restricting immigration. ''There's over 100 years of precedent for us to be abusive. There was nothing lawyerly I could do.''

Lun packed a backpack with a few changes of clothes, $50, a roll of toilet paper, a bottle of Tylenol and pictures of his wife and children. Two filmmakers from California, Nicole Newnham and David Grabias, who are making a documentary about the deportations, filmed his departure. ''Bye, Dad!'' little Emilee said cheerfully, wearing a pink T-shirt emblazoned Princess. Sarom Loun, erect and dignified, put her arm though Lun's, walked him to the door of the federal building in Seattle and let him go.

When Lun and 10 other deportees landed in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian authorities welcomed them back by locking them up in a dirty, mosquito-infested detention center. The guards proceeded to shake them down. One called Sarom Loun in Tacoma and told her that her husband would be freed if she coughed up $200. She had a very American reaction. She called her lawyer.

Stansell got in touch with Bill Herod, an American in Phnom Penh. Herod, 58, is a white-haired, blue-eyed native of Indiana who tools around Phnom Penh in a rusty old Willys Jeep. A minister who introduced the Internet to Cambodia, Herod has been in and out of Southeast Asia for several decades, working for nongovernmental organizations. When the first planeload of six deportees was due to arrive in Cambodia in June 2002, Herod realized that there was no program in place to help them. So he threw one together, using a friend's guest house as a drop-in center, a classroom and a boarding house.

Since then, Herod has assumed almost sole responsibility for the Cambodian-Americans. A high proportion -- 10 percent -- are mentally ill or disturbed and arrived without medical records. Their first violent episodes came as real shocks. One troubled man, since given a diagnosis of ''complex post-traumatic stress disorder consistent with torture,'' wrapped a brick in a shirt and began swinging it around, until he was wrestled to the ground. Chhoeuth Phok, who is bipolar, suffered a paranoid, manic episode when he ran out of pills; his relatives chained him up for several weeks until he finally managed to escape to Herod.

Expecting thugs, Herod said that he has been surprised by the ordinariness and provincialism of the returnees. Many of them affect a bad-dude demeanor, clinging to gang handles like Tweety and Playboy and to the homeboy attire -- oversize sports jerseys, baggy pants and chunky gold necklaces -- that accentuates their foreignness. But, despite having crisscrossed the world twice, first as refugees and then as returnees, most of them are not very worldly. On arriving, they drink water straight from the tap and plug their American appliances directly into 220-volt sockets. They speak basic Khmer, but they know very little about contemporary Cambodia. At first, many enjoy the exoticism of their homeland and tour the countryside on dirt bikes as if on holiday. After about three months, though, many hit a wall. ''I'm serious, Bill, I can't do this,'' they tell Herod. ''I need to go home.''

The older men -- those over 30, including one who is 83 -- have fared better. They tend to recognize that they have a chance to start over and to possess some work experience. Some returnees have agreed to arranged marriages to establish a foothold in Cambodian society. Several have gone onto Herod's payroll, a few have found outside jobs, some have entered monasteries and others have started pimping or dealing drugs. A lot of the guys drink heavily, get high or develop a taste for an amphetamine-type stimulant called yaba. The lobby of the guest house often contains ex-gang members hanging around watching kung-fu-infused Chinese soap operas on TV, unclear what else to do with themselves.

In September, the United States Embassy, recognizing the pivotal role that Herod is playing, awarded a $108,000 grant to his Returnee Assistance Program. Herod, who opposes repatriation, has thus become its reluctant enabler. His program cannot accommodate more than 12 to 15 returnees a month, so that will probably be the maximum for now. The embassy has also agreed to pay the Cambodian government $300 to defray processing expenses for each returnee, a fee that ''makes it easier for the Cambodian government to cooperate,'' the embassy official said. The American government badly wants the repatriation program to succeed, since it is trying to persuade Vietnam and Laos to accept back their nationals too.

As the numbers mount, there is the potential for American gang warfare to flare in Phnom Penh. Already, the young men ask to scan the lists of arrivals, looking for friends and enemies. ''There's some feeling of scores to be settled,'' Herod said. ''But we're very optimistic that once they make the adjustment, these guys are bilingual, they have Western standards and they'll be successful. Still, every group gets off the plane thinking their life is over.''

Lun didn't think that. But then he has an almost Zenlike ability to float into a zone where he feels and thinks nothing. ''I never get mad at what happened,'' he said. ''I think fate just pulled me here. Why did I buy that gun? If somebody -- God, whatever -- had told me: 'Hey, you'll have a family someday. You buy that gun, you risk everything,' then I wouldn't have done it. But life don't work that way.''

In June, Herod reported the attempted blackmail of Sarom Loun to Cambodian authorities. Soon afterward, Lun was released from custody. He finally got to see Phnom Penh, and he was overwhelmed by the vibrant chaos of the streets -- the bikes, the motorcycles that looked as if they were traveling in packs, the dilapidated grandeur of the old colonial buildings. He had no vestigial memory of Cambodia at all. ''I tend to forget stuff,'' he said.

Lun first went to Herod's guest house, a spare but solid three-story home in the heart of the capital, a few blocks from the chocolate brown Tonle Sap River. He didn't stay long; he felt uncomfortable there surrounded by so much frustration and alcohol. But where to go? Lun decided to venture into the countryside to find his wife's grandmother, whom Sarom Loun had never met. He bought a secondhand motorcycle, and very late one steamy July night, drove till dawn over rocky, bandit-ridden roads from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap.

Lun felt like a stranger around the old woman, and he felt uncomfortable in the intense heat and Spartan living conditions of the countryside. So he went back to Phnom Penh and sought out his long-lost half brother. The brother, another stranger, was welcoming, but he had his own family to look after. At complete loose ends, Lun returned to his wife's grandmother's unelectrified one-room house on stilts in the village of Yeang Tes.

The journey from Siem Reap to the village begins on a graded dirt road and veers off onto a rutted pathway. It winds through extraordinarily lush vegetation, including rice paddies that my translator informed me were once killing fields. Dotted with water lilies, the flooded fields boast scarecrows to ward off evil spirits. Oxen and water buffalo rambled alongside our car.

Sarom Loun's grandmother, Pach Om, is 81. Her head is shaved, and her teeth are rotting inside her mouth. She often doesn't bother with much clothing, wrapping her tiny body in a piece of burgundy cloth. When I arrived, she stood at the top of a rickety staircase and motioned me into her home, pointing out a corner of tatami mat where I should settle and swat away the mosquitoes that buzzed around me. ''Wow,'' she said to me through the translator. ''What poverty, huh? I've been poor forever, but look here, my grandson from America is poor now, too.'' She rocked back and let out a high-pitched laugh. ''Isn't that crazy?''

Her family has owned land in Yeang Tes for many generations. As she sees it, she has lost all her children -- two to the genocide, one to illness and Sarom Loun's mother to America. She does not live alone, though, but with many relatives, including too many fatherless children, she said. She is happy to have Lun, another man, around. But Lun is soft, she said. He tried to go out into the rice paddies with some male cousins, stood in the flooded fields and nearly fainted when water snakes swam through his legs. ''I'm scared of bloodsuckers,'' Lun acknowledged. ''If I'd have grown up in this life, I'd be out there in the fields every morning. But I'm from the projects, man. Mud, worms, leeches -- that's not my style.''

Lun described his living situation to his wife as ''all natural.'' As the guest of honor, Lun was awarded the bed, though it is just a frame, no mattress. His wife's relatives sleep around him on the floor. The night is pitch-black but cacophonous with snoring, animal sounds and a mechanical rendition of ''Oh, Susannah'' when the battery-powered clock strikes the hour. Sometimes Lun dreams that he is home in Tacoma, ''and then I wake up and, oh, I'm all alone with these strangers.''

Lun is so private that it has been difficult for him to get used to the intimacy of rural poverty. But there's a door on the outhouse, at least. The trees beside the house bear more mangos, papaya and coconut than they could possibly eat. They own an old black-and-white TV that they hook up to a car battery once in a while.

And Lun has his beat-up motorcycle. Every day he rides to the main road and hangs out at the local temple, counting the cars that pass. He builds his schedule, such as it is, around puttering slowly into Siem Reap and calling his family from an international phone center. ''Every time I call, my wife talks to me in a nice way,'' he said. ''I tell her, 'I hear you, I'm happy.' '' For months, Emilee would ask him daily when he was coming home, and he would tell her he'd take her to McDonald's when he did. She now asks only occasionally, and Lun is relieved. ''I hope those two little girls follow my wife's path,'' he said.

One time, Lun tried to apply for a hotel job, even though it would have paid a paltry $30 to $50 a month (compared with the $3,000 he earned monthly in America). But he said he was deterred when the employers demanded a national identification card. Lun had heard that you needed to bribe local officials as much as $1,000 to get an ID, so he forgot about the job. But Herod said that an ID was obtainable -- with maybe a $50 fee -- and that an ID wasn't necessary to secure most jobs. Many of the returnees are timid about navigating an unfamiliar, corrupt system, he said, and they're not ready to accept the reality that their earnings will be quite meager.

Sitting cross-legged next to me on the floor, Pach Om clutched my arm, stared into my eyes and implored me to do something for Lun. She felt sorry for him and baffled by his one-way trip back to Cambodia. ''There must have been some kind of mistake,'' she said. ''There he had a wife, kids, a job. Here he has nothing. He is like an alien.''

This may feel like a special time, when the American government operates from a harsh posture of suspicion toward aliens, brushing aside concerns about their rights to due process. It has really been since 1996, though, that the government has been pitiless toward immigrants who break the law. In that year, new laws made even relatively minor missteps -- shoplifting, cocaine possession -- cause enough for a permanent legal resident of the United States to forfeit his membership in American society.

The laws grew out of several anxieties, about welfare fraud, about inefficiency and ineptitude in the Immigration and Naturalization Service and about a wave of immigration from the third world. Eager to crack down, Congress greatly expanded the grounds for deportation and made immigrants and refugees deportable retroactively for crimes that were not deportable offenses when committed. It also took away, in many if not most cases, their right to go before an immigration judge and petition for their deportations to be waived on the basis of their rehabilitation or family ties or military service.

With those changes, nuance dropped out of the deportation system. Noncitizen immigrants and refugees became a class of American residents ineligible for forgiveness or even for individual consideration by our judicial system. No matter how long they had lived in this country, if they broke the law, they were once again aliens, criminal aliens.

The U.S. government took the position that it did not owe second chances to immigrants or refugees who abused their welcome by breaking the law. Yet noncitizen immigrants and refugees are an enduring human reality in this country. They labor in our factories, serve in our armed forces, sit in our classrooms and languish in our prisons. Perhaps there should once again be room for the U.S. to take this reality into account, to make some allowance for the distinctions between murderers and shoplifters, between serial offenders and people who make mistakes, between illegal immigrants and refugees who severed all ties with their troubled homelands.

Advocates have been successful in winning a few reprieves through court cases. But lawmakers have tried and failed since 1996 to restore some ''sanity and humanity'' to the deportation system, as one senator's immigration adviser put it. Perhaps, this immigration expert said, Congress would be more receptive to softening the laws incrementally, through special fixes for specific populations like military veterans or refugees or even a specific subset of refugees. Congress could, for instance, exempt from deportation refugees who fled their homelands as infants or toddlers, grew up in this country and succumbed to the negative influences of our own inner cities. It could be argued that these refugee children are our responsibility, and their failure is our failure.

For Cambodian-Americans, the strict new immigration laws were irrelevant until after the Bush administration -- in the wake of 9/11 and the Supreme Court ruling against indefinite detention -- succeeded in negotiating the repatriation agreement with Cambodia. Then the Cambodian-Americans felt as if they were punched in the collective gut by an unanticipated punishment for their difficulties in adjusting to this country. Further, many Cambodian-American young men would have approached their criminal cases differently if they knew that deportation was a potential consequence. Many might have taken a chance at trial rather than accepting plea agreements, for one. It didn't seem fair, they told me again and again. It didn't seem American.

Joel R. Charny, vice president of Refugees International for policy, who was based in Cambodia in the aftermath of the genocide, said that he couldn't believe his ears when he first heard about the repatriation. ''We are basically abandoning the children of Holocaust survivors,'' he said. ''We're dropping them as if from the sky back into a very scarred society. These guys are lost on the planet earth.''

Earlier this fall, I met Lun at the airport outside Phnom Penh. He was uncharacteristically bouncy, waiting for his wife to arrive for a visit. ''I love the color red,'' he volunteered, making small talk, which was not his habit. ''To me, it says power.'' At an outdoor cafe, he drank a 7-Up and told me that he had rented a hotel room in Phnom Penh for a few nights, after which they would head off to Yeang Tes.

Lun kept jumping up to check the arrivals board. ''Maybe another six minutes until she lands,'' he said. Lun deftly slipped $5 to one official and $5 to another to get us inside the international arrivals building. As travelers filed off a plane from Taipei, Lun spotted his wife making her way to the head of the line. ''Dang, she looks good,'' he said. It was 95 degrees in Phnom Penh, but Sarom Loun was wearing cargo pants and a fluffy red down vest, with an overstuffed backpack slung over her shoulder. She looked very Seattle and, next to the Cambodians around her, very hearty.

Sarom Loun enveloped her husband in a hug, took his cheeks in both hands, examined his face and bounded toward the baggage carousel. ''She's so happy to see me,'' Lun said as he hustled after her. Sarom Loun got a porter to load bags stuffed with presents onto a cart, cleared customs and pushed the cart into the steamy outdoors. She looked around smiling and cocked her head at the announcements in Khmer. So this was their homeland. Sarom Loun ruffled her husband's hair. Then she discreetly tucked away her American passport -- and her return ticket -- for another day.

Deborah Sontag is a staff writer for the magazine.

Additional Information:
http://www.cancweb.org/
http://www.cancweb.org/canc/deportation.html

Joy, and Jeers, as New Police Patrol Baghdad

Joy, and Jeers, as New Police Patrol Baghdad
By SUSAN SACHS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/15/international/middleeast/15BAGH.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 14 — Tires squealing, sirens wailing and adrenaline pumping madly, dozens of Iraqi police officers charged through central Baghdad to take back their city from bandits.

Pistols and Kalashnikov rifles at the ready, they sprinted up a narrow alleyway in the notorious Fadhil district on Thursday, pulling one car theft suspect from his bed in his underwear. Hardly pausing for breath, the officers burst into a billiard parlor, pushed the six young patrons against a wall and searched them for weapons.

Women and children stared down at the ruckus from sheet-covered balconies. Startled peddlers stood frozen by their donkey carts.

"God bless the police!" shouted a shopkeeper as the men in blue passed by.

"What took you so long?" called out another.

Such a happy scene would have been unimaginable a year ago. The Iraqi police force was as tainted as the rest of Saddam Hussein's security forces, feared for its casual brutality and powers to spy, residents said.

But there in person was the police chief of Baghdad, Hassan al-Obeidi, smiling as he walked with his troops past the ramshackle car repair shops with mufflers hanging from the doorways like sausages. Even more astonishing to the onlookers, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, deputy interior minister and boss of the Iraqi national police, strode along at the head of the procession, asking, even pleading, for people to help him fight crime.

"Help us to protect you and preserve security," General Ibrahim, wearing a black bulletproof vest and a black Gauloises cap, shouted through a megaphone above the din.

"Guide us, please," he said, buttonholing merchants along the sidewalks. "If you have suspicions about anything, tell us. We've been receiving complaints about gangs and hand grenades. Do you know anyone? Have you seen anything? Can you give us a name or an address?"

The morning raids and patrol amounted to a public show of courage and force for the newly revamped Iraqi police.

Most Iraqi police officers were absent during the looting spree that swept Baghdad just after the war. Most veterans returned to their posts in May and June, but with the country awash in stolen and abandoned weapons, few of the ill-equipped and jumpy officers ventured forth from their stations.

Since then, police officers have increasingly become targets of guerrilla attacks, unthinkable in the days of the old government, when the police outgunned the populace. General Ibrahim was shot in the leg in July during the arrest of kidnapping suspects. Earlier this month, car bombs exploded at four Baghdad police stations.

Despite the risks, the Iraqi force has slowly been gaining confidence, according to British and American advisers. "These people are taking ownership," said Col. Ted Spain, a military police commander in the United States Army who manages retraining courses here.

In storming the Fadhil neighborhood, a center for black-market cigarettes and stolen goods, the Iraqi chiefs said, they wanted to send the message that the police were back. But they also tried to impress a new ethic on their men.

"On duty today, any suspect person will be detained, questioned and searched for weapons, grenades or anything illegal," General Ibrahim told the officers before they set out in their raiding parties. "But," he added, mindful of the new rules in the new Iraq, "the raid should be done with honesty, truth and respect."

Out on the street, few people seemed concerned with such niceties. "Why are you coming so late?" a shopkeeper selling toilet fixtures demanded of the general.

"We are not late," he responded. "You know that Saddam Hussein burned everything."

"Answer my question," the merchant demanded. "We know the state received a burned Iraq. But this is an important commercial center."

General Ibrahim stared him down. "First we have to provide security for the people of Iraq, not first for your shop," he said.

Swords Into Plowshares

Swords Into Plowshares
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/15/opinion/15BROO.html

I've been waiting for one of the trailing Democratic presidential candidates to give the following speech. Since none have, I'm offering it to them, free of charge:

My fellow Democrats, it's good to be back in New Hampshire today. But I'd like to throw away my stump speech and talk honestly about the state of this campaign.

I am losing. Howard Dean is crushing me. He has money. He has a movement. And he's had one other big advantage: no opposition.

From the moment his campaign took off, the rest of us contenders tried to mimic his success. We ratcheted up our attacks on the Bush administration. We became more combative. We attacked the war in Iraq. In short, we've tried to be better Howard Deans than Howard Dean. The results have been pathetic.

Oh sure, we sniped at him at times. We pointed out his flip-flops and his gaffes. But Dean's core strength is that he is tough enough to stand up to the Republicans. His supporters don't care if he's flip-flopped on issues or if he makes a gaffe or two. They just want to know he can take on Karl Rove.

Howard Dean is liberal aggression, and none of us have ever taken that on until today. But now I am relaunching my campaign around one simple slogan: Stop the War.

I don't mean the war in Iraq. I mean the war at home. I mean the partisan war between Republicans and Democrats that rages every day in Washington and produces behavior that would be unacceptable in any other arena of life. I mean the war that poisons our airwaves, clogs up our best-seller lists and stagnates our politics.

I've lived at the front: it's in Washington, D.C. This is World War I. Each party has its trench works. Each party has its heavy artillery. Anybody who dares wander from the predictable party lines and do something unorthodox gets his head blown off.

Nothing ever changes.

If Dean is our nominee, he may fight the Beltway wars more aggressively than other Democrats, but we will still be a nation at war. I have seen Dean up close. The man hates his opponents. His kind thrives only during times of domestic war.

If we nominate Dean, it will be bad for our party and bad for our country. It will be bad for our party because 40 percent of the voters in this nation call themselves moderates.

If we nominate Dean, George Bush will have a good shot at winning a large chunk of those votes. That's disgraceful after the partisan way George Bush has led this country. But it will be our fault because we nominated someone just as partisan on the other side.

But suppose Dean does win the White House. He'll propose some good legislation. I'll support it, but it will never get passed. Because each party will still be down in its trenches, and nothing will move except the bouncing of the rubble and the writhing of the wounded.

We've all seen the Dean style. If he is elected, we will be a nation at war every second of his term. I don't even want to think about what our country would be like after four years of that.

Remember when George Bush used to say he was going to change the tone in Washington? He lied about that. He couldn't even reach out to Jim Jeffords, a moderate in his own party. He was never going to reach out to Democrats. He is too intellectually insecure. He can't handle people who disagree with him, so he retreats into the cocoon of the like-minded.

I'm opting out of the game of tit for tat. I'm going to get us out of the trenches.

If I do nothing else in the Oval Office, I will free people to build new coalitions, explore new ideas and talk to one another for the first time in a decade.

This is an evenly divided country. That is the political fact of our time. It is about time we had a president who understands that, who has a strategy for governing in such circumstances. Howard Dean and George Bush do not. They just want to pound away and pound away and ram things through. More artillery, more troops, more screaming and more hatred.

As for me, I say no more war. I'm for movement. I'm for progress, and if you are, too, come along with me.

Out-of-Town Tryouts for the West Wing

Out-of-Town Tryouts for the West Wing
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/fashion/16IOWA.html

DES MOINES -- THE 25 or so cars in the overflowing parking lot on a recent night at Wellman's Pub here had license plates representing a dozen states and bumper stickers from three current presidential campaigns, not to mention decals from six colleges and universities.

Inside, dozens of young workers from Senator John Edwards's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination gathered at the dark wooden bar. Campaign workers for Representative Richard A. Gephardt sat at tables near the dartboards and jukebox, and campaigners for Senator John Kerry claimed the back corner. Interspersed were a few isolated workers for Dr. Howard Dean.

Jamiyl Peters, 23, who had driven to Des Moines from Washington two days earlier, made his way through the smoky, crowded room. At the bar, he ran into a classmate from Williams College he hadn't seen in over a year. "What are you doing here?" Mr. Peters asked. The friend, Jonathan Pahl, it turned out, was working for Senator Edwards in Sioux City, Iowa. "It's good to know there is still a familiar face so far away from home," said Mr. Peters, who until recently had worked on the Kerry campaign in Washington.

All week, the young foot soldiers of the candidates work 14-hour days, and they tend to gather in separate bars and restaurants to hash over daily events. But on weekends these aspiring James Carvilles and Mary Matalins, just a few years removed from student council days, check their rivalries at the door of Wellman's, Des Moines's version of neutral Switzerland, to mingle over bottles of Leinenkugel's beer at $1.25 and leave 50-cent tips.

"We're all friends, despite what your boss might have done on Medicare," said Bill Burton, 26, the press spokesman for Representative Gephardt.

Even though two Democratic aspirants, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman and Gen. Wesley K. Clark, are not campaigning in Iowa, five Democratic campaigns are active here — more than in any election season since 1988, when seven Democrats and six Republicans jostled to succeed Ronald Reagan. (President Bush is unopposed for 2004, so there has been little Republican influx for the Iowa caucuses, on Jan. 19.) With a political system favoring grass-roots organizing over television air wars, Iowa has become the hottest place to be for ambitious Democratic campaign workers hoping for a role in the next "War Room."

"Iowa tells the rest of the nation who could and who should be president," said Jeffery Winmill, 25, a field organizer for the Kerry campaign from Pocatello, Idaho, who said he has always wanted a future in politics.

So fresh college graduates show up as volunteers, hoping eventually to be hired for as little as $1,000 a month. National campaign staff workers wanting the adrenaline rush and the cachet of hand-to-hand politics request transfers to Des Moines. "Iowa is a state that launches people's careers," said Brad Anderson, 28, a researcher for the Edwards campaign. "Politically, this is where the action is. D.C. is on the sidelines right now."

With 64 days left until the caucuses, where the first delegates will be picked for the national presidential conventions, about 250 campaign workers have already decided that the long hours, the low pay and the inherent job instability are worth whatever payoff may be at the end — be it a job in a new presidential administration or enough field experience to run a Congressional campaign. Some arrived as early as February; others have just shown up.

Together, they form a subculture — transient, zealous and competitive, though bonded by common denominators like nights on leaking air mattresses, meals of cold pizza and long hours selling their candidates' visions door to door. Many even live in the same building in Des Moines, at 3000 Grand Avenue (usually called just "3000 Grand"), a modern building with a gym and three-bedroom apartments that go for $1,000 a month. Needless to say, the Iowa troops are overwhelmingly young.

"It's almost as if you see a young person in Des Moines, it's a 50 percent chance that they work on a campaign," said Jack Ryan, a 24-year-old Kerry campaign worker from Massachusetts. Indeed, an informal poll of all five Democratic campaigns suggested that some 90 percent of the 250 or so full-time workers now in Iowa are in their 20's — a good number of them under 25. Over all in Iowa, 13 percent of the population is in its 20's.

As reality television has made clear, tossing attractive young single people into a stressful, intense environment inevitably results in romantic encounters, and inter- and intracampaign romances are part of life in Des Moines. Mr. Burton, the spokesman for Representative Gephardt, is dating the Kerry spokeswoman, Laura Capps. They met in July in Urbandale, Iowa, where their respective candidates were addressing a gathering of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

"There is a lot of cross-pollination," said Jean Hessburg, 40, the executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party.

Allison Stuntz, 23, first visited Iowa after receiving an e-mail message at home in Austin, Tex., from the Dean campaign offering volunteers a free trip to Des Moines to knock on doors for a weekend. When she showed up at the Des Moines headquarters, she was surprised that the campaign resembled more a student government election than a presidential one.

"It was inspiring to see that it was people my age who were running the show," said Ms. Stuntz, who had been working as a waitress and a freelance writer. After one weekend campaigning, she applied for a job. Now she is staying in Des Moines at the home of a Dean supporter. (This is not unusual: many workers who are watching their budgets stay with local supporters of their candidates.)

For some young campaigners, working in Iowa is part of a larger career plan that started in high school. In 1984, Martin O'Malley, now mayor of Baltimore, toured Iowa as a campaign worker for Senator Gary Hart, playing guitar for audiences across the state. Other campaigners, stirred by their own opposition to the war in Iraq, have traveled to Iowa to support particular candidates.

Three campaign workers — Chris Hayler, 25, Jennifer Psaki, 24, and John Liipfert, 26, who now room together — worked last year on the re-election campaigns of Senator Tom Harkin and Gov. Thomas J. Vilsack, both of Iowa. They wanted to position themselves for the state's presidential caucuses. All see their futures in politics. This year they evaluated the presidential contenders before choosing to work for Mr. Kerry.

"It was like being in a mall, shopping for candidates," said Mr. Liipfert, who is from Maryland. Ms. Psaki, who is from Connecticut, saw Mr. Kerry a year ago at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner, an annual Democratic event in states across the country. "When I heard him speak, I thought, `This is the guy.' " she said.

Now they share an apartment at 3000 Grand decorated with little except three huge campaign signs, one each for Mr. Kerry, Mr. Harkin and Mr. Vilsack, but no couch. (Why bother? "We're all working 90 hours a week," said Mr. Hayler.)

Their place is becoming known as a crash pad. Ten people slept there last weekend, including Mr. Peters, recently in from Washington.

With staff members working and living in such close proximity, rival campaigns can observe comings and goings and read much into nuances of behavior. The Dean, Edwards and Kerry campaign headquarters, along with the former campaign headquarters of Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who dropped out of the campaign last month, are all within three blocks in a fading area of downtown Des Moines.

In the compressed world of Iowa presidential politics, word travels fast. Workers at rival campaigns, for example, knew the weekend before Mr. Graham quit the race that something was afoot, when his workers showed up at Lucky's bar on a Friday at 11:30 in the morning.

"The bar is right next to the Edwards campaign headquarters, and word got around," said Sarah Leonard, the spokeswoman for the Dean campaign and one of the few native Iowans working on the caucuses. After Mr. Graham's withdrawal, the Dean campaign sent three cases of beer over. The Graham workers partied for the next three days in Mr. Graham's Des Moines apartment at 3000 Grand — or so say Kerry workers who lived one floor above.

"It really is like a sitcom," Ms. Leonard said.

But inevitably, the competitive nature of the races has seeped into the social dynamic. Dean staff members say that as their candidate's prominence has grown, they have withdrawn socially because they feel under attack.

Other campaigns have noted that the Dean campaign has not been well represented at Wellman's lately. Instead, last Saturday, Ms. Stuntz and Ms. Leonard joined dozens of other Dean workers at Billy Joe's Pitcher Show, a karaoke bar, for a 25th-birthday party for a co-worker, Maureen Meyers. Well into the party, they went onstage and belted out "I've Got Friends in Low Places."

"Our staff has been encouraged to watch what they say around the staff of other campaigns," Ms. Leonard said. She said, for example, that the Gephardt campaign organized a protest at a speech by Dr. Dean after being tipped to his schedule by the Kerry campaign. "They'll use anything — what one staff person says to another staff person," she said.

That caution may not be misplaced. Last year in the race for the Senate, an offhand comment by a staff worker for one campaign to a worker for another generated an advertisement in which Mr. Harkin, the incumbent, pointed out that his Republican rival, Greg Ganske, wasn't offering health benefits to his campaign staff.

Last spring, when most campaigners were still arriving, things were not so tense. The Gephardt campaign organized a bowling contest at Val Lanes in West Des Moines in June for all the campaign staffs. As a prize, the victorious team subjected the others to an impromptu song about its candidate.

The victor, with an average score of 141, was the campaign staff of Representative Kucinich. "We equated it to the campaign," said Jessica Ireland, 22, a Kucinich scheduler. "We're quiet, no one notices us come in and bam! We win."

Asked what will happen to them after caucus day, Jan. 19, most staff members shrug. Some will be dispatched to the primary states of New Hampshire, South Carolina and New Mexico to help with the next round. Others, if their candidates fare poorly, may find themselves jobless.

Or maybe they'll just sign on with another candidate.

Bloodlust revisited

Bloodlust revisited
By John Balzar, Times Staff Writer
November 11, 2003
http://www.latimes.com/features/outdoors/la-os-ethics11nov11,1,3185198,print.story

It begins before dawn, as usual. Two gray-haired men, coffeed, oatmealed and camouflaged, move out of camp. Wordlessly, their boots crunching through a glaze of autumn frost, they vanish into the moonshadows and trees at yonder end of a high mountain meadow.

One of them is an archer from the Rocky Mountains of the United States, and today he is a guide. The other is from the lush wetlands of central Canada. He carries a black-powder flintlock in the style of 200 years ago.

They are not walking, but choosing their steps. All senses are activated. A few paces, and listen. A few more, and sniff the air. Then more, and try to gauge the terrain ahead while anticipating the glow of daybreak. It is elk season in Colorado. These two men are out to kill a majestic bull. Over time, they also are out to change the way North Americans perceive — and pursue — this ancient endeavor of hunting.

There is nothing new in saying that hunters are being challenged by antihunters on this continent. That's been going on for more than a generation. What's fresher is the debate from within: the emerging arguments among hunters themselves about what is good and what is bad with hunting, what is defensible and what is not.

It is a discussion being provoked, and not always on welcome terms, by the likes of David Petersen, bowhunter and writer from southern Colorado. And by black-powder shooter Mike Buss, a retired government wildlife biologist from Canada's Ontario province and a founder of the group Hunting Heritage Hunting Futures.

Until quite recently, North American hunters could be viewed as akin to the larger community of gun owners: men and women locked in arms. They stood together no matter what, ready to defend anything and everything — even the worst of things — for fear of giving that proverbial first inch to opponents.

The 1990s brought stirrings of change. In Canada, Buss and a colleague collected sporting groups together into a single national organization, its aim to elevate hunting above its lowest common denominator. In the U.S., Petersen published a groundbreaking anthology of essays titled "A Hunter's Heart," which challenged people to think more deeply about hunting ethics and outdoor values. In 2000, he followed with a book of his own lively reflections on four decades as an outdoorsman: "Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality and Wildness in America."

"Hunters are so easy to hate," Petersen acknowledges. "I sometimes think that were I not a hunter myself — lacking that intimate perspective, that hunter's heart — I suppose I could become an antihunter. The line is that fine."

As Buss puts it: "We're trying to get hunters to look at their activities in light of what society expects of us."

Back to raw nature

If a mule slips on the muddy trail and tumbles down the near-vertical cliff, it is a good idea to dismount on the uphill side as swiftly as your wits allow. Also, if the mules wander into a nest of yellowjackets, it's best not to be carrying a pack on your back in the event you get bucked off in the yee-haw that's sure to ensue. With those words of guidance, you are handed the reins to a dappled mule named Hilda, and you're on your way to hunting camp.

"Ethical" hunting with Petersen and Buss is also aesthetic hunting — getting away from roads and other hunters and as close to raw nature as practical. In the glaciated, razor-ridged San Juans, that means signing up with a guide, like Mike Murphy of Durango's T Bar M Outfitters, for a switchbacking, stream-cut saddle ride to a 9,500-foot camp of wall tents, heaped firewood and boiled coffee. This kind of hunting has occurred in these mountains for generations: a comfortable base camp in a national forest that allows hunters to penetrate the extremes of Colorado's lofty aspen and meadow wilderness.

It is, at least for some, neither pure meat hunting nor outright trophy hunting, but some combination of both in which campfire fraternalism, the epic country, the noble quarry and the overpowering sense of primitive wildness all beckon.

What is it about hunting? For one important thing, it is elemental. Hunters attest that nothing brings them so close to nature, both to the nature around them and to their own human nature, as assuming a predatory place in the food chain. It is feral, primeval. And natural too, for humans evolved as hunters. Perhaps the only similar sensation is to wander unarmed in grizzly bear country, or to swim in the ocean with large sharks, an experience offering the other primordial point of view: that of possible prey.

Our ancient progenitors would probably be mystified, though, by the determination of hunters like Buss and Petersen to make it as tough as possible.

They push themselves into the most difficult reaches of the mountains with primitive armaments in search of game that could take a full day or more to pack out. Why? Because, as the writer Steven Bodio once put it, the rituals of hunting are not apart from "beauty, grace and difficulty." Also, because in this age, the easy hunting grounds tend to attract the very people whom Buss and Petersen believe are endangering their future — the slob hunters, the binge drunks, the roadside shooters, the ATV fanatics, the numbskulls who drive into town with bloody carcasses of 700-pound elk in their pickups and park in front of a saloon by way of showing off.

"If we hunters don't clean up our act, the antihunters will," Petersen warns.

Outfitter Mike Murphy, a leathery and untiring 25-year veteran of these mountains, is impressed. At the beginning of the hunt, he posed a standard question to Buss: "What are you going to hold out for?" Typically, a hunter will describe the size of the bull he wants. Buss says only, "I'll hold out for a good shot."

A rarity among guides, who must cater to the ficklest of clients, Murphy doesn't shy from the discussion of what is right and wrong about hunting these days. He dislikes the commonplace videos from gadget makers that seek to portray hunting as easy. He disapproves of the trend toward ultra-long-range rifles and ammunition. Murphy respects no one so much as a hunter who would work for a certain shot, no matter how long it takes, over one who might risk wounding an animal.

Still, around Murphy's campfire it's apparent that "ethics" are not always matters of agreement. Buss, Petersen and the three other guides at this camp seem to share the view that "canned" hunts are particularly unsporting and offensive. These involve game animals, sometimes exotic animals, either farm-raised or imported, released into a confined space for the benefit of hunters who want to increase their head count. They oppose hunting along or near roads. Most are vigorously opposed to baiting as a means to lure animals within shooting range. But distinctions between hunting for food and hunting for trophies do not always bring easy consensus. Neither does the idea of releasing pen-raised pheasants into fields ahead of hunters, although such an activity is better called "shooting" than "hunting." There is sharp disagreement around this crackling campfire about the ethics of hunting at watering holes.

"We as hunters should be talking about these things, and the public should know that we're talking about them," Petersen says. "Ten years ago, you wouldn't have heard many conversations like this."

Endangered hunters

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the number of hunters in the U.S. continues to decline — down 7% between 1996 and 2001. Now, just six of every 100 people in the country call themselves hunters. Canada's federal government ceased its sporting survey in 1996, but at that time hunters had decreased 33% over a span of 15 years.

Michael Markarian, animal-rights supporter and president of the Fund for Animals, predicts, "The end of hunting is no more than a generation away, and we look forward to the day when animals are shot only with cameras, not lethal weapons."

But that old divide between hunters and those opposed to hunting no longer tells the full story. Wildlife watching in the U.S. plunged 13% during this same interval. The connection between Americans and their remaining free-roaming creatures is diminishing, no matter how you slice it.

The things that hunters and antihunters share — a fascination with wild animals, ready awareness of the needs of these creatures and their suffering — have propelled them into unexpected alliances. Some hunters have supported state ballot initiatives to ban bear baiting and others have taken the lead in criticizing canned hunts. Some animal-rights activists have begun to give priority to conservation of habitat, long the top concern of hunters. Both sides despair that most North Americans consume meat from the supermarkets or restaurants without thought to it having lived, or how it lived, or what unhealthy chemicals it may contain.

'Fun' isn't the word

Elk, or wapiti, tend to move at daybreak and again at sunset. A morning hunt in these mountains may last four hours, counting the time to reach one's destination and return. The afternoon hunt may begin at 3 p.m. and send hunters laboring as high as 12,000 feet into the peaks. Sometimes, they do not return until midnight.

Depending on the conditions, the terrain, the moment and the accumulated knowledge of the hunter, elk can be stalked, ambushed or lured close by imitating the mating "bugle" of bulls or the calls of a cow. Only one in five Colorado hunters is successful in an average year, a percentage that increases among hunters who use professional guides. Hunters expect days to pass without any chance of a shot.

But every moment is still savored. Entire chapters of hunters' lives can meld into a blur, but they can remember vividly each day of each hunt for 15 years or more: the sweet apple smell of aspens in autumn, the "disgustingly intoxicating" fragrance of a bull elk in rutting season, the snap of a twig underfoot that sent prey bolting, the ridges topped, the lightning storms endured, the ash-coated steaks cooked over campfires, the sadness that always accompanies the crumple-crash of a downed elk in the heavy brush.

This clarity of experience fortifies the hunters' belief that their quest answers something deep in their evolutionary genes. You might notice that they rarely use words like "fun" to describe their time in the mountains.

Ethical hunting thus becomes more than just the rules one follows. It becomes a matter of motive, of sensibility. It is, as some hunters say, a question of a person's Code. The hunter who takes to the woods to escape his family and whoop it up with the boys is viewed, at least at this camp, as decidedly apart from hunters who feel they can retrieve something important here that was left behind in the collective race toward civilization.

"I propose that to hunt, kill, and devour the flesh of creatures wild and free is not only the most natural possible exercise for body and spirit: it represents a palpable and significant, if only partial, return to our evolved animal heritage," Petersen postulates in his book "Heartsblood."

"Viewed in this light, honorable hunting is a spiritual sacrament, a humbling genuflection to our evolutionary design, genetic plan, and nutritional needs, as well as a sacred affirmation of our ancient blood-bond with the wildings that for millions of years fed us, fed on us, and, in time, made us human. Thus were we created."

A bull's bellow

From this camp, most of the hunting routes lead up. One of them begins behind the cook tent, crosses a stream and winds over the campsite plateau to a plunging valley 1,000 feet deep. Here, the mountains have sent down a finger-ridge, which climbs steeply through groves of aspen; trees that sing in harmony with the high-country winds.

Ascending the finger ridge, two hunters gaze across the daybreak shadows of the valley below and upward almost a vertical mile to the rock teeth of the summit peaks. A chilly autumn breeze carries the sound of distant waterfalls.

Where the trail levels out, a wallow the size of a swimming pool is inspected for fresh sign. Hunters then veer onto a crossing game trail under the dark canopy of an aging evergreen stand. Stepping even more carefully now, they approach a bowl-like meadow. Once animals of the plains, elk were driven into the mountains by humans. They still seek open spaces to feed. The hunters, camouflaged even to the paint on their faces, quietly sink to the ground. With binoculars they probe the meadow's edges in the oyster light of dawn. They wait until the body aches and they can wait no longer.

They move ahead. Up, over, around and then down, and down more. They hear the distant bugle of an elk — a bull just getting his voice for the mating season. Side-hilling through a grove of trees, the hunters happen upon elks' fresh day-beds. The marking scent of bull urine is enough to make their eyes water and their hearts thump.

From here, the map shows the distance to camp in mere yards. Add the vertical, and the climb back out of the valley approaches a half-mile — 60 degrees ascending. Sweating, they arrive in camp for breakfast. They didn't see an elk, but smelled them and heard one. It was a great hunt, the hunters agree. They recount the morning for everyone else in camp.

They'll be back on the trail in five hours.

Afterword: Five days into his hunt, Mike Buss killed a 5-by-5 bull elk, an animal with five tines on each beam of its antlers. David Petersen is still hunting.

At Play in Chinatown's Backyard

At Play in Chinatown's Backyard
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/13/nyregion/13COLU.html

Blind Man Chin shuffles into Columbus Park in Chinatown, lifts his wooden chess set and shakes the pieces inside, sounding a crackle that scatters the pigeons. It is his invitation to play.

Someone always accepts, rising from among the dozens of Chinese chess players to lead him to a picnic table and set up his board. Mr. Chin, 60, whose first name is Wing, plays from memory, shouting the moves he wants to make and listening to those called out by his opponent. He plays game after game until the sun sets over Lower Manhattan. Then he takes the train home to Brooklyn.

Benson Li, 19, enters his own piece of the park on the opposite end, three basketball courts away. He glides across the concrete pavement in a baseball cap and cargo pants, shaking friends' hands with a special finger snap that is their private greeting, and then settles in for a game of cards, usually hearts or spades.

Mr. Chin and Mr. Li have never met. They live in distant worlds, separated by language, age and, in some ways, cultural identity. But they share one palpable need: to keep coming back to the same small and crowded patch of green that is Chinatown's communal backyard.

It is a pull that the park's regulars, including the many who have moved to Queens, Brooklyn and New Jersey, grasp for words to explain.

"It was a part of me growing up," said Mr. Li, a freshman at the Borough of Manhattan Community College who still lives in Chinatown.

The park is where Mr. Li came of age; he climbed the monkey bars as a 6-year-old and broke his arm twice playing basketball and football in his early teens. "That's how I got my love for the park: I got hurt."

For the man known to everyone as Blind Man Chin, the park is a sanctuary in a land that still seems foreign. Mr. Chin's youthful memories belong to Toisan, China: he immigrated to Chinatown in 1978. He later moved with his wife and four children to Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, but he has returned to the park at least three times a week over the last 25 years.

"I've made many friends with this board," Mr. Chin said in Chinese, speaking through a translator, as he smoked a Marlboro Red at one of seven dark green picnic tables that have become permanent chess playing stations.

The life of Columbus Park begins in the early morning hours, when men and women arrive to practice tai chi and toddlers clamber around the park's playground.

At lunchtime, the park calls forth lawyers, jurors and probation officers from the Criminal Court building across Baxter Street, along with the occasional Wall Street analyst.

Older Chinese women sit under rainbow-hued umbrellas at the Bayard Street entrance, waiting to tell the fortunes of passers-by. Sometimes they are joined by a small troupe of Chinese opera singers.

Schoolchildren rush to the paved field for recess. In the early afternoon, teenagers begin to gather at the park's south end, near Worth Street, to play basketball and cards.

But if the park has a daylong anchor, it is the dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of men who come for Xiangqi, or Chinese chess.

The game is similar to Western chess: its object is to capture the opponent's leader. The general is to Chinese chess what the king is to Western chess. The Chinese pieces — flat round wooden or plastic chips engraved with Chinese characters — are placed on the intersections of the board's lines.

Every day, groups of men begin to gather around 10 a.m. to watch, play and sometimes bet on games. As the sun moves overhead, the men lift the tables to the shade of the mulberry trees. When too many pigeons congregate on the branches, the men nervously move the tables back into the open. At sundown, the players reluctantly go home.

During the blackout last summer, they stayed through the night and played by candlelight.

A sign near the tables warns that gambling is illegal, and the police occasionally make arrests. But, because the players are of modest means — many are unemployed or retired — the bets are usually a cup of coffee and rarely exceed a $10 bill.

"In Chinese they say your life is like a chess game," Mr. Chin said. "Each game is new. It's just like us. Every day is not the same. Chess is life."

The same faces appear, day after day.

There is Kar San in his black poncho, 3 feet 4 inches tall, smoking a pipe and listening to country rock on a hidden Walkman. There are the Detectives, two former officers of the Royal Hong Kong Police. There are the park's revered champions, men like Bond Tam and Lo Ming; when they arrive, space is immediately cleared for them to play.

Then there is Loud Mouth Ming, who earned his nickname with superfluous and unsolicited spectator commentary. When a game turns suspenseful, though, dozens of men press around a table, hurling suggestions at the players.

The advice comes in at least five Chinese dialects, from Cantonese (the most common dialect in Chinatown) to Toisanese and Shanghainese. Mostly, the men understand one another.

"If you move that piece, you'll have checkmate," a gray-jacketed spectator told a man playing in the early evening.

"That won't do," the player replied.

"Why don't you just do it?" the man insisted.

"I don't need your advice right now. Your bad advice."

There are younger Chinese among the chess players, but they are Chinatown's newest immigrants, mostly from the Fujian province. They scarcely relate to their basketball-toting peers at the park's south end.

"Their Chinese is like our English — just as poor," said Eagle Chen, 28, huddled over his chess board. He came from China 10 years ago.

For the younger Chinese-Americans at the south end, raised playing both Monopoly and Chinese chess, the gap between the two groups is hard to define, said a 21-year-old Baruch College finance major who identified himself only as Eric. "It's just something you feel, like an uncomfortable silence," he said.

Still, the park's current of Chinese culture draws the younger group, which includes high school freshmen from Bronx Science or Stuyvesant who hop off the train en route to their homes in Brooklyn for a quick game of cards and a snack at the Tasty Dumpling on Mulberry Street.

"You feel like you know everything here," said Elizabeth Wang Yo, 16, of Brooklyn, who said she added "Elizabeth" to her name because she "really wanted" an English name. "It's like we belong here."

Living in a Concerto for Memorabilia and Strings

Living in a Concerto for Memorabilia and Strings
By DAVID MASELLO
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/13/garden/13BELL.html

JOSHUA BELL, the boyish 35-year-old star of classical violin, often greets fans after a performance, giving them a chance to get a close look at the prominent red mark on his neck where he cradles his 290-year-old Stradivarius.

Many also ask him to sign one of his CD's. He has produced 27 since his debut in 1982 at 14, including "The Romance of the Violin," released last month by Sony Classical.

Some fans wrap the souvenir CD in a handkerchief, the better to preserve the signature, a gesture Mr. Bell can relate to. Between recordings and constant performances he, too, is a collector of autographs.

"I've made this wall a kind of shrine," he said, standing in one of two hemlock-green alcoves in his Manhattan loft. Sepia-toned photographs, programs and letters of his musical heroes (Niccolo Paganini, Fritz Kreisler, Jules Massenet, Pablo de Sarasate), are lighted by votive candles in brass holders, creating an almost sacred effect.

Doug Fitch, the interior designer, used wallboard to deepen recesses in the walls, then added depth by using three shades of green paint. He likened each candle to "a miniature footlight, a way to make the photograph or object a piece of theater."

Mr. Bell's musical ephemera are a historical touch in a cocoon of modernity, a 2,400-square-foot loft with novel custom fittings hidden throughout. Mr. Bell paused at a round table designed by Mr. Fitch. He pressed the surface in four spots. Up popped four musical stands, yielding rehearsal space for a quartet. For dinner parties, a fiberglass panel big enough to seat 14 descends from the ceiling on pulleys.

"There's something about the process of putting a home together that excites me," Mr. Bell said.

Since buying the loft in 1998, he has plunged into renovations with the delight of a performer who has discovered a lost piece by Mozart. "So much of making music is dealing with proportion and balance," he said. "The way you decide to play a piece of music has so much to do with proportion and using time. I love taking a space and — maybe this a traditionally feminine trait — trying to fix your nest."

Mr. Fitch, a designer best known for sculptural furniture, said he proposed hanging paintings, only to discover that his client preferred sheet music and photographs. Mr. Bell is not alone. Collectors chase after everything from a letter written by Pablo Casals (about $500) to a manuscript with George Gershwin's notations (about $65,000). Last May, an original score of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with Beethoven's notes in the margins, sold for nearly $3.5 million at Sotheby's.

Mr. Bell's collection includes a wooden Art Nouveau music stand once owned by Ivan Galamian, the distinguished professor of violin at the Juilliard School, with whom Mr. Bell studied as a boy.

In one of the alcoves there is a signed photograph of Jascha Heifitz, whom Mr. Bell calls "my idol growing up." But the most prominent photograph, about 12 by 18 inches, is an out-of-focus black-and-white portrait of an elderly man, Josef Gingold, tuning a violin. In one corner is the inscription "Joshua, Your sublime artistry will live with me forever. Love, Josef Gingold." Tucked in another is a 500-ruble note.

Mr. Gingold fled Russia in 1912, settling in Bloomington, Ind., where Mr. Bell began taking lessons from him at 12. "He was a grandfather to me," Mr. Bell said of his former teacher, who died in 1995. The ruble note had been put aside to pay the way to freedom for Mr. Gingold and his family, but had become nearly worthless by the time they made the trip.

Resting on a shelf is a plaster cast of the right hand of Eugène Ysaye, the 20th-century French violinist. Mr. Bell admits to occasionally grasping it while walking through his apartment, troubled by a chip caused by a careless housekeeper.

His latest acquisition is a charcoal drawing of Bronislaw Huberman, who once owned the 1713 Stradivarius that Mr. Bell uses. The drawing was a gift from Simon Mulligan, Mr. Bell's longtime pianist, who found it in a London shop.

"I'm not sure that the violin Huberman is shown playing is the same one I own," Mr. Bell said, explaining that the one he bought in 2002 — for $4 million — had been stolen from Huberman twice, the second time at Carnegie Hall in 1936. In 1987, a cabaret violinist confessed on his deathbed to the Carnegie Hall theft, and the instrument was recovered. It passed through several hands before Mr. Bell bought it from J&A Beare Ltd., an international dealer.

The story echoes the fictional tale told in a 1998 movie, "The Red Violin," whose soundtrack, by John Corigliano, was played by Mr. Bell.

Mr. Gingold originally owned a number of the items in Mr. Bell's collection. Some were gifts, and others came to Mr. Bell through a Manhattan dealer in antiquarian music material, Wurlitzer-Bruck, which helped handle Mr. Gingold's estate. "He buys quickly when he comes here," said Gene Bruck, who runs the business with his wife, Marianne Wurlitzer. "He knows right away whether he wants something."

Mr. Bell's loft, in the Flatiron district, is deep and narrow, and Mr. Fitch positioned the works to keep them out of sunlight. He recessed 75-watt spotlights in the ceiling and hung the candleholders, tracked down by Mr. Bell at a store called Illuminations, with nails. There was no special science to determine the distance between flame and frame, Mr. Fitch said, adding: "Some frames are a bit too close, and they're getting worked on by the heat, but I was more concerned with getting the candlelight close enough to the frame to illuminate the art fully.

"One thing I didn't want to do was to hang the frames at eye level, but rather to put them all over the wall. That way, you get the impression that the wall space goes on forever. It's a wall of infinity, an eternity of great music."

A heavy performance schedule keeps Mr. Bell on the road all but 10 days a month. "More often than not, my surroundings, where I sleep, where I live, is not mine, not personalized," he said. "It's important for me to come home and find things that have sentimental value."

Once he has paid off his apartment and his violin, Mr. Bell said, he can imagine filling yet another alcove with musical ephemera.

"I've not made many purchases lately of autographs or letters because of my big purchase of the violin," he said, adding that it is "the ultimate for me in terms of collectible antiques."

Aiming to Be the Next Big Amenity

Aiming to Be the Next Big Amenity
By MOTOKO RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/13/garden/13TURF.html

AS the horizon turned to a deep pink outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of their serene living room, the Cantone family looked out over the Hudson River and pondered the meaning of living "green."

Robin Cantone was enthusiastic about the air filtration in their apartment at the Solaire, which opened in Battery Park City in May to great fanfare, billed as the country's first high-rise residential "green building." She pointed out the energy-saving washer and dryer and the kitchen cabinets, made without the usual formaldehyde.

Her husband, Robert, talked about living for less. Though the apartment has three bedrooms and three bathrooms, its electricity requirements are about the same as for the smaller apartment they used to rent in Chelsea.

But Michael, 15, shrugged. Was there really a difference between this building and nongreen buildings? "No, not really," he said. His younger sister, Caroline, 11, chimed in. "I don't really see a difference, either," she said.

And that pretty much sums up public ambiguity about life on the green frontier. At a time when up to 20 percent of new homes in some markets are being built with environmentally friendly features like double-pane windows, carpet made from recycled plastic, sophisticated air-ventilation systems and nontoxic paints, many Americans still aren't sure just what they're getting when they buy green.

Their ambivalence comes at a turning point for the industry. After years of trial runs and custom-built prototypes, the green movement is facing its toughest test of all: Will consumers buy, and will they pay the same kind of premium as they do for marble floors and en suite bathrooms?

While environmentalists and engineers have long thought that green design made good sense, developers and real estate brokers are wondering if it is the best way to sell homes to buyers enamored of tangible perks. "We find that to be a huge challenge, because a lot of customers are focused on amenities that they can touch and feel," said Chuck Lemmond, vice president for purchasing at Newmark Homes, based in Austin, Tex. The company, which expects to install high-efficiency heating and air-conditioning systems and low-volatility paints in 600 houses this year, is competing with builders who trim costs by focusing on looks, not energy consumption. Customers are generally unwilling to pay a premium for green features, Mr. Lemmond said, adding that he hoped that in the long run the company's reputation for green building would spur buyers to choose Newmark homes.

"We find that if our features, location and price are relatively equal to the competition," he said, then the green features can "set us apart enough to help a discriminating buyer make a good decision."

Newmark Homes has developed its green homes as part of a program sponsored by the electric utility in Austin, which is city-owned. About 30 cities and states have some kind of green certification program for builders who voluntarily meet certain criteria, up from none just over a decade ago.

In Austin, where the program has been running for 12 years, about a fifth of all new homes are built under green criteria, which include air-conditioners that are at least 20 percent more efficient than those adapted to national standards; landscaping with native plants to reduce the need for watering; and building materials that do not contain formaldehyde.

And in Colorado, which has had a statewide program since 1998, the Built Green Colorado program expects to register 5,000 houses this year: 10 to 15 percent of the total being built in the state.

Despite the growth, green is still a tiny sliver of the housing market. It's "a chicken and egg situation here," said Nigel Howard, a vice president of the U. S. Green Building Council in Washington, which runs a program to rate and certify green commercial buildings. "I think that if the buildings were available, there would be a strong demand for them. But because they're not available, people don't think to ask and the realtors in the middle are telling the developers that there is no demand."

At a conference in Pittsburgh this week, the council is discussing new standards for certifying residential buildings and single-family homes as green.

The green sell is inherently difficult in a country where gasoline still costs less than $2 a gallon. Unlike Europeans, who long ago learned to love small cars and dense housing, Americans remain largely wedded to their suburban homes and S.U.V.'s. A 2003 study by Roper ASW indicated that only 9 percent of those polled made green a priority; a majority of those surveyed were interested in "what's in it for me?" suggesting that green developers will have to spell out the savings if they want to close a deal on a tightly built energy-efficient house. About 16 percent said they were not interested in environmental issues.

The owners of the Solaire, who gambled $120 million on a building with pesticide-free roof gardens and cobalt blue photovoltaic cells over the entrance, say it has been a success. Nearly all of the 293 units are rented, with tenants paying from $2,250 a month for a studio to $6,500 for a three-bedroom apartment — about 5 percent above market rates, said Russell C. Albanese, the developer. Brochures touting the building's "advanced air filtration" and "all-natural building materials" carry the slogan "Live Healthy. Live Green."

Still, green is not necessarily the main attraction. Many tenants are just as seduced by the building's unobstructed views of the river and by the amenities, which include 24-hour concierge service and a residents-only gym. About 40 percent of the tenants are receiving $500 a month from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks offered incentives to residents who agreed to live downtown for at least two years. The developer offered all tenants at least one month's free rent.

Kathleen Skowyra, who recently moved to Manhattan from Albany with her husband, William Baccaglini, and their daughter, Emily, 8, said she fell in love with the Solaire after seeing the parquet floors, granite kitchen countertops and the "absolutely stunning" view of the Hudson.

She and her husband are pleased about the air filtration, as well as a specialized system that treats wastewater from toilets, sinks and showers and resupplies it to toilets and cooling systems. But, she said, "I can't say it was the reason why we chose the building."

Indeed, said Adam Bean, a home builder in Clifton, Va., most buyers are still much more concerned with location, proximity to good schools and floor plans. Mr. Bean has built 10 homes in the last three years with insulation made from recycled newspapers, and energy-efficient heating and cooling systems. As for what sells the home, green features are "tertiary at best," he said.

For some buyers, of course, it's more than that. The Cantones, who were displaced from another Battery Park City building after Sept. 11, would not have come back if it were not for a brand new building that promised "all kinds of technological innovations in terms of air handling and filtration," Mr. Cantone said.

Hillary and Stephen Liles, who moved to Austin from Boston recently, decided to buy a $232,000 four-bedroom house built by Newmark because it offered a ventilation system that allowed them, with a press of a button, to bring fresh, filtered air into the house. "It's really fantastic for us because we're allergic to pollen, cats, dogs, grass, you name it," said Mrs. Liles, whose two young daughters also suffer from allergies.

When JoAnn Peace and her partner, John Allbee, were looking for a new house, they settled on a condominium in the Venetian Golf and River Club, a development built by WCI Communities in North Venice, Fla. They said they liked its energy-efficient appliances, recycled wastewater for watering plants and "low toxin" wood cabinets. "We're both pretty interested in protecting the environment for our grandchildren," said Ms. Peace, 67, adding that she and her partner were avid recyclers and planned to buy a hybrid car when they trade in their Lexus RX300.

Such buyers are the ideal targets for green builders. Persuading those who still drive gas guzzlers or toss their bottles into the trash is harder. The Environmental Protection Agency, which runs an energy-efficiency program for homes and appliances called Energy Star, encourages builders to extol the 15 percent to 30 percent savings on utility bills that home buyers will achieve because of features that include better insulation and windows. But that's a challenge for many who were trained to sell houses a different way, said Sam Rashkin, national director of the Energy Star for Homes program. "They sell granite counters and master suites."

In Colorado, the Built Green program plans to begin a new campaign in March that will reposition its homes as more durable and cheaper to run. Until now, they have been marketed mostly as saving resources and the environment.

"We haven't been able to reach the broader audience that we need to reach," said Kim Calomino, director of Built Green Colorado. "Folks have a tendency to think if it's green, that's like recycled products, and they have a hard time moving much beyond that," she added. She said the new campaign would show home buyers a direct correlation between green features and cost savings on utility bills and continuing maintenance of the house.

Not all green features cost more. They can be as simple as positioning a home so that it pulls in lots of natural light. And in some cases adding insulation and airtight windows means the builder can spend less on furnaces or air-conditioning.

But developers are less convinced about the market value of solar panels and other symbols of green design. Mr. Bean, the Virginia builder, said that in his area "typically, photovoltaics are not cost-effective," because of a decades-long payback period.

Mr. Albanese, developer of the Solaire, said he was not sold on the benefits of photovoltaic cells because they took too long to get a payback. Ditto for the wastewater treatment system, which collects runoff from toilets, sinks and showers, purifies it and then pumps it back into the building's toilets and the cooling systems.

"There is no obvious tenant marketing benefit," he said. "People feel good about being in an environmentally responsible building, but I don't think people are really going to pay extra for that."

Tax benefits and government subsidies have helped him pay for the Solaire.

A green apartment complex in Silver Spring, Md., is struggling to fill its units. The Tower Companies, which developed the 78 loft-style Blair Towns apartments, has leased about two-thirds of them. Charles Segerman, director of green development, said the apartments, which feature energy-efficient appliances, carpets made from recycled plastic and low-volatility paints, had been renting slowly because they were among the most expensive in the Silver Spring market at $1,500 to $2,200 per month.

Some builders want to get ahead of future regulation. "In future years, if we don't do it right, it's going to become regulatory," said Karen Childress, environmental stewardship manager for WCI Communities.

Other builders say they believe that demand will eventually catch up with the supply. The problem now, said Alan Rossetto, owner of A. Rossetto Construction in Waitsfield, Vt., is that so many builders have not changed their techniques since the 1950's, and home buyers don't think to ask for anything different.

Mr. Rossetto recently built a home using cement that looks like clapboard (to reduce the amount of wood in the house) and a heater that warms both water and the house itself. Despite such green features, he has failed to sell it.

He offered an analogy. "It's like everybody you saw is driving '55 Chevrolets, and then some guy comes along with a brand new Yukon with fuel injection, 30 miles to the gallon and extra safety features," he said. "But everybody else still drives a '55 Chevrolet because they don't know there's anything better."

VHS Memories Parade Into Your DVD Vault

VHS Memories Parade Into Your DVD Vault
By WILSON ROTHMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/13/technology/circuits/13basi.html

LIKE other families, we had a camcorder when I was growing up in the 1980's, but my father wasn't one of those video guys who would amass hours of soccer games and science fairs. No, my friends and I are largely responsible for the most memorable videos. Sadly, certain projects like our "Star Trek" sendup are believed lost for good, or taped over, but I still have one tape, dating from seventh-grade English class, labeled "NBC Nightly News."

Based loosely on Tom Brokaw's newscast, that collection of skits featured a towheaded Robin Leach, a book-reading Siskel and Ebert who appear to suffer from attention-deficit disorder, and overdramatizations of middle-school lit like "The Chronicles of Narnia." The tape itself is getting on in years, and with each viewing the decay advances, not to mention the risk of its being chewed up by the VCR.

Hoping to preserve it for eternity on DVD and make copies for my now-grown-up co-stars, I tested devices that convert analog video to digital MPEG-2 format and then took a look at the latest crop of DVD burners.

Often converters are boxes that you hook up to your PC through a U.S.B. 2.0 connection. Most, including TDK's IndiCapture and ADS Tech's Instant DVD 2.0, have list prices around $180 and include both the composite red, white and yellow inputs as well as the higher quality S-Video jack.

If you're courageous enough to open up your desktop PC, you can rely on internal cards to do the job, plugging them into a spare PCI slot. They're usually a little cheaper: the PCI version of Adaptec's VideOh! DVD Media Center is $170, whereas its U.S.B. version has a $200 list price. Pinnacle Systems offers similar options, from the internal Studio AV/DV ($130) to the external Studio MovieBox U.S.B ($200).

Catchy names notwithstanding, to produce actual DVD's, all of those products require separately sold DVD burners.

The product making the biggest splash at the moment is Hewlett-Packard's DVD Movie Writer dc3000 ($399), because it can both convert video and burn DVD's, and has a wizard that can plow through the whole process without requiring much human interaction.

What, you might be asking, is the whole process? It turns out that there are just three steps: capture, edit and burn. Truth is, turning home movies into DVD's is only as big a deal as you make it, with few variables outside of your own creativity.

Setting Up

It may be easy, but it's still the biggest burden your PC will know. In my tests, playing around with just two or three videotapes, I spent hours capturing and rendering video and ate up about 25 gigabytes of space. I used a Gateway 700XL purchased last year, equipped with a 2.5-gigahertz Pentium 4 processor, 1 gigabyte of RAM and a 120-gigabyte hard drive; if you don't have a similarly fast system with U.S.B. 2.0 and 20 spare gigabytes of hard-drive space, it may be time to go shopping.

The next step is to understand bit rates, that is, how video quality is measured. In the world of digital music, a lower-quality MP3 might have a bit rate of 64 kilobits per second (Kbps; remember, bits not bytes) while a higher one is encoded at a rate upwards of 160 Kbps. DVD-ready MPEG-2 video involves the same basic technology but demands far higher bit rates, in the neighborhood of 4 to 8 megabits per second (Mbps).

All of the software included with video-capturing devices - from ArcSoft ShowBiz, Sonic MyDVD by Adaptec and Ulead DVD MovieFactory, the three most dominant bundled titles, to the more streamlined, product-specific utilities - allows you to set the bit rate of incoming video. Since the bit rate determines how many minutes of video you can fit on a single DVD, it's a trade-off between quality and quantity. Current recordable DVD's hold 4.7 gigabytes of video, which works out to about 60 minutes at the higher settings and twice that when you cut the bit rate in half.

Fortunately, when turning VHS tapes into DVD's, you can use bit rates in the 3 to 4 Mbps range, because the medium's mediocre video quality won't improve with a higher quality capture. If you happen to have a pristine tape and a VCR with S-Video output to connect to the capture device, you may want to ratchet up the settings to 6 Mbps.

Capturing and Editing

Once you've sorted through your settings, capturing is easy: just hit Play on your VCR or your analog camcorder, then click the round red Record button on the screen. Most programs show a VCR-type counter of your current recording and another that indicates how much disk space you have left in hours and minutes of video. The software generally stores captured video in Windows XP's My Videos folder or gives you the immediate option of saving it where you want it.

In the case of my "Nightly News" video, I wanted to grab each full skit separately, in part because there are gaps on the tape between shows but also because I want to be able to play each episode as a stand-alone movie on my PC. Between skits, I stopped the capturing, and when I had captured all four in their entirety, I brought the lot into the video-editing windows of ShowBiz, MyDVD and MovieFactory.

Although I didn't want to destroy the authentic 1980's video style, this is where you might go all Spielberg, adding titles and effects and dividing recorded blocks into chapters or scenes. Some software performs automatic scene detection, but I find that what it turns up is rarely what I had been thinking of, and it ends up being less time-consuming to do it by hand.

Automatic or not, each program has a slightly different way of slicing up your movies. In Ulead's DVD MovieFactory, you lay out the clips in your chosen order, then subdivide each clip into chapters. When you go to build your DVD, it produces an onscreen button for each clip that when clicked will take you to a submenu of the chapters you have marked. As with normal DVD movies, you can even set chapter thumbnails (although, strangely, Movie Factory doesn't let you title chapters in the submenu).

ArcSoft's ShowBiz 2 gives you a richer set of movie editing tools; the catch is, once you've thrown all of your clips together, they appear in the DVD builder as a single movie and you have to use a new tool to mark chapters. (ShowBiz does let you name every chapter of your movie.)

Now that the clips are selected, edited and subdivided into chapters, it's time to pay attention to your DVD's title page. Here is where Sonic MyDVD really shines. Some programs use only unmoving title pages, while others have limited animated templates.

Sonic gives you plenty of choices and even lets you design your own animated page by picking short video and audio clips from your library. When you're happy with your title page, check to see if it will work on the TV screen by clicking on Preview (or in some cases, Next).

Burning

When you are ready, you can give the signal to burn, usually by clicking yet another big red button. Although you may think you're just minutes from a finished disc, the burning process can only happen once the DVD's ones and zeroes - menus, movies and the hidden stuff DVD players look for - have been rendered. In other words, go make some hot cocoa and watch a little TV. Only at the end of a long, automated process does the burner get to do its job. It can take an hour to churn out a 60-minute video.

The burners I tried out, including Pioneer's internal DVR-A06, Iomega's new Super DVD Writer external and the HP DVD Movie Writer, are all 4X drives, and in comparison with a two-year-old Matsushita internal DVD-R/RAM drive, these burners were quick. The Pioneer and the Iomega accept both DVD-R and DVD+R media, as do Sony's current recorders. Speed freaks should stay tuned: 8X DVD-write-speed internal drives from HP, Sony, TDK and others are arriving in stores for under $300.

Most video capturing products will get you to the drawing board, so you should shop for the best price. Be sure to read up on the software that comes with the one you choose. If you already use earlier versions of the software that comes with converters and burners, you may want to uninstall them before loading the new versions.

With all of the options available, your finished DVD-player-ready disc should be a work of art, although only time will tell whether my seventh-grade project falls into that category. If it's not art, at least it's a more permanent record of my youth - and one reason that in the future, I'll never have to explain to my children what a VCR is.

Does Science Matter?

[excellent series of articles commemorating the New York Times' 25th anniversary of the Science Times section (25 Provocative Questions), including articles discussing — intelligent design (this article below), war, sleep, and number theory.]

(1) Does Science Matter?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11MATT.html

Through its rituals of discovery, science has extended life, conquered disease and offered new sexual and commercial freedoms. It has pushed aside demigods and demons and revealed a cosmos more intricate and awesome than anything produced by pure imagination.

But there are new troubles in the peculiar form of paradise that science has created, as well as new questions about whether it has the popular support to meet the future challenges of disease, pollution, security, energy, education, food, water and urban sprawl.

The public seems increasingly intolerant of grand, technical fixes, even while it hungers for new gadgets and drugs. It has also come to fear the potential consequences of unfettered science and technology in areas like genetic engineering, germ warfare, global warming, nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear arms.

Tension between science and the public has thrown up new barriers to research involving deadly pathogens, stem cells and human cloning. Some of the doubts about science began with the environmental movement of the 1960's.

"The bloom has been coming off the rose since `Silent Spring,' " said Dr. John H. Gibbons, President Bill Clinton's science adviser, of Rachel Carson's 1962 book on the ravages of DDT. Until then, he said, "People thought of science as a cornucopia of goodies. Now they have to choose between good and bad."

"The urgency," he said, "is to re-establish the fundamental position that science plays in helping devise uses of knowledge to resolve social ills. I hope rationality will triumph. But you can't count on it. As President Chirac said, we've lost the primacy of reason."

Science has also provoked a deeper unease by disturbing traditional beliefs. Some scientists, stunned by the increasing vigor of fundamentalist religion worldwide, wonder if old certainties have rushed into a sort of vacuum left by the inconclusiveness of science on the big issues of everyday life.

"Isn't it incredible that you have so much fundamentalism, retreating back to so much ignorance?" remarked Dr. George A. Keyworth II, President Ronald Reagan's science adviser.

The disaffection can be gauged in recent opinion surveys. Last month, a Harris poll found that the percentage of Americans who saw scientists as having "very great prestige" had declined nine percentage points in the last quarter-century, down to 57 from 66 percent. Another recent Harris poll found that most Americans believe in miracles, while half believe in ghosts and a third in astrology — hardly an endorsement of scientific rationality.

"There's obviously a kind of national split personality about these things," said Dr. Owen Gingerich, a historian of astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who speaks often of his Christian faith.

"Science gives you very cold comfort at times of death or sickness or so on," Dr. Gingerich said.

In this atmosphere of ambivalence, research priorities have become increasingly politicized, some scientists say.

"Right now it's about as bad as I've known it," said Dr. Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist who has advised the federal government on national security issues for more than 40 years.

As the world marches into a century born amid fundamentalist strife in oil-producing nations, a divisive political climate in the United States and abroad and ever more sophisticated challenges to scientific credos like Darwin's theory of evolution, it seems warranted to ask a question that runs counter to centuries of Western thought: Does science matter? Do people care about it anymore?

The Context
Breakthroughs and Disenchantment

Clearly, science has mattered a lot, for a long time. Advances in food, public health and medicine helped raise life expectancy in the United States in the past century from roughly 50 to 80 years. So too, world population between 1950 and 1990 more than doubled, now exceeding six billion. Biology discovered the structure of DNA, made test-tube babies and cured diseases. And the decoding of the human genome is leading scientists toward a detailed understanding of how the body works, offering the hope of new treatments for cancer and other diseases.

"For a lot of people, life has gotten better," said Dr. James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix. "You don't know what it was like in 1950. It wasn't just the dreariness of Bing Crosby that made life tough."

In physics, breakthroughs produced digital electronics and subatomic discoveries. American rocket science won the space race, put men on the moon, probed distant planets and lofted hundreds of satellites, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

But major problems also arose: acid rain, environmental toxins, the Bhopal chemical disaster, nuclear waste, global warming, the ozone hole, fears over genetically modified food and the fiery destruction of two space shuttles, not to mention the curse of junk e-mail. Such troubles have helped feed social disenchantment with science.

When the cold war ended, the physical sciences began to lose luster and funding. After spending $2 billion, Congress killed physicists' pre-eminent endeavor, the Superconducting Super Collider, an enormous particle accelerator.

"Suddenly, Congress wasn't interested in science anymore," said Fred Jerome, a science policy analyst at the New School.

At the same time, industry spending on research soared to twice that of the federal government, about $180 billion last year, according to the National Science Foundation. One result is that Americans see more drugs, cellphones, advanced toys, innovative cars and engineered foods and less news about the fundamental building blocks and great shadowy vistas of the universe.

The main exceptions to the downward trend in the federal science budget are for health and weapons. This year, spending on military research hit $58 billion, higher in fixed dollars than during the cold war.

Meanwhile, other countries are spending more on research, taking some of the glory that America once monopolized. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea now account for more than a quarter of all American industrial patents, according to CHI Research. Europe is working on what will be the world's most powerful atom smasher. The British are now flying the first probe in a quarter century to look for evidence of life on Mars.

The Contradictions
New Challenges, but Also Threats

Despite the explosion in the life sciences, cancer still darkens many lives, and the flowering of biotechnology has fed worries about genetically modified foods and organisms as well as the pending reinvention of what it means to be human. Many people worry that the growing power of genetics will sully the sanctity of human life.

Last month, the President's Council on Bioethics issued a report warning that biotechnology in pursuit of human perfection could lead to unintended and destructive ends. Experts also worry about terrorists using advances in biology for intentional harm, perhaps on vast new scales.

"As this becomes ever easier and cheaper, it's only a matter of time before some misguided people decide to infect the world," said Dr. Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of science at Columbia University. Last month, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences recommended wide review of experiments that could lead to biological weapons.

The physical sciences seem to have lost what was once a good story line. Without the space race and the cold war, and perhaps facing intrinsic limits as well as declining budgets, they are slightly adrift. Some observers worry that physics has entered a phase of diminishing returns. That theme runs through "The End of Science," a 1997 book by John Horgan.

In an interview, Mr. Horgan noted that physicists no longer make nuclear arms and have lost momentum on taming fusion energy, which powers the sun, and on developing a theory of everything, a kind of mathematical glue that would unite the sciences. Abstract physics, he said, "has wandered off into the fantasy land of higher dimensions and superstring theory and has really lost touch with reality."

Other experts disagree, noting that scientific fields rise and fall in cycles and that physics may be poised for new strides. "You can smell discovery in the air," said Dr. Leon M. Lederman, a Nobel laureate in physics and an architect of the supercollider. "The sense of imminent revolution is very strong."

Despite the decline in prestige recorded in the recent Harris poll, scientists still top the list of 22 professions in terms of high status, ahead of doctors, teachers, lawyers and athletes.

"Science is one of the charismatic activities," said Dr. Gerald Holton, a professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard. "This keeps our interest in science at some level even if we are deeply troubled by some aspects of its technical misuse."

Polls by the National Science Foundation perennially identify contradictions. Its latest numbers show that 90 percent of adult Americans say they are very or moderately interested in science discoveries. Even so, only half the survey respondents knew that the Earth takes a year to go around the Sun.

"The easy answer is, `Oh, I'm interested,' " said Melissa Pollak, a senior analyst at the National Science Foundation. "I'm not quite sure I believe those responses."

The Competition
The Battles Increase Over Darwin's Theory

A simple number jars many scientists: about two-thirds of the public believe that alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution should be taught in public schools alongside this bedrock concept of biology itself.

The organized opposition to the mainstream theory of evolution has become vastly more sophisticated and influential than it was, say, 25 years ago. The leading foes of Darwin espouse a theory called "intelligent design," which holds that purely random natural processes could never have produced humans. These foes are led by a relatively small group of people with various academic and professional credentials, including some with advanced degrees in science and even university professorships.

Backers of intelligent design say they are simply pointing up shortcomings in Darwin's theory. Scientists have publicly rallied in response, last week staving off an effort at the Texas State Board of Education to have intelligent design taught alongside evolution.

"It just absolutely boggles the mind," said Dr. James Langer, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is vice president of the National Academy of Sciences. "I wouldn't want my doctor thinking that intelligent design was an equally plausible hypothesis to evolution any more than I would want my airplane pilot believing in the flat Earth."

Science has, in fact, sold itself from the start as something more than a utilitarian exercise in developing technologies and medicines. Einstein — who often used religious and philosophical language to explain his discoveries — seemed to tell humanity something fundamental about the fabric of existence. More recently, the cosmologist Stephen Hawking said that discovering a better theory of gravitation would be like seeing into "the mind of God."

Such rhetorical flourishes are as much derided as admired by the bulk of working scientists, who as a culture have drifted closer to the thinking of Steven Weinberg, another Nobel Prize winner in particle physics, who famously wrote that "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

That almost militantly atheistic view helps some observers explain how science has come into bitter conflict with particular religious groups, especially biblical literalists.

"What accentuates the fault line," said Dr. Ernan McMullin, a Roman Catholic priest who is a former director of the history and philosophy of science program at Notre Dame, is that "the scientists see their science being attacked and they immediately rush to the battlements."

"I think they rather enjoy seeing themselves as a persecuted minority instead of as the dominant force in the culture, which they really are," he said.

The Future
Urgent Goals for Governments

Industry looks to short-term goals and has proven highly adept at using science to take care of itself and consumers. A far more uncertain issue is whether the federal government can successfully address issues of human welfare that lie well beyond the industrial horizon — years, decades and even centuries ahead.

"Science is still the wellspring of new options," Dr. Gibbons said. "How else are we going to face the issues of the 21st century on things like the environment, health, security, food and energy?"

Some experts believe that despite the gnawing doubts today, the world will be ever more inclined to seek scientific answers to those questions in the decades to come. "It will probably accelerate," said Dr. John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science adviser, "because it will become increasingly obvious that we need this steady infusion of results to sustain our ability to cope with all these social problems."

An urgent goal, experts say, is to develop new sources of energy, which will become vitally important as oil becomes increasingly scarce. Another is to better understand the nuances of climate change, for instance, how the sun and ocean affect the atmosphere. Such work is in its infancy. Another is to develop ways of countering the spread of nuclear arms and germ weapons.

The world will also need a new science of cities, to help coordinate planning in areas like waste, water use, congestion, highways, hazard mitigation and pollution control.

"It's going to take a lot of work," said Dr. Grant Heiken, an editor of "Earth Science in the City," a collection of essays just published by the American Geophysical Union in Washington. The number of urban dwellers is expected to grow from three billion now to five billion by 2025.

"I don't know if we'll get a new science," Dr. Heiken said, "but we damn well better."

Dr. Richard E. Smalley, a Rice University professor and Nobel laureate in chemistry, argues that new technologies and conservation can probably solve the world's energy needs. But success, he said, requires a new army of scientists and engineers.

Like others, Dr. Smalley worries about a significant shift in the demographics of American graduate schools in science and engineering. By 1999, according to the latest figures from the National Science Foundation, the number of foreign students in full-time engineering programs had soared so high that it exceeded, for the first time, the steeply declining number of Americans.

"Where the bright kids and the big action are is in Asia," Dr. Smalley said. "That's great for them. It is not what I would hope for our country and our economic well-being or our national security."

Whether the complex challenges of today generate a new era of scientific greatness, several scientists said, may depend on how a deeply conflicted public answers the question of whether science still matters.

In many ways, it all boils down to "a schism between people who have accepted the modern scientific view of the world and the people who are fighting that," said Dr. David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist who is president of the California Institute of Technology.

"Scientists are presenting a much more complicated, much less ethically grounded view of the world, and it's hard for people to take that in," he added.

Some experts warn that if support for science falters and if the American public loses interest in it, such apathy may foster an age in which scientific elites ignore the public weal and global imperatives for their own narrow interests, producing something like a dictatorship of the lab coats.

"For any man to abdicate an interest in science," Jacob Bronowski, the science historian, wrote, "is to walk with open eyes towards slavery."

Is War Our Biological Destiny?

(2) Is War Our Biological Destiny?
By NATALIE ANGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11WAR.html

In these days of hidebound militarism and round-robin carnage, when even that beloved ambassador of peace, the Dalai Lama, says it may be necessary to counter terrorism with violence, it's fair to ask: Is humanity doomed? Are we born for the battlefield — congenitally, hormonally incapable of putting war behind us? Is there no alternative to the bullet-riddled trapdoor, short of mass sedation or a Marshall Plan for our DNA?

Was Plato right that "Only the dead have seen the end of war"?

In the heartening if admittedly provisional opinion of a number of researchers who study warfare, aggression, and the evolutionary roots of conflict, the great philosopher was, for once, whistling in a cave. As they see it, blood lust and the desire to wage war are by no means innate. To the contrary, recent studies in the field of game theory show just how readily human beings establish cooperative networks with one another, and how quickly a cooperative strategy reaches a point of so-called fixation. Researchers argue that one need not be a Pollyanna, or even an aging hippie, to imagine a human future in which war is rare and universally condemned.

They point out that slavery was long an accepted fact of life; if your side lost the battle, tough break, the wife and kids were shipped off as slaves to the victors. Now, when cases of slavery arise in the news, they are considered perverse and unseemly.

The incentive to make war similarly anachronistic is enormous, say the researchers, though they worry that it may take the dropping of another nuclear bomb in the middle of a battlefield before everybody gets the message. "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought," Albert Einstein said, "but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Admittedly, war making will be a hard habit to shake. "There have been very few times in the history of civilization when there hasn't been a war going on somewhere," said Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and classicist at California State University in Fresno. He cites a brief period between A.D. 100 and A.D. 200 as perhaps the only time of world peace, the result of the Roman Empire's having everyone, fleetingly, in its thrall.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have found evidence of militarism in perhaps 95 percent of the cultures they have examined or unearthed. Time and again groups initially lauded as gentle and peace-loving — the Mayas, the !Kung of the Kalahari, Margaret Mead's Samoans, — eventually were outed as being no less bestial than the rest of us. A few isolated cultures have managed to avoid war for long stretches. The ancient Minoans, for example, who populated Crete and the surrounding Aegean Islands, went 1,500 years battle-free; it didn't hurt that they had a strong navy to deter would-be conquerors.

Warriors have often been the most esteemed of their group, the most coveted mates. And if they weren't loved for themselves, their spears were good courtship accessories. This year, geneticists found evidence that Genghis Khan, the 13th century Mongol emperor, fathered so many offspring as he slashed through Asia that 16 million men, or half a percent of the world's male population, could be his descendants.

Wars are romanticized, subjects of an endless, cross-temporal, transcultural spool of poems, songs, plays, paintings, novels, films. The battlefield is mythologized as the furnace in which character and nobility are forged; and, oh, what a thrill it can be. "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction," writes Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times who has covered wars, in "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." Even with its destruction and carnage, he adds, war "can give us what we long for in life."

"It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living," he continues.

Nor are humans the only great apes to indulge in the elixir. Common chimpanzees, which share about 98 percent of their genes with humans, also wage war: gangs of neighboring males meet at the borderline of their territories with the express purpose of exterminating their opponents. So many males are lost to battle that the sex ratio among adult chimpanzees is two females for every male.

And yet there are other drugs on the market, other behaviors to sate the savage beast. Dr. Frans de Waal, a primatologist and professor of psychology at Emory University, points out that a different species of chimpanzee, the bonobo, chooses love over war, using a tantric array of sexual acts to resolve any social problems that arise. Serious bonobo combat is rare, and the male-to-female ratio is, accordingly, 1:1. Bonobos are as closely related to humans as are common chimpanzees, so take your pick of which might offer deeper insight into the primal "roots" of human behavior.

Or how about hamadryas baboons? They're surly, but not silly. If you throw a peanut in front of a male, Dr. de Waal said, it will pick it up happily and eat it. Throw the same peanut in front of two male baboons, and they'll ignore it. "They'll act as if it doesn't exist," he said. "It's not worth a fight between two fully grown males."

Even the ubiquitousness of warfare in human history doesn't impress researchers. "When you consider it was only about 13,000 years ago that we discovered agriculture, and that most of what we're calling human history occurred since then," said Dr. David Sloan Wilson, a biology and anthropology professor at Binghamton University in New York, "you see what a short amount of time we've had to work toward global peace."

In that brief time span, the size of cooperative groups has grown steadily, and by many measures more pacific. Maybe 100 million people died in the world wars of the 20th century. Yet Dr. Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has estimated that if the proportion of casualties in the modern era were to equal that seen in many conflicts among preindustrial groups, then perhaps two billion people would have died.

Indeed, national temperaments seem capable of rapid, radical change. The Vikings slaughtered and plundered; their descendants in Sweden haven't fought a war in nearly 200 years, while the Danes reserve their fighting spirit for negotiating better vacation packages. The tribes of highland New Guinea were famous for small-scale warfare, said Dr. Peter J. Richerson, an expert in cultural evolution at the University of California at Davis. "But when, after World War II, the Australian police patrols went around and told people they couldn't fight anymore, the New Guineans thought that was wonderful," Dr. Richerson said. "They were glad to have an excuse."

Dr. Wilson cites the results of game theory experiments: participants can adopt a cheating strategy to try to earn more for themselves, but at the risk of everybody's losing, or a cooperative strategy with all earning a smaller but more reliable reward. In laboratories around the world, researchers have found that participants implement the mutually beneficial strategy, in which cooperators are rewarded and noncooperators are punished. "It shows in a very simple and powerful way that it's easy to get cooperation to evolve to fixation, for it to be the successful strategy," he said. There is no such quantifiable evidence or theoretical underpinning in favor of Man the Warrior, he added.

As Dr. de Waal and many others see it, the way to foment peace is to encourage interdependency among nations, as in the European Union. "Imagine if France were to invade Germany now," he said. "That would upset every aspect of their economic world," not the least one being France's reliance on the influx of German tourists. "It's not as if Europeans all love each other," Dr. de Waal said. "But you're not promoting love, you're promoting economic calculations."

It's not just the money. Who can put a price tag on the pleasures to be had from that wholesome, venerable sport — making fun of the tourists?

What Is the Most Important Problem in Math Today?

(23) What Is the Most Important Problem in Math Today?
By GINA KOLATA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11MATH.html

Many mathematicians would say it's the problem they're working on, but of all the famous unsolved problems, one stands out — the Riemann hypothesis. Posed in 1859 by the German mathematician Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, it has tantalized mathematicians ever since. Recently, efforts to prove it have taken on a new intensity, with mathematicians turning to physics for insight.

The conjecture is Riemann's only venture into number theory, a branch of mathematics that investigates whole numbers. And it says something truly profound about prime numbers. Such numbers, like 2, 3, 5 and 7, have no divisors other than themselves and 1 and seem to appear unpredictably on the number line. Euclid proved that there were infinitely many primes, but the question is, Where are they? Is there a pattern or rule that can tell where to find them?

In his conjecture, Riemann suggested a formula to describe where the primes are. It involves a certain set of points on a plane that correspond to solutions that make an equation, the zeta function, equal zero. His hypothesis said that all of those points, the zeros of the zeta function, are on a single line. The only exceptions are points that mathematicians call trivial zeros because, they say, everything they care to know about those points is already known.

Riemann, however, gave not a hint of how to prove he was right.

One approach is to prove the conjecture wrong. Over the years, mathematicians have used vast computer calculations to climb further up the line, examining point after point in the infinite collection of points, and so far every point has been on the line. The record is the 10 to the 23rd zero, which, as Dr. Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota discovered, falls on the line, just as 20 billion of its neighbors do.

The physics connection involves the boundary between ordinary Newtonian physics, in which you can know at every moment an object's position and its speed, and quantum physics, the subatomic level where if you know an object's position, you cannot know its velocity, and vice versa.

What happens, physicists asked, in the zone between the worlds of Newtonian and quantum physics? It turns out to involve the zeta function of the Riemann hypothesis. The distribution of energy levels in highly excited atomic nuclei looks similar to the distribution of the zeros of the zeta function.

This confluence has given mathematicians a promising avenue to explore. But given the history of the conjecture, few express strong optimism.

What Happened Before the Big Bang?

(10) What Happened Before the Big Bang?
By DENNIS OVERBYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11BANG.html

Like baseball, in which three strikes make an out, three outs on a side make an inning, nine innings make a regular game, the universe makes its own time. There is no outside timekeeper. Space and time are part of the universe, not the other way around, thinkers since Augustine have said, and that is one of the central and haunting lessons of Einstein's general theory of relativity.

In explaining gravity as the "bending" of space-time geometry, Einstein's theory predicted the expansion of the universe, the primal fact of 20th-century astronomy. By imagining the expansion going backward, like a film in reverse, cosmologists have traced the history of the universe credibly back to a millionth of a second after the Big Bang that began it all.

But to ask what happened before the Big Bang is a little bit like asking who was on base before the first pitch was thrown out in a game, say between the Yankees and the Red Sox. There was no "then" then.

Still, this has not stopped some theorists with infinity in their eyes from trying to imagine how the universe made its "quantum leap from eternity into time," as the physicist Dr. Sidney Coleman of Harvard once put it.

Some physicists speculate that on the other side of the looking glass of Time Zero is another universe going backward in time. Others suggest that creation as we know it is punctuated by an eternal dance of clashing island universes.

In their so-called quantum cosmology, Dr. Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and author, and his collaborators envision the universe as a kind of self-contained entity, a crystalline melt of all possibilities existing in "imaginary time."

All these will remain just fancy ideas until physicists have married Einstein's gravity to the paradoxical quantum laws that describe behavior of subatomic particles. Such a theory of quantum gravity, scientists agree, is needed to describe the universe when it was so small and dense that even space and time become fuzzy and discontinuous. "Our clocks and our rulers break," as Dr. Andrei Linde, a Stanford cosmologist likes to put it.

At the moment there are two pretenders to the throne of that ultimate theory. One is string theory, the putative "theory of everything," which posits that the ultimate constituents of nature are tiny vibrating strings rather than points. String theorists have scored some striking successes in the study of black holes, in which matter has been compressed to catastrophic densities similar to the Big Bang, but they have made little progress with the Big Bang itself.

String's lesser-known rival, called loop quantum gravity, is the result of applying quantum strictures directly to Einstein's equations. This theory makes no pretensions to explaining anything but gravity and space-time. But recently Dr. Martin Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany, found that using the theory he could follow the evolution of the universe back past the alleged beginning point. Instead of having a "zero moment" of infinite density — a so-called singularity — the universe instead behaved as if it were contracting from an earlier phase, according to the theory, he said. As if the Big Bang were a big bounce.

In their dreams, theorists of both stripes hope that they will discover that they have been exploring the Janus faces of a single idea, yet unknown, but which might explain how time, space and everything else can be built out of nothing. A prescription for, as the physicist Dr. John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton puts it, "law without law."

Dr. Wheeler himself, the pre-eminent poet-adventurer in physics, has put forth his own proposal. According to quantum theory's famous uncertainty principle, the properties of a subatomic particle like its momentum or position remain in abeyance, in a sort of fog of possibility until something measures it or hits it.

Likewise he has wondered out loud if the universe bootstraps itself into being by the accumulation of billions upon billions of quantum interactions — the universe stepping on its own feet, microscopically, and bumbling itself awake. It's a notion he once called "genesis by observership," but now calls "it from bit" to emphasize a proposed connection between quantum mechanics and information theory.

One implication of quantum genesis, if it is correct, is that the notion of the creation of the universe as something far away and long ago must go. "The past is theory," Dr. Wheeler once wrote. "It has no existence except in the records of the present. We are all participators, at the microscopic level, in making that past as well as the present and the future."

If the creation of the universe happens outside time, then it must happen all the time. The Big Bang is here and now, the foundation of every moment.

And you are there.

Why Do We Sleep?

(15) Why Do We Sleep?
By ERICA GOODE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11SLEE.html

Any second grader knows why humans need food and water. The logic behind sex becomes obvious with a quick lesson on birds and bees.

But even the most gifted scientist on the planet cannot explain why people sleep.

"It may be the biggest open question in biology," said Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen, a sleep expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Scientists' ignorance about one of life's most basic activities is not for lack of trying.

Fifty years of sleep research have ruled out some possibilities and yielded a variety of intriguing leads.

But the researchers who bragged, at a conference in the early 1970's, that the secret of sleep would be theirs by the millennium have had to revise their estimates.

"We were too optimistic," said Dr. Michel Jouvet, a professor emeritus at Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences who attended that long-ago meeting. "The brain is more complicated than we thought."

Still, scientists know far more than they once did.

The discovery of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep in 1953 awakened scientists to the realization that sleep was not "a simple turning off of the brain," but an active, organized physiological process, said Dr. Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Five decades later, few researchers would dispute that sleep serves some critical — if unknown — biological purpose.

All mammals, birds and reptiles engage in some form of sleep, Dr. Rechtschaffen noted in a 1998 paper, even if they do it perched on a tree branch or, like the dolphin, while swimming, with one half of the brain at a time. Sleep has also endured through the eons, despite the fact that it interferes with other survival-enhancing activities.

"While we sleep, we do not procreate, protect or nurture the young, gather food, earn money, write papers, et cetera," Dr. Rechtschaffen wrote.

Equally telling is the finding that when humans and other animals lose sleep, they proceed to make it up, paying off the "debt" by sleeping longer or more intensely.

Sleep deprivation over long periods appears to have serious consequences, though what they are is still debated, because it is difficult to separate the effects of lost sleep from those of stress or other factors.

"One can't remove sleep and change nothing else," Dr. Siegel said.

Researchers once thought that a prolonged lack of sleep produced mental illness. They now know that this is not the case, though waking subjects up every few minutes, early studies showed, made them cranky. Nor is there proof that humans have expired from a lack of sleep. But rats deprived of sleep die in two to three weeks, or in five to six weeks if they are deprived only of REM, a sleep stage in which brain activity is similar to that in waking. Whether the rats die from massive heat loss, infection or other cause is unclear.

What is it about sleep that makes it essential to life? Experts say that, despite widespread belief, it is not simply the fact that humans and other animals need rest.

"You can rest all you like and you still need sleep," Dr. Rechtschaffen said.

Another theory holds that sleep may serve to protect animals, by taking them out of circulation during the dangerous hours when predators roam. Yet this theory, Dr. Rechtschaffen and others point out, cannot explain why the sleep winks lost one night are made up the next or why the impact of long-term sleep deprivation is so severe.

"It's clear," said Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a Harvard sleep researcher, that sleep is "not just to get you off the street and save you a few calories." Dr. Hobson; Dr. Robert Stickgold, also of Harvard; and other experts have argued that REM sleep helps consolidate memory and advance learning, and a number of studies have examined this premise, including two reports published in the journal Nature last month.

But other researchers, including Dr. Siegel, have challenged this theory. People who take antidepressants called monoamine oxidase inhibitors, which suppress REM sleep, do not show memory deficits, Dr. Siegel noted in a 2001 review.

Similarly, patients with brain injuries that do away with REM appear to suffer no problems in memory, Dr. Siegel said. One Israeli man, injured by shrapnel, went to law school and served as the puzzle editor for a local newspaper. Nor are the animals that spend the most time in REM — the platypus, for example, which averages eight hours of REM each day compared with the two hours typical of humans — known for their learning ability or powers of recall.

Dr. Hobson responded: "It's not to say that memory depends on REM sleep. It is to say that certain aspects of mnemonic function are enhanced during REM."

Dr. Siegel himself has waded into the mysteries of REM sleep. As in waking, most neurons in the brain fire actively during REM. The exception is nerve cells involved with the transmitter chemicals serotonin, norepinephrine and histamine, which remain inactive. It is possible, Dr. Siegel and others have suggested, that these neurons become overused, and that REM allows them to rest and regain their sensitivity.

Smaller animals, studies have found, sleep longer than large ones: a horse snoozes for 3 hours a day, a ferret close to 15. The fact that an animal's metabolic rate slows with size has led to yet another hypothesis about sleep's purpose: that it may act to repair cell damage caused by free radicals, chemicals released during the metabolic process.

The most promising theory so far, some experts believe, proposes that REM sleep plays a role in brain development. Newborns spend more time in REM than adults. Animals that spend long periods in REM are also more immature at birth.

In the meantime, the search continues. The answer, experts say, may turn out to be something obvious or something not yet dreamed of.

"There is something tremendous out there," Dr. Rechtschaffen said, "and we just haven't found it."

How Does the Brain Work?

(4) How Does the Brain Work?
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/11BRAI.html

In the continuing effort to understand the human brain, the mysteries keep piling up. Consider what scientists are up against. Stretched flat, the human neocortex — the center of our higher mental functions — is about the size and thickness of a formal dinner napkin.

With 100 billion cells, each with 1,000 to 10,000 synapses, the neocortex makes roughly 100 trillion connections and contains 300 million feet of wiring packed with other tissue into a one-and-a-half-quart volume in the brain.

These cells are arranged in six very similar layers, inviting confusion. Within these layers, different regions carry out vision, hearing, touch, the sense of balance, movement, emotional responses and every other feat of cognition. More mysterious yet, there are 10 times as many feedback connections — from the neocortex to lower levels of the brain — as there are feed-forward or bottom-up connections.

Added to these mysteries is the lack of a good framework for understanding the brain's connectivity and electrochemistry. Researchers do not know how the six-layered cortical sheet gives rise to the sense of self. They have not been able to disentangle the role of genes and experience in shaping brains. They do not know how the firing of billions of loosely coupled neurons gives rise to coordinated, goal-directed behavior.

They can see trees but no forest.

They do think they have solved one longstanding mystery, though. Most neuroscientists are convinced the mind is in no way separate from the brain. In the brain they have found a physical basis for all our thoughts, aspirations, language, sense of consciousness, moral beliefs and everything else that makes us human. All of this arises from interactions among billions of ordinary cells. Neuroscience finds no duality, no finger of God animating the human mind.

So what have neuroscientists been doing? Like a child who takes apart his father's watch, they have dissected the brain and now have almost all the pieces laid out before them. There are thousands of clues about what makes the brain tick.

But how to put it back together? How to understand something so complex by examining it piecemeal? Even harder, how to integrate the different levels of analysis? Some brain events occur in fractions of milliseconds while others, like long-term memory formation, can take days or weeks. One can study molecules, ion channels, single neurons, functional areas, circuits, oscillations and chemistry. There are neural stem cells and mechanisms of plasticity, which involve how the brain changes with experience or recovers from injury.

New research tools continue to drive progress. In the late 1970's, researchers mostly placed sharp-tipped electrodes into single cells and measured firing patterns. By the 1990's, they had machines that could take images of brain activity while people spoke, read, gambled, solved moral dilemmas or, in a recent study, had orgasms.

Unfortunately, studies like these, while fascinating, tend to feed the fires of a huge disagreement within the brain sciences: is the brain made up of discrete modules that pass information among themselves? Or is it more loosely organized so that varied pockets of distant neurons fire together when called upon to perform a particular task? In mapping the brain, some researchers say that areas dedicated to aspects of language, arm movements or face recognition are hard-wired modules.

Other researchers say that such areas are surprisingly flexible. For example, the human face recognition area is where expert bird watchers distinguish features of closely related species or car experts decide if a 1958 or 1959 Plymouth had bigger fins.

While the two sides in this debate agree that the brain is prewired to some degree at birth, the nature of that prewiring is uncertain. What do genes expressed in the brain do? How do genes influence behavior? What is innate and what is flexible? What is the role of culture in shaping a brain?

While lacking a coherent framework, scientists are nevertheless making progress in mapping the correlations between brain activity and behavior. New imaging tools reveal circuits and overall patterns of activity as people solve problems or reflect on their feelings. Genes expressed in mouse brain cells are being mapped so that researchers can begin to find out if neurons that look alike have different proteins and functions. A magnetic device can knock out human brain regions, safely and temporarily, to learn what those regions do.

A lively debate continues over the nature of time in brain function. In the absence of stimulation from the outside world, neurons remain active; they are filled with electrical currents that give them a propensity to oscillate and, on interacting, create spiking patterns of activity. Do the spikes carry precise information? Or do such spikes average out over large areas? How is information carried in the brain?

One of the most exciting developments is the recent exploration of the frontal lobes. Located behind the forehead, the frontal lobes help create the social brain, melding emotions, cognition, error detection, the body, volition and an autobiographical sense of self. Special circuits containing spindle cells appear to broadcast messages — this feels right, this does not feel right — to the rest of the brain. Researchers are finding that emotions arise from body states as well as brain states, confirming that the supposed distinction between mind and body is illusory.

Others are delving into individual differences. What makes one person empathic, another mean or shy or articulate or musical? How do genes relate to temperament and how is a baby's brain constructed from early experience? Specialized cells called mirror neurons seem to help babies imitate the world to learn gestures, facial expressions, language and feelings.

Brain chemistry is no longer the study of neuromodulators as "juices" that make us feel good or awake. Substances like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine play crucial roles in learning, updating memories and neuropsychiatric disease.

The question of free will is on the table. Some of our behavior is conscious, but most of it is notoriously unconscious. So although we make choices, is free will mostly an illusion? And what is consciousness? In seeking an explanation, a new mystery has emerged. Many scientists now believe that the brain basically works by simulating reality. The sights, sounds and touches that flow into the brain are put in the framework of what the brain expects on the basis of previous experience and memory.

In the words of many neuroscientists, all these mysteries are terrific job security.

25 Questions

25 Questions
November 10, 2003
Science
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2003/11/10/science/text/index.html

The first issue of Science Times appeared 25 years ago, on Nov. 14, 1978. Its guiding principle ever since has been that science is not a collection of answers, but a way of asking questions, an enterprise driven by curiosity. To celebrate the anniversary, we pose 25 of the most provocative questions facing science. As always, answers are provisional.

(1) Does Science Matter?

(2) Is War Our Biological Destiny?

(3) Will Humans Ever Visit Mars?

(4) How Does the Brain Work?

(5) What Is Gravity, Really?

(6) Will We Ever Find Atlantis?

(8) What Should We Eat?

(9) When Will the Next Ice Age Begin?

(10) What Happened Before the Big Bang?

(11) Could We Live Forever?

(12) Are Men Necessary? ...

... Are Women Necessary?

(13) What Is the Next Plague?

(14) Can Robots Become Conscious?

(15) Why Do We Sleep?

(16) Are Animals Smarter Than We Think?

(17) Can Science Prove the Existence of God?

(18) Is Evolution Truly Random?

(19) How Did Life Begin?

(20) Can Drugs Make Us Happier? Smarter?

(21) Should We Improve Our Genome?

(22) How Much Nature Is Enough?

(23) What Is the Most Important Problem in Math Today?

(24) Where Are Those Aliens?

(25) Do Paranormal Phenomena Exist?

Commentary: Rousing Science Out of the Lab and Into the Limelight

The Birth of Science Times: A Surprise, but No Accident

Personal Health: Trans Fats to Safe Sex: How Health Advice Has Changed

Essay: Spellbound by the Eternal Riddle, Scientists Revel in Their Captivity

What Did We Learn From AIDS?

Voices: Scientists Look Ahead

Among Saudis, Attack Has Soured Qaeda Supporters

Among Saudis, Attack Has Soured Qaeda Supporters
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/international/middleeast/11SAUD.html

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 10 — The bombing of a housing compound whose residents were almost entirely Arab and Muslim late on Saturday has appalled Saudis far more than other terrorist attacks, evaporating expressions of support for Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network that were vaguely whispered or occasionally even shouted over the last two years.

"They lost their support on the street," said Ehab al-Khiary, 27, a computer security specialist, standing on a broad avenue packed with cars during the typical 10 P.M. to midnight rush hour of Ramadan. "They are killing people with no cause."

"The street was divided before," he added, talking about similar attacks against three compounds in May that killed 34 people, including 8 Americans, 2 Britons and 9 attackers. "At that time it was seen as justifiable because there was an invasion of a foreign country, there was frustration."

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, there were reports of a certain celebratory air in some Saudi neighborhoods, of congratulatory messages sent back and forth on mobile phones. In that and subsequent violence, the attackers seemed to be succeeding in reaching a constituency that among other things wants to remove a ruling family it sees as American stooges.

But that mood, fueled by the sense that behind it all was some sort of religious endorsement, is diminished, replaced by confusion and the uneasy feeling that the bombings this year are just the opening salvos in a very long fight.

"They can no longer say they are more or less raising the banner of jihad," said Saad A. Sowayan, a professor specializing in Bedouin poetry at King Saud University, sipping orange juice in a hotel coffee shop. "Jihad is not against your own people."

The fact that the targets were fellow Muslims lent the sense that the attackers might just be pursuing pure chaos. "If they were really seeking change they would resort to actions that would win them the support of the people," the professor said. "Before, people could find excuses. It is getting so irrational that you cannot explain it, you cannot defend it, you cannot understand it."

Of the 17 people reported killed in the bombing so far, all 13 identified were Arabs. Most of the 200 town houses in the Muhaya compound were occupied by Arab families.

The strong Arab identity, residents said, helped give them a sense of security.

"You don't want to stay in a place where Westerners are common because then it would be a major target," said Shakib el-Qasim, 40, an electrical engineer who became an American citizen while studying at the University of Texas in the 1980's.

"I did not expect them to hit that compound because the culture inside the compound is more Arab than it is Western," added Mr. Qasim, whose son, 10, and daughter, 9, were home alone studying when the attack occurred, the children fleeing the house as it collapsed around them. "It is more like you are in Egypt, you are in Syria, you are in Jordan."

Oddly, Mr. Qasim had moved his wife and three children out of the more luxurious Hamra compound last spring when his American employer who paid for his villa pulled up stakes after its contract ended.

At the new compound, there was no alcohol. His wife wears the veil. He especially liked the idea that his children were hearing more Arabic on the playground — between the American school and their Western friends in Hamra they had been growing up without learning the language. A month after he moved them out of the Hamra, it was bombed.

There was no obvious explanation for an attack on a compound full of Arabs, although the assumed security of the Arab population may have made the guards less vigilant.

Saudi officials have laid blame for the attack on the Al Qaeda network headed by Mr. bin Laden, who has made no secret of the fact that he would like to overthrow the Saud dynasty. One thing that made him a folk hero to many was that he came right out and called the rulers corrupt, something that can only be whispered inside the kingdom.

But killing Muslims shattered the illusion that somehow the violence, however misguided, was vaguely connected to the idea of pushing reform. What gloating there was on Web sites after the attack tended to question the abilities of the interior minister, Prince Nayef, who is the chief law enforcement officer.

"For Al Qaeda, reform is not an issue, they want radical change," said Mushairy al-Zaidy, a journalist with the newspaper Al Madina who specializes in militant religious groups. "They want the regime out, they want the Americans out of Saudi Arabia and everywhere, they want to set up a Taliban regime in Saudi Arabia."

To many here, the fact that Al Qaeda grew out of the jihad movement against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan lent it something of the romantic aura of a good cause. Those who joined were often referred to as the youths of jihad, their excesses written off as misguided.

What is most alarming now, Mr. Zaidy said, is that there are youths who never went to Afghanistan who have decided the jihad lies at home. He said he believed that the steps toward reform and democratization would dilute some of the feelings that drew a young generation to the idea of jihad in the first place. At least twice over the last few months, small demonstrations, prompted by calls from the opposition in London, have appeared on Saudi streets, an extremely rare occurrence.

"Reform, participation, democracy and freedom of speech could help contain the frustrated youth who are potential members of Al Qaeda," he said. "We could make it difficult for Al Qaeda to convince new youth to join if there is more freedom and jobs."

Many Saudis say they recognize that their government has supported some dubious Islamic causes over the years in its zeal to promote itself as the guardian of the faith. Exporting radicals by sending them off to jihad in Afghanistan was also a popular move.

"We were supporting all these extremists thinking we were safe from them, and suddenly they turn on you," said Mr. Sowayan, the professor.

Newsweek Quotations

[some hilarious/insightful quotations in this week's newsweek (10 Nov 03) as usual. my most favorite page in the magazine -- quotations and political cartoons.]

"According to the Muslim faith, a terrorist who touches a pig is not eligible for the 70 virgins in heaven." -- The Hebrew Battalian's Kuti Ben-Yaakov, on getting rabbinical approval to train pigs to guard Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

"It's astounding that I've never won one. They tend not to give it to the Britisih unless you're Sting. The sun shines out of his arse -- a pure jazz musician, Mr. Serious who helps the Indians." -- Singer Rod Stewart on why he hasn't won a Grammy.

"People abroad are going to realize just how much they enjoyed globalization; they watched the movies, listened to the music, vacationed in America and sent their children to college here. They could denounce America by day and consume its bounties by night." -- Fareed Zakaria

The Rise of Homeschooling

[a trend is growing, and my sister is doing it too...]

Unhappy in Class, More Are Learning at Home
By JANE GROSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/nyregion/10SCHO.html

In Penny Kjellberg's modest living room in Stuyvesant Town, one of her 11-year-old twins conjugates French verbs while cuddling a kitten. The book shelves sag with The Encyclopedia of the Ancient World, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Einstein" and Ken Burns's videos about the Civil War. Ms. Kjellberg's other daughter devours a book about Ulysses with periodic romps outdoors when she grows antsy.

The Kjellberg twins, Caroline and Jessica, were in a highly regarded public school until two years ago. But they were bullied, their mother said, and referred to psychiatrists when, miserable, they misbehaved in class. So Ms. Kjellberg, neither a hippie nor a fundamentalist, decided to educate them at home.

"I was always too afraid to take that giant step outside the mainstream," she said. "But now that circumstances have forced us out, our experience here on the sidelines is so good that I find it harder and harder to imagine going back."

The Kjellbergs' choice is being made by an increasing number of American families — at least 850,000 children nationwide are schooled at home, up from 360,000 a decade ago, according the Education Department. In New York City, which compiled citywide statistics for the first time this year, 1,800 children are being schooled at home.

Newcomers to home schooling resist easy classification as part of the religious right or freewheeling left, who dominated the movement for decades, according to those who study the practice.

They come to home schooling fed up with the shortcomings of public education and the cost of private schools. Add to that the new nationwide standards — uniform curriculum and more testing — which some educators say penalize children with special needs, whether they are gifted, learning disabled or merely eccentric.

"It's a profound irony that the standards movement wound up alienating more parents and fueling the growth of home schooling," said Mitchell L. Stevens, an educational psychologist at New York University and author of "Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement" (Princeton University Press, 2001).

"The presumption of home schooling is that children's distinctive needs come before the managerial needs of the schools," he said. "And, it's easier to do than it was 10 years ago, because the ideologues were so successful in making it legal and creating curriculum tools and organizational support."

In addition to dissatisfaction with schools, Mr. Stevens and others say, social trends have fed interest in home schooling. More women are abandoning careers to stay home with their children. And many families yearn for a less frantic schedule and more time together.

"This may be a rebellion of middle-class parents in this culture," Mr. Stevens said. "We have never figured out how to solve the contradiction between work and parenting for contemporary mothers. And a highly scheduled life puts a squeeze on childhood."

Laurie Spigel, of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, chose home schooling for her 13-year-old son, Solomon, because he was overextended.

"He was taking ballet and piano and begging for flute," she said. "We'd already given up bedtime stories. He was tired all the time. We had no family life left. And all the wasted time seemed to be at school."

She had already given up on public school. A first-tier private school was so intense that "fourth grade felt like high school." So she chose home schooling, as she had for Solomon's brother Kalman, now in college.

Julia Attaway of Washington Heights made the home-schooling decision because the first of her four children was reading chapter books and counting to 100 by seven before kindergarten. "This is a very intense kid," Ms. Attaway said. "She dives into something until she has a sense of completion. It was so obvious that school was not going to work."

The Kjellbergs, Spigels and Attaways fit the profile of home-schooling families from a 1999 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, considered the only authoritative snapshot of home schooling. Nationwide, a majority of home-schooled children come from white, two-parent, one-income families with three or more children.

The top three motivations for home schooling in the survey were the prospect of a better education (49 percent), religious beliefs (38 percent) and a poor learning environment in the schools (26 percent).

Home schooling is legal in all 50 states, although there are widely different regulations. New Jersey, for instance, requires virtually no oversight. In New York, parents must notify their school district, file an instructional plan and quarterly reports and submit to annual assessments, alternating between standardized tests and portfolios.

The success of home schooling is hard to determine. Some Ivy League admissions officers say home-schooled children have high SAT scores and adjust well to the demands of college. These admission officers also are impressed by accounts of prodigious accomplishments: A family with three home-schooled children at Harvard. A youth with a best-selling novel. First, second and third second place in the 2000 National Spelling Bee.

But Clive R. Belfield, associate director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia Teachers College, urges caution. The only published study comparing test scores, on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, shows home-schoolers scoring in the 70th to 80th percentile; no reliable data exists for the SAT's because of shifting definitions of home schooling. And Dr. Belfield notes that any test score comparison may pit the cream of home schoolers against average students.

"It is possible some of them are fantastically educated and some are not, and all we're seeing in the data is the fantastically educated," he said.

In the debate about home schooling, socialization is more of an issue than achievement. Dr. Belfield said there was no research in this area but much anecdotal evidence that home-schooled children had plenty of social contact, benefited from being outside the dog-eat-dog world of school and were kinder to one another as a result.

Most worrisome, Dr. Belfield said, is the occasional child-abuse case, like the one in New Jersey in which four home-schooled children were said to have been starved by their adoptive parents. Having children show up at a public place — like school — is one way to see that that type of mistreatment does not happen, he said.

Without hewing to a public school curriculum, responsible and resourceful parents can cobble together teaching materials that cover all the bases. In New York, they start with a great library system, where families can order online something as esoteric as Aboriginal dance videos, as Mrs. Attaway did. They were delivered to her local branch.

The newest resource for home schoolers on a tight budget is the Internet. "You can Google a third-grade English lesson plan, a ninth-grade chemistry textbook and an 11th-grade study guide to Hamlet," Ms. Spigel said. "It's all there for the cost of an AOL account."

New York City home-schoolers rave about the educational and cultural institutions here, many free and just a subway ride away. "This city is a cornucopia of opportunity," Ms. Kjellberg said, adding that even costly extras do not approach two $25,000 private school tuitions. "Home schooling is a misnomer, because we're hardly ever at home."

Caroline and Jessica take French classes at a Midtown language school that charges half its hourly rate of $30 because home schoolers come at off-peak hours. They are on a track team with a coach hired from the Road Runners Club.

Solomon takes jazz, tap and ballet and has an internship in marine biology at the Hudson River Project. When the Attaway children study the ancient Code of Hammurabi or the breeding of silkworms, they visit the Museum of Natural History or the Japan Society.

Following New York State's rules demands careful record-keeping. But Ms. Spigel welcomes it. "The reporting keeps me focused on milestones," she said. "I have the information for college transcripts. And the boys learn about being organized."

Her current method is a week-at-a-glance calendar, with Solomon's subjects listed on the left side and the days of the week across the top. Both mother and son notice a row of empty spaces and adjust accordingly, she said. "There's all this extra science," one or the other will say. "What happened to social studies?"

"Solomon and I put these squares on the page together," Ms. Spigel said. "This is a team effort. We both make it happen. We both find a way to make it work."

For Dean, The Edge Widens

For Dean, The Edge Widens
Democrat Rejects Public Financing Gets Union Support
By Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz, Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17202-2003Nov8.html

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean is shaking up the Democratic presidential race by busting federal spending constraints, locking up two of the campaign's biggest endorsements and, for the first time, threatening to pull away from the pack.

Dean yesterday became the first Democrat ever to opt out of the taxpayer-funded presidential system, providing his campaign what could be a decisive long-term financial edge. This week, two of the nation's most politically powerful labor unions -- the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) -- plan to endorse Dean, a decision that has stunned people inside the labor movement and rattled the other candidates.

These two unions have 3 million members combined and tens of millions of dollars to spend on the presidential election.

Together these developments provide Dean an opening for a quick-kill strategy: winning Iowa and New Hampshire, developing substantial momentum, and unleashing superior money and manpower to prevent anyone from becoming a serious challenger.

"This is their big play," said Bill Carrick, senior strategist to Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). "It's a sweepstakes approach to the whole thing."

Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, said: "We feel we're really well-positioned now to take it."

But not without a fight -- and probably starting with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 19, the first major contest on the calendar. The path to victory may look brighter inside the Dean campaign because of what happened in the past seven days, but he still faces a serious obstacle course. His opponents will both gang up on him in attacks and attempt to isolate him into a series of one-on-one battles in various states. With his profile as high as it is today, the other question is whether Dean has the temperament and candidate skills to go with the grass-roots energy his campaign has aroused. The former governor's penchant for making comments he later has to clean up could cause him further problems.

Dean's sudden move is sending shocks through the Democratic race, which polls show few voters outside of Iowa and New Hampshire have even tuned into. It is forcing several candidates to rethink or rework their strategies with the Iowa caucuses less than three months away, and is turning the contest into Dean vs. the rest of the field.

Many Democrats, including key figures in Congress and at the Democratic National Committee, say they worry Dean may be too liberal or too abrasive to defeat President Bush. They are scrambling to stop the former governor before it is too late. Yet with so many candidates from which to choose, it is unlikely that the Democratic establishment, which Dean spends much of his time bashing at campaign events, could coalesce around an alternative. Several Democrats said they hope former President Bill Clinton, his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and former Vice President Al Gore will intervene to help thwart Dean, but that appears unlikely, too.

The question is which -- if any -- of his rivals can stop him, and how. "Dean is in the driver's seat," said Donna Brazile, who was Gore's campaign manager in the 2000 presidential race. Dean's rivals "may be able to stop his momentum for a few days or knock him off his message," she said. "But I don't know if they can capture the imagination of voters unless they do something interesting to shake things up."

As several advisers to Dean's rivals said, there is not much the other candidates can do to alter the race, other than hope Dean does himself in. It is difficult to break through with new and innovative policies because the candidates have rolled out their biggest ideas and, most will acknowledge, there is little difference between Dean and his rivals. They all want to extend health coverage to the uninsured, repeal some or all of the Bush tax cuts and build a more multilateral foreign policy.

Their best hope -- attacking Dean for switching positions on politically popular programs or making controversial remarks -- does not appear to be working, either. Dean has survived the biggest controversy of his campaign this past week after telling a reporter he wanted to be the candidate of southerners who display the Confederate flag on their pickup trucks. Under heated criticism from the other candidates, Dean reluctantly apologized, and most said they accepted his apology.

Strategists for several candidates said the campaign is going to get even nastier and more personal in the weeks ahead. Their plan is to try to drive a wedge between Dean and his liberal base by hammering his past or present support for gun rights and for changes in the Social Security and Medicare programs. "The more liberals find out about his record as governor of Vermont, the more they're going to be uncomfortable with him," said Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).

The candidate best positioned to stop Dean may be Gephardt, despite his failure to rack up the endorsement of the AFL-CIO, which represents more than 60 unions including AFSCME and SEIU. The day the news broke that AFSCME would endorse Dean, Gephardt was telling people he had a good chance of winning the union's backing, Democratic sources said.

Still, the Missouri lawmaker has substantial support among industrial unions and the advantage of being a midwesterner confronting Dean first in Iowa. Steve Murphy, Gephardt's campaign manager, said the race is "narrowing" into a two-person contest. "It's either going to be Howard Dean or Dick Gephardt," he said. Gephardt is making his stand in Iowa, where he plans to spend most of the next three months. He has essentially pulled out of New Hampshire in recent weeks.

Dean's new union support -- especially from AFSCME, which has a big and powerful grass-roots presence in Iowa -- will give Dean a lift there, putting Gephardt's industrial union backers on the spot to deliver their voters. Dean's union support is "definitely not good news for Gephardt but not a death knell," a labor official said. Still, there is a historical precedent for Gephardt defeating an AFSCME-backed candidate in Iowa: In 1988, the union backed Michael S. Dukakis, but Gephardt won the caucuses.

"If he falls back into an Iowa-only strategy and we continue to run a 50-state campaign, it turns Iowa into a formidable coin-toss situation," said Trippi, Dean's campaign manager.

Yet even if Gephardt wins in Iowa, he could meet the same fate as he did 1988: victorious in the Hawkeye State but lacking the money to challenge for the nomination nationally. Dean, who broke Bill Clinton's fundraising record last quarter, has leaped way ahead of many of his rivals in organizing for primaries held later in the campaign in places such as Wisconsin.

Kerry may be hurt most by Dean's rise, strategists said. Kerry, who fashioned himself as the front-runner early in the race, is struggling to keep Dean from pulling away in New Hampshire, which is widely considered a make-or-break state for the senator.

Kerry is almost singularly focused on undercutting Dean, mostly with increasingly sharp and personal attacks on his character, consistency and honesty. But the attacks do not appear to be working.

Dean has consistently held a double-digit lead in New Hampshire, and SEIU is a big political force there that can help widen it. Dean has built his lead despite being outspent in the state by Kerry. "It's very hard to see what John Kerry does in New Hampshire to get past Howard Dean," said Steve Elmendorf, a top Gephardt adviser. "I don't see what issues he could use to get past Dean's lead." Elmendorf said the Kerry campaign already could be finished.

Kerry is considering dipping into his personal fortune to boost his campaign, which would force him to opt out of the federal system as Dean did yesterday. Still, of all the candidates, Kerry is considered the biggest disappointment by many Democrats, who say he has failed to clearly articulate a vision for the country and has been too negative. "I think Senator Kerry needs to shake things up and get back on his message," Brazile said.

The only other candidate making a serious play in Iowa and New Hampshire is Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), who lags in the polls but remains attractive to some because of his southern politics and his smooth television and debate presence. Edwards said he is hoping for a top-three finish in both early states, a win in South Carolina on Feb. 3 and to emerge as the alternative to Dean after that. Of all the candidates, Edwards's attacks on Dean may be penetrating the most deeply. Dean apologized for the Confederate flag remark in part because Edwards told him it was offensive to poor southern whites.

"I need to compete everywhere, not choose particular places like some candidates are doing," Edwards said in an interview. "This includes places that on the surface do not look advantageous to me. The path to the nomination for me is clear: Do well in Iowa, do well in New Hampshire and do very well on Feb. 3."

Edwards, retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) are pursuing a strategy that depends on chalking up a first victory Feb. 3, a week after New Hampshire. It is a risky strategy that defies history and recent political logic, strategists said, but reflects the reality of the campaign. Polls show all three trailing badly in Iowa and New Hampshire but doing much better in South Carolina, the most talked-about Feb. 3 stop. They, too, want to emerge as the alternative to Dean.

Lieberman also hopes to impress in New Hampshire and score on Feb. 3 and believes that if Dean wins Iowa and New Hampshire and the field is winnowed, he will provide the most appealing contrast to Democrats worried about Dean's electability.

Clark remains the most enigmatic and unpredictable candidate. After blasting to the top of national polls when he jumped into the race two months ago, he has faded a bit. He has impressed Democratic and labor officials on personal level, but his campaign performance and team have left them wanting. AFSCME strongly considered backing Clark but soured on him after he pulled out of Iowa without alerting many union officials. In an interview, Clark said he is "favorably positioned" in South Carolina but did not want to discuss which state he could win.

Al Sharpton, former Illinois senator Carol Moseley Braun and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) are considered long shots to place in the top three of any early state.

"Dean has his ticket to the playoffs; this only confirms it more," Lieberman media adviser Mandy Grunwald said of the past week's events. "Who is going to be there with him is more wide open than it was two or three months ago."

Goldman, BofA cutting bankers

Goldman, BofA cutting bankers
by Heidi Moore Posted 04:00 EST, 7, Nov 2003
http://www.thedeal.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hpa&c=TDDArticle&cid=1068053450546

Just as things seem to be looking up for investment bankers, there is one more hurdle to jump: year-end performance reviews. And this year, staff cuts are coming with them.

Goldman, Sachs & Co. is laying off at least 30 bankers, sources said. The cuts, which are all based on performance, involve mostly managing directors and vice presidents, including some who were only months away from being promoted to managing directors, sources said. A Goldman spokeswoman declined to comment.

Banc of America Securities LLC, meanwhile, is in the process of letting go 100 bankers from its global corporate and investment bank. The cuts, which a BofA spokeswoman said represents 1.5% of GCIB's total staff, includes positions in everything from research to high-yield to capital markets to investment banking.

The layoffs are startling since many bankers thought the coast was clear after three years of aggressive cost cutting. After wielding the ax for months, many Wall Street firms were finally able to post healthy profits in the most recent quarter.

But these latest layoffs are performance — rather than cost — related, sources said. That too is surprising, as those being snipped have survived three tough years on Wall Street, including at least three major rounds of layoffs. As a result, sources said that those who are losing their jobs now are considered to be strong bankers, or, at the very least, politically well connected within their firms.

In another indication that these latest layoffs are performance related, both Goldman and BofA are in hiring mode. Goldman is making some selective hires, while BofA is going full throttle and has even retained a search firm. "We have been strategically building our business for some time in targeted areas where we have a competitive advantage and can be a market leader," said Tara Burke, a BofA spokeswoman.

At Goldman, all of the bankers losing their jobs have been notified, but not all have left the bank, according to sources. Goldman has quietly approached some bankers to advise them that they will not be promoted and they should start looking for other positions, the sources added.

Several people familiar with Goldman said the firm has been tightening the criteria for promotions to managing director in recent years. The firm is moving toward more "differentiation" in compensation, sources said, in terms of rewarding top producers more aggressively than in years past.

At BofA, the cuts will continue until the end of the year, Burke confirmed. "These cuts are part of an aggressive performance management program," she said. "This is an ongoing assessment of our associates ... attributable to low-plan individual or business unit performance."

When BofA lays off bankers, a source said, those cut receive a fixed percentage of their previous year's full bonus — generally around 20% As a result, bankers let go this month will receive the same amount as those cut earlier in the year, despite having put in considerably more work.

Corporate Financing Week first reported the BofA cuts on its Web site Friday morning.

Bankers have been optimistic about the Wall Street hiring environment lately, which has been boosted by a recent uptick in M&A, including big deals such as Bank of America Corp.'s buy of FleetBoston Financial Corp.

The Age of Liberty

The Age of Liberty
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/opinion/10SAFI.html

NEW ORLEANS -- With a strong sense of history, George W. Bush last week made the case for "a forward strategy" of idealism in American foreign policy. He dared to place his Big Idea — what has become the central theme and purpose of his presidency — in the direct line of aspirations expressed by three of the past century's most far-seeing and controversial U.S. presidents.

He evoked Woodrow Wilson trying to make the world safe for democracy in 1918; then F.D.R. in 1941 giving hope of freedom to peoples enslaved by Nazism; finally, Ronald Reagan telling a skeptical Britain's Parliament in 1982 that a historic turning point had been reached and Communist tyranny could not stop the march of freedom. "From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the Speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle," Bush said. "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time."

That is called a theme. Did he develop that theme in his speech, marshaling his arguments both rationally and evocatively at a time of crisis? Did he succeed in setting his vision of our mission in the world before the American people in a detailed, coherent and inspiring way worthy of rallying their support?

I think he did — not only because I agree that protecting and extending freedom has always been America's "calling," but because I was able to read and re-read the serious speech in its entirety.

You have probably not had that opportunity. Most people did not have the chance to catch the whole speech on cable, and found only snippets on broadcast TV; the longest excerpt of the half-hour address ran less than four minutes on prime-time network news.

Some newspapers front-paged accounts of the news in the speech, noting departure from the realpolitik of Nixon, the elder Bush and others: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty." But not even The Times gave readers the chance to study the full text in the paper. (It's on the Times Web site at www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/politics/06TEXT-BUSH.html.)

This speech clearly articulated the policy this Bush will be remembered for. If you are interested in knowing where he wants to take this country and why, you will find it worth reading all the way through. Reading summaries and excerpts and critiques lets editors and analysts do the thinking for you. Film snippets of applause lines won't help you grasp the import, which you should have even if you want to disagree knowledgeably. A carefully constructed speech, like a poem or a brief or a piece of music, has a shape that helps makes it memorable. Bush's "age of liberty" address begins on a note of historical optimism: "We've witnessed, in little over a generation, the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500-year story of democracy . . . It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was itself a democracy." (He chose "influential" rather than "powerful" to stress our democratic example.)

Then he takes us on a tour d'horizon of the state of freedom today: from "outposts of oppression" like Cuba, Burma, North Korea and Zimbabwe to China with its "sliver, a fragment of liberty," to the West Bank leaders who are "the main obstacles to peace." Egypt, having "shown the way toward peace" (under Sadat) "now should show the way toward democracy."

He returns to his opening theme in dealing with Iraq, where failure "would embolden terrorists around the world," but where "a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." (Failure gets the conditional "would," but success the certain "will.")

But let me not join the summarizers. Invest a half-hour in reading this moving exposition of the noble goal of American foreign policy. And note the subtlety in Bush's concluding reference to the deity in underscoring our opportunity in this age of liberty: "And as we meet the terror and violence of the world, we can be certain the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom."

In Bush's Words: 'Iraqi Democracy Will Succeed'

In Bush's Words: 'Iraqi Democracy Will Succeed'
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/politics/06TEXT-BUSH.html

[The following is the text of President Bush's remakrs on the 20th Anniversary of The National Endowment For Democracy, as transcribed by FDCH e-Media, Inc. ]

BUSH: Thanks for the warm welcome. Thanks for inviting me to join you in this 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Staff and directors of this organization have seen a lot of history over the last two decades. You've been a part of that history. By speaking for and standing for freedom you've lifted the hopes of people around the world and you've brought great credit to America.

I appreciate Vin for the short introduction.

(LAUGHTER)

I'm a man who likes short introductions.

(LAUGHTER)

And he didn't let me down. But more importantly, I appreciate the invitation.

Appreciate the members of Congress who are here, senators from both political parties, members of the House of Representatives from both political parties.

I appreciate the ambassadors who are here.

BUSH: I appreciate the guests who have come. I appreciate the bipartisan spirit--the nonpartisan spirit of the National Endowment for Democracy. I'm glad that Republicans and Democrats and independents are working together to advance human liberty.

The roots of our democracy can be traced to England and to its Parliament and so can the roots of this organization. In June of 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke at Westminster Palace and declared the turning point had arrived in history. He argued that Soviet communism had failed precisely because it did not respect its own people, their creativity, their genius and their rights.

President Reagan said that the day of Soviet tyranny was passing, that freedom had a momentum that would not be halted.

BUSH: He gave this organization its mandate: to add to the momentum of freedom across the world. Your mandate was important 20 years ago. It is equally important today.

(APPLAUSE)

A number of critics were dismissive of that speech by the president, according to one editorial at the time. It seems hard to be a sophisticated European and also an admirer of Ronald Reagan.

(LAUGHTER)

Some observers on both sides of the Atlantic pronounced the speech simplistic and naive and even dangerous.

BUSH: In fact, Ronald Reagan's words were courageous and optimistic and entirely correct.

(APPLAUSE)

The great democratic movement President Reagan described was already well under way.

In the early 1970s there were about 40 democracies in the world. By the middle of that decade, Portugal and Spain and Greece held free elections. Soon, there were new democracies in Latin America and free institutions were spreading in Korea and Taiwan and in East Asia.

This very week, in 1989, there were protests in East Berlin in Leipzig. By the end of that year, every communist dictatorship in Central America had collapsed.

Within another year, the South African government released Nelson Mandela. Four years later, he was elected president of his country, ascending like Walesa and Havel from prisoner of state to head of state.

BUSH: As the 20th century ended, there were around 120 democracies in the world, and I can assure you more are on the way.

(APPLAUSE)

Ronald Reagan would be pleased, and he would not be surprised.

We've witnessed in little over a generation the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500-year story of democracy. Historians in the future will offer their own explanations for why this happened, yet we already know some of the reasons they will cite.

It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was itself a democracy. The United States made military and moral commitments in Europe and Asia which protected free nations from aggression and created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish.

As we provided security for whole nations, we also provided inspiration for oppressed peoples. In prison camps, in banned union meetings, in clandestine churches men and women knew that the whole world was not sharing their own nightmare. They knew of at least one place, a bright and hopeful land where freedom was valued and secure. And they prayed that America would not forget them or forget the mission to promote liberty around the world.

Historians will note that in many nations the advance of markets and free enterprise helped to create a middle class that was confident enough to demand their own rights. They will point to the role of technology in frustrating censorship and central control, and marvel at the power of instant communications to spread the truth, the news and courage across borders.

Historians in the future will reflect on an extraordinary, undeniable fact: Over time, free nations grow stronger and dictatorships grow weaker.

In the middle of the 20th century, some imagined that the central planning and social regimentation were a shortcut to national strength. In fact, the prosperity and social vitality and technological progress of a people are directly determined by the extend of their liberty.

BUSH: Freedom honors and unleashes human creativity. And creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations. Liberty is both the plan of heaven for humanity and the best hope for progress here on Earth.

The progress of liberty is a powerful trend. Yet we also know that liberty, if not defended, can be lost.

The success of freedom is not determined by some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of freedom rests upon the choices and the courage of free peoples and upon their willingness to sacrifice.

In the trenches of World War I, through a two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent, Americans have amply displayed our willingness to sacrifice for liberty.

The sacrifices of Americans have not always been recognized or appreciated, yet they have been worthwhile.

Because we and our allies were steadfast, Germany and Japan are democratic nations that no longer threaten the world. A global nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union ended peacefully, as did the Soviet Union. The nations of Europe are moving toward unity, not dividing into armed camps and descending into genocide.

Every nation has learned, or should have learned, an important lesson: Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for and standing for, and the advance of freedom leads to peace.

(APPLAUSE)

And now we must apply that lesson in our own time. We've reached another great turning point and the resolve we show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement.

BUSH: Our commitment to democracy is tested in countries like Cuba and Burma and North Korea and Zimbabwe, outposts of oppression in our world. The people in these nations live in captivity and fear and silence. Yet these regimes cannot hold back freedom forever. And one day, from prison camps and prison cells and from exile, the leaders of new democracies will arrive.

(APPLAUSE)

Communism and militarism and rule by the capricious and corrupt are the relics of a passing era. And we will stand with these oppressed peoples until the day of liberation and freedom finally arrives.

(APPLAUSE)

Our commitment to democracy is tested in China. The nation now has a sliver, a fragment of liberty. Yet China's peoples will eventually want their liberty pure and whole.

China has discovered that economic freedom leads to national wealth. China's leaders will also discover that freedom is indivisible, as social and religious freedom is also essential to national greatness and national dignity. Eventually men and women who are allowed to control their own wealth will insist on controlling their own lives and their own country.

Our commitment to democracy is also tested in the Middle East, which is my focus today and must be a focus of American policy for decades to come. In many nations in the Middle East, countries of great strategic importance, democracy has not yet taken root.

BUSH: And the questions arise: Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom and never even have a choice in the matter?

I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free.

(APPLAUSE)

Some skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to representative government. This cultural condescension, as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history.

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would, quote, "never work."

Another observer declared the prospects for democracy in post-Hitler Germany were, and I quote, "most uncertain, at best." He made that claim in 1957.

Seventy-four years ago, the Sunday London Times declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be, quote, "illiterates, not caring a fig for politics." Yet, when Indian democracy was imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to liberty in a national referendum that saved their form of government.

Time after time, observers have questioned whether this country or that people or this group are ready for democracy, as if freedom were a prize you win from meeting our own Western standards of progress. BUSH: In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, peaceful resolution of differences.

As men and women are showing from Bangladesh to Botswana to Mongolia, it is the practice of democracy that makes a nation ready for democracy and every nation can start on this path.

It should be clear to all that Islam, the faith of one-fifth of humanity, is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries: in Turkey, Indonesia and Senegal and Albania and Niger and Sierra Leone.

Muslim men and women are good citizens of India and South Africa, the nations of Western Europe and of the United States of America. More than half of all Muslims live in freedom under democratically constituted governments.

They succeed in democratic societies, not in spite of their faith, but because of it. A religion that demands individual moral accountability and encourages the encounter of the individual with God is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government.

Yet there's a great challenge today in the Middle East. In the words of a recent report by Arab scholars, the global wave of democracy has, and I quote, "barely reached the Arab states. They continue this freedom deficit, undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development."

The freedom deficit they describe has terrible consequences for the people of the Middle East and for the world.

BUSH: In many Middle Eastern countries poverty is deep and it is spreading, women lack rights and are denied schooling, whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead.

These are not the failures of a culture or a religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines.

As the colonial era passed away, the Middle East saw the establishment of many military dictatorships. Some rulers adopted the dogmas of socialism, seized total control of political parties and the media and universities. They allied themselves with the Soviet bloc and with international terrorism.

Dictators in Iraq and Syria promised the restoration of national honor, a return to ancient glories. They've left instead a legacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin.

Other men and groups of men have gained influence in the Middle East and beyond through an ideology of theocratic terror. Behind their language of religion is the ambition for absolute political power.

Ruling cabals like the Taliban show their version of religious piety in public whippings of women, ruthless suppression of any difference or dissent, and support for terrorists who arm and train to murder the innocent.

The Taliban promised religious purity and national pride. Instead, by systematically destroying a proud and working society, they left behind suffering and starvation.

Many Middle Eastern governments now understand that military dictatorship and theocratic rule are a straight, smooth highway to nowhere, but some governments still cling to the old habits of central control.

BUSH: There are governments that still fear and repress independent thought and creativity and private enterprise; human qualities that make for strong and successful societies. Even when these nations have vast natural resources, they do not respect or develop their greatest resources: the talent and energy of men and women working and living in freedom.

Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and blaming others, governments in the Middle East need to confront real problems and serve the true interests of their nations.

The good and capable people of the Middle East all deserve responsible leadership. For too long many people in that region have been victims and subjects; they deserve to be active citizens.

Governments across the Middle East and North Africa are beginning to see the need for change. Morocco has a diverse new parliament. King Mohammad has urged it to extend the rights to women.

Here's how His Majesty explained his reforms to parliament: "How can society achieve progress while women, who represent half the nation, see their rights violated and suffer as a result of injustice, violence and marginalization, not withstanding the dignity and justice granted to them by our glorious religion?"

The king of Morocco is correct: The future of Muslim nations would be better for all with the full participation of women.

(APPLAUSE)

In Bahrain last year citizens elected their own parliament for the first time in nearly three decades. Oman has extended the vote to all adult citizens.

(excerpt missing)

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: Champions of democracy in the region understand that democracy is not perfect. It is not the path to utopia. But it's the only path to national success and dignity.

As we watch and encourage reforms in the region, we are mindful that modernization is not the same as Westernization. Representative governments in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures. They will not, and should not, look like us. Democratic nations may be constitutional monarchies, federal republics or parliamentary systems.

And working democracies always need time to develop, as did our own. We've taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and justice, and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at different stages of this journey.

There are, however, essential principles common to every successful society in every culture.

Successful societies limit the power of the state and the power of the military so that governments respond to the will of the people and not the will of the elite.

Successful societies protect freedom, with a consistent impartial rule of law, instead of selectively applying the law to punish political opponents.

Successful societies allow room for healthy civic institutions, for political parties and labor unions and independent newspapers and broadcast media.

Successful societies guarantee religious liberty; the right to serve and honor God without fear of persecution.

BUSH: Successful societies privatize their economies and secure the rights of property. They prohibit and punish official corruption and invest in the health and education of their people. They recognize the rights of women.

And instead of directing hatred and resentment against others, successful societies appeal to the hopes of their own people.

(APPLAUSE)

These vital principles are being applied in the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

With the steady leadership of President Karzai, the people of Afghanistan are building a modern and peaceful government. Next month, 500 delegates will convene a national assembly in Kabul to approve a new Afghan constitution. The proposed draft would establish a bicameral parliament, set national elections next year and recognize Afghanistan's Muslim identity while protecting the rights of all citizens.

Afghanistan faces continuing economic and security challenges. It will face those challenges as a free and stable democracy.

(APPLAUSE)

In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council are also working together to build a democracy. And after three decades of tyranny, this work is not easy. The former dictator ruled by terror and treachery and left deeply ingrained habits of fear and distrust. Remnants of his regime, joined by foreign terrorists, continue to battle against order and against civilization.

Our coalition is responding to recent attacks with precision raids, guided by intelligence provided by the Iraqis themselves.

BUSH: We're working closely with Iraqi citizens as they prepare a constitution, as they move toward free elections and take increasing responsibility for their own affairs.

As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test.

(APPLAUSE)

Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq and for the security of free nations. Aid workers from many countries are facing danger to help the Iraqi people.

The National Endowment for Democracy is promoting women's rights and training Iraqi journalists and teaching the skills of political participation.

Iraqis themselves, police and border guards and local officials, are joining in the work and they are sharing in the sacrifice.

This is a massive and difficult undertaking. It is worth our effort. It is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes: The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world and increase dangers to the American people and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region.

Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation.

(APPLAUSE)

The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.

(APPLAUSE)

Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.

BUSH: And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.

(APPLAUSE)

Therefore the United States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before and it will yield the same results.

As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.

(APPLAUSE)

The advance of freedom is the calling of our time. It is the calling of our country. From the 14 Points to the Four Freedoms to the speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle.

We believe that liberty is the design of nature. We believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom, the freedom we prize, is not for us alone. It is the right and the capacity of all mankind.

(APPLAUSE)

Working for the spread of freedom can be hard, yet America has accomplished hard tasks before.

BUSH: Our nation is strong. We're strong of heart.

And we're not alone. Freedom is finding allies in every country. Freedom finds allies in every culture.

And as we meet the terror and violence of the world, we can be certain the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom.

With all the tests and all the challenges of our age, this is, above all, the age of liberty. Each of you at this endowment is fully engaged in the great cause of liberty, and I thank you.

May God bless your work, and may God continue to bless America.

(APPLAUSE)

END

The Humiliation Factor

The Humiliation Factor
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/opinion/09FRIE.html

If President Bush wants to get a better handle on the problems he's facing in Iraq and the West Bank, I suggest he study the speech made Oct. 16 by Malaysia's departing prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to a conclave of Muslim leaders. Most of that speech was a brutally frank look into the causes of the Muslim world's decline. Though it was also laced with shameful anti-Jewish slurs, it was still revealing. Five times he referred to Muslims as humiliated. If I've learned one thing covering world affairs, it's this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.

"I will not enumerate the instances of our humiliation," Mr. Mahathir said. "We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated. . . . Today we, the whole Muslim [community], are treated with contempt and dishonor. . . . There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right." He added: "Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly."

One reason Yasir Arafat rejected the Clinton plan for a Palestinian state was that he and many followers didn't want a state handed to them by the U.S. or Israel. That would be "humiliating." They wanted to win it in blood and fire. Hezbollah TV had bombarded Palestinians with stories of how the Lebanese drove the Israelis out. Palestinian militants wanted the "dignity" of doing the same.

Always remember, the Arab-Israeli conflict is about both borders and Nobel Prizes. It's about where the dividing line should be and it's about the humiliation that comes from one side succeeding at modernity and the other not. As Mr. Mahathir says in his speech, "We sacrifice lives unnecessarily, achieving nothing other than to attract more massive retaliation and humiliation. [But] we are up against a people who think. [The Jews] survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. . . . We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also."

Which is why the Palestinians need both their own state and a new leadership able to build their dignity on achievements, not resistance.

Ditto Iraq. Why have the U.S. forces never gotten the ovation they expected for liberating Iraq from Saddam's tyranny? In part, it is because many Iraqis feel humiliated that they didn't liberate themselves, and America's presence, even its aid, reminds them of that. Add the daily slights and miscommunications that come with any occupation, and even the best-intended liberators will wear out their welcome over time. I was with my Iraqi translator one day in Baghdad, trying to enter the office of the Governing Council. The American private security guard at the door ordered me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak. Then he told my translator to sit in the 130-degree heat while he escorted me — the American — inside to see if the Iraqi leader we were seeing was available. Both of us felt like punching that guard in the face.

"Iraq is full of angry men," Mustafa Alrawi, managing editor of Iraq Today, wrote in Beirut's Daily Star. "For example, in the area unfairly labeled as the `Sunni triangle,' the population was badly hurt by the decision to disband the army and the policy of de-Baathification. . . . Thousands of men, many of whom took pride in their rank and status, were left bewildered and confused. It must be remembered that the army . . . did not fight the U.S. invasion, effectively giving their stamp of approval to the plan to topple Saddam Hussein. They have wounded pride to restore. Entire tribes feel embarrassed that they supported the invasion, only to be left out in the cold by the coalition's myopic vision of how Iraq should be run."

Never, ever underestimate a people's pride, no matter how broken they might be. It is very easy for Iraqis to hate Saddam and resent America for overstaying. Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger. Which is why a Pakistani friend tells me that what the U.S. needs most in Iraq is a strategy of "dehumiliation and re-dignification."

The only way we'll foster a decent government in Iraq is if every day we turn a little more power over to Iraqis and create the economic conditions where Iraqis can be successful. The more we empower Iraqis, the less humiliated they will feel, the more time we will have to help them and the less they will need our help.

Strategy memo 'poisons' panel

Strategy memo 'poisons' panel
By Audrey Hudson
Published November 10, 2003
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20031110-120724-9175r.htm

The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday said his nonpartisan panel will continue operating, but in a weakened capacity because of a Democratic memo that surfaced last week outlining plans for a partisan attack against the White House.
"What this memo has done is really poison the well," said Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the panel, which has operated in a nonpartisan fashion for 30 years, handling sensitive and classified information.
"I was stunned by this memo, shocked by this memo," Mr. Roberts told "Fox News Sunday."
The memo, which outlined a Democratic strategy of using the investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq against the Bush administration, surfaced last week as the work of a staffer working for Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia Democrat and a leading critic of the war.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, said Friday the committee has become so politicized "as to render it incapable of meeting its responsibilities to the United States Senate and to the American people."
Mr. Roberts said all committee activity will not be shut down, but "it's going to be very difficult to put the committee back together again without somebody saying, 'We're not going to launch this attack plan.' "
"It really prejudges the whole inquiry. It says that we're guilty until proven innocent, in regards to the use of the memo. We are about 90 percent done. Now, we have this very partisan attack memo laying out there, with some members of the Senate actually embracing it, reveling in it. They are destroying the nonpartisan history of this committee," Mr. Roberts said.
Mr. Frist said the committee might be forced to wrap up its inquiry into pre-Iraq war intelligence quickly. According to Mr. Roberts, finishing the inquiry will be "primary duty right now" of the committee and sensitive briefings will continue. However, he questioned how functional the committee will be in the future.
In a floor speech, Mr. Frist demanded that Democrats "disavow this partisan attack in its entirety" and said he will not let the committee be "misused for blatant partisan gain."
Senators are discussing sanctions against the committee, including restructuring the rules that make the panel unique in Congress.
The committee does not have a majority chairman with near absolute power and a ranking minority member who can do little more than object. Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rockefeller are listed as co-chairmen, and either can preside over a hearing.
The committee's staff also is considered full time and not divided between the two parties, but rather works for the panel as a whole. The memo suggested taking advantage of the special rule that allows either party to begin an official investigation of its own by simply gathering the signatures of a majority of either party's members.
The memo suggested that Democrats "pull the majority along as far as we can," then "take full advantage" of the panel rules to "among other things, castigate the majority for seeking to limit the scope of the inquiry." It said the best time to "pull the trigger on an independent investigation" of the Bush administration would be next year, when the president will be campaigning for re-election.
The Republicans hold a one-vote majority on the panel and could use that edge to reconfigure the committee's rules and structure.
Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, refused to disavow the memo's contents and said Republicans are the ones acting in bad faith to shift attention away from the inquiry.
"The purpose of the memo apparently was to lay out options. And I don't disavow the options, including the words 'independent investigation,'" Mr. Levin said.
"We have an important role to play in the revealing the misleading — if not flagrantly dishonest methods and motives — of the senior administration officials who made the case for a unilateral, pre-emptive war," said the memo, suggesting Democrats should "pull the trigger on an independent investigation."
Democrats, including Mr. Levin yesterday, said the memo "was apparently swiped" from the Democrat staffer's office and not seen by any member of the Senate.
"I want to finish the answer here. It's very important. It should not be allowed to change the subject from the refusal of the Republicans to look at the use of intelligence by the administration," Mr. Levin said.
"If a well is poisoned, it's poisoned by people stealing a memo of a staffer, which is in a file apparently, and then dropping it in the well, and then saying, 'Oh my ..., the well is now poisoned,' " Mr. Levin said also appearing on "Fox News Sunday."
"There must be an independent review. There should be an independent review," Mr. Levin said.
Asked whether it will be possible to work with Democrats to complete their review, Mr. Roberts said, "It's up to them. I hope so. It's up to them."

Japan's Governing Party Keeps Power, but Loses Strength

Japan's Governing Party Keeps Power, but Loses Strength
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/international/asia/10JAPA.html

TOKYO, Monday, Nov. 10 — Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's governing coalition held on to power in parliamentary elections on Sunday, even as voters handed big gains to the main opposition party in a ballot that could help lead Japan toward a two-party system.

Despite his personal popularity, Mr. Koizumi failed to get the popular mandate that could help him decisively push through economic and political reforms against the conservatives in his own Liberal Democratic Party.

But the strong showing by the Democratic Party, the main opposition, which campaigned on a reformist agenda, could put pressure on the governing party to stick to Mr. Koizumi's plans to curb public spending and to reshape the economy, the world's second largest.

The Democratic Party portrayed itself as offering a break from the pork-barrel politics of the Liberal Democrats, who have governed Japan almost continuously since 1955. In addition to the opposition's gains, this election, for the first time, gave voters a real choice between viable parties and candidates for prime minister, in a system in which prime ministers were typically picked by a handful of power brokers inside the Liberal Democratic Party.

"This election is a watershed in the postwar history of this country," said Hidekazu Kawai, a professor of politics at Gakushuin University, "because, first, there was an electable opposition and, second, the parties talked about policies. For the first time, voters could choose the prime minister. This tendency is irreversible."

Of the 480 seats in the lower house of Parliament, the Liberal Democratic-led coalition won 275, down from the 287 it had before, according to complete though unofficial returns. The total number of seats should allow Mr. Koizumi's party — and its two coalition partners, the New Komeito and New Conservative parties — to govern effectively.

The five-year-old Democratic Party, reinforced by its recent merger with a smaller party, won 177 seats, up from 137. The Democratic Party attracted younger, unaffiliated voters in urban areas, while the Liberal Democrats kept their grip on rural areas dependent on public spending.

Although Mr. Koizumi, 61, has had approval ratings of around 60 percent and the economy has recently shown signs of reviving, his party failed to get a majority of 241 seats by itself. It had 247 seats in the last Parliament. The party won 237 seats this time, though independents are likely to join the party and may eventually give it a majority.

Experts said voters had been drawn by the Democratic Party, which put together a "manifesto" of its policies, a first in Japanese politics, and emphasized the possibility of a change in government.

For Mr. Koizumi, the election was the first time that the electorate had passed judgment on his reform agenda, which has received criticism for being too slow and halting. Mr. Koizumi, who will be required by party rules to step down after his second term as leader of the Liberal Democrats, said privatizing the postal system and road corporations would be among his goals, but provided few other details on how he would reinvigorate the economy.

Appearing glum as partial returns were announced, Mr. Koizumi said in a television interview: "Our stance for reform has not changed. We will continue to push for reforms."

"Since the L.D.P. has ruled a long time, I suspect people are wanting change, and the Democratic Party's strong gains reflect such a wish," he said. "There are lots of people who are becoming impatient for the results of reforms."

The leader of the Democratic Party is Naoto Kan, 57, a former grass-roots organizer who first came to prominence as a health minister in a coalition government in 1996 when he led efforts to uncover the government's failure to prevent hemophiliacs from using blood products tainted with H.I.V. He smiled on television on Sunday as his party scored gains, though it did not reach his stated goal of 200 seats.

"The general public gave us a considerable number of seats," Mr. Kan said. "As the biggest opposition party, we will strive to build a responsible party capable of governing."

He said the election had opened a new era in which voters cast their ballots based on policies.

"I think voters evaluated highly that we offered discussions on policies centered around our manifesto," he said. "Many people voted based on their judgment of the manifesto. This will never be reversed back to the old way."

In general, his party's policies differed little from those of Mr. Koizumi's party. One crucial difference, though, centered on the dispatch of troops to Iraq. Mr. Kan's party opposed it, saying Japan should send troops to Iraq only under the umbrella of the United Nations. On Sunday night, Mr. Koizumi reiterated plans to send troops, but did not give a specific date.

In this election, polls showed a large segment of undecided and unaffiliated voters, who tend to support the opposition when they cast their ballots. The Democratic Party showed strong gains despite a low voter turnout, of 59.86 percent of 103 million voters, down from 62.49 percent in the 2000 election.

The results appeared to confirm pre-election surveys of voters that showed a strong desire for a system in which a change in government is possible.

"I really want a change to take place this time," said Emiko Saotome, 80, a volunteer worker for a club for senior citizens in the city of Kawagoe in Saitama Prefecture. "I've voted for opposition parties, including the Communist Party, while the L.D.P. has been in power in the past in order to give some diversion. But I did not seriously want Communists to hold power."

Masahiro Ishida, a 58-year-old public servant who voted in the Ginza section of Tokyo, said he supported the Democrats.

"Well, things, the economy, for example, are at a standstill, and I want a change in power anyway," he said. "Although we don't know what kind of government they would come up with yet, I want to let them try anyway. Break up the status quo. The L.D.P. is no good."

Small parties, like the Communists and the Social Democrats, lost seats, as the Democratic Party captured seats. While Japan may be moving toward a system in which two major parties alternate in government, the Democratic Party will have difficult earning the trust of some Japanese used to one-party rule for half a century.

"If there is more a firm opposition, I will vote for it," said Hiroshi Natori, a 58-year-old salaryman, voting in Yokohama. "But I am not impressed by the Democratic Party to that point yet."

Japan Farms: An Old Man's Game

Japan Farms: An Old Man's Game
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/07/business/worldbusiness/07farm.html

MIHARU, Japan, Nov. 6 - When the motorcade of earnest agricultural promotion agents rolled up the other morning to his father's rice paddy, Shunseki Ouchi sensed a lecture on the virtues of farming. Without even a bow, Mr. Ouchi, a 22-year-old college student, ran away.

Here in the heart of what was once a Japanese rice bowl, young people are voting with their feet on farming. Since 1980, the number of people in this town of 20,000 making most of their money from farming has dropped 56 percent, to 1,655. In the 15- to 59-year age group, the drop has been more precipitous: 83 percent, to 455. The only segment that has grown is of farmers over 70, currently 633.

On Sunday, Japanese voters are expected to return to power the Liberal Democrats, the politicians who over the last half-century have irrigated Japan's farm sector with subsidies and kept city food prices high through tariffs.

But judging by the advancing age of farmers in this town 120 miles north of Tokyo, and by the advance of scrub forest into abandoned farmland, the Liberal Democrats are playing a waiting game, waiting for the grim reaper gradually to thin the ranks of Japan's politically influential farmers.

"Young people dislike farming," Akiyoshi Ouchi, 50, said, looking a little sheepish about his son's abrupt flight. Speaking under the gaze of Sidek Bin Saadon, his 23-year-old "agricultural trainee" from Malaysia, Mr. Ouchi said that of the 73 farm households in his district, only four other families lived solely from farming.

The wait for a policy shift in Tokyo may not be long.

Later in the month, Japanese and Mexican negotiators are to resume talks on a free trade pact. Last month, Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, left Tokyo empty-handed after Japanese negotiators refused to allow measures that would harm pig farmers and orange juice producers. But Japan's leading business group, the Keidanren, calculates that Japanese companies lose $3.6 billion each year that passes without a bilateral free trade pact.

The announcement that Japan would resume talks with Mexico shortly after the election indicates that Japan intends to keep its promises to start free trade talks early next year with South Korea and Thailand, both major rice producers.

Despite billions of dollars in subsidies and protective rice tariffs as high as 490 percent, young rural dwellers do not think the government will maintain today's economic fantasyland in which a farmer can earn $50,000 a year from three acres.

Contributing to the bleak economics of rice farming, last summer's cool and rainy weather is making this fall's rice crop Japan's worst in a decade.

"We knew changes would come, so we decided that he would work outside," Kazuya Furukawa, a 56-year-old rice farmer, said gesturing to Tatsuya, his 34-year-old son, who has a civil service job.

Across the archipelago, the number of people working full time in farming has dropped steadily, to about 2.8 million today, down from 3.9 million in 1980, and from 12 million in 1960.

Here in the Fukushima prefecture, which once had Japan's largest tobacco crop and its second-largest production of silkworms, it is easy to spot some of the region's 40,000 acres of recently abandoned farmland.

In the folds of the hills here, cattails grow in abandoned, 300-year-old rice paddies. On hillsides, weeds grow in old tobacco patches. Mulberry orchards have been left to grow wild, victims of a silkworm business that collapsed in face of low-priced Chinese competition.

"The youngest farmer I know around here is 45," said Yoshio Kanomata, 62, who drives a taxi to make ends meet. His four children have migrated into local white-collar jobs. At this year's harvest time for the family tobacco crop, his wife, Sueko, hired three neighbors: two 70-year-old women and a 75-year-old man.

With government support for tobacco being phased out, the value of tobacco produced in this town has dropped 75 percent since 1975, the mulberry leaf production has been wiped out, and the production of rice, the untouchable of Japanese farm policy, has dropped by a third. The only growth has been in truck farming as production of vegetables has doubled, largely for local market.

"We are going back to the old saying: in order to keep healthy you should eat food grown from the area surrounded by four li," said Shigeru Fukaya, the town employee charged with promoting agriculture, using a local measurement. "You won't get sick if you only eat crops from a four-kilometer-by-four- kilometer area."

While Japanese consumers like locally grown fresh food, they no longer seem swayed by scare campaigns on imported rice.

"American rice is not that much different," Mr. Furukawa, a 12th-generation rice farmer, said in his farmhouse, where the family shrine room includes a portrait of Emperor Hirohito, Japan's wartime leader. "I cook in the winter at the ski area near here. I have used it. I don't think there is a difference."

While Japan limits its rice imports to 770,000 tons, less than 10 percent of its needs, many city dwellers say they would prefer cheap American rice to expensive domestic rice.

At the same time, many Japanese are concerned that the country now relies on imports to cover 60 percent of its food needs, the highest ratio among major nations in the world.

"Japan is the world's largest agricultural importer country," Yoshiyuki Kamei, Japan's agriculture minister, said in a recent briefing for foreign reporters. Pegging imports at around $35 billion year, he added: "Even compared to Germany, which ranks second, Japanese net food imports are more than double Germany's imports."

Despite the general hand-wringing over agriculture in Japan, farming is in retreat. In recent years, farmers have started to battle a new threat: wild boars rooting up their fields.

"The increase of boars is because of the abandonment of farmland," Mr. Fukaya said. "As far as agriculture is concerned, this is a dropout town."

A Japanese Witness to History

A Japanese Witness to History Adroitly Survived It
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/international/asia/08FPRO.html

KAMAKURA, Japan -- SEEN through the prism of old photographs that sit atop the piano in the family living room, Toshikazu Kase is the Zelig of Japanese diplomatic history.

In this seaside town of gardens and temples, the forgiving light of a recent afternoon illuminated faded snapshots from a tumultuous century. There he was with Stalin in Moscow. There he was on the deck of the battleship Missouri for the signing of Japan's surrender to the United States at the end of World War II. He was there, too, raising the first Japanese flag at the United Nations.

Now 100 years old, Mr. Kase was witness to virtually every historical watershed to shape modern Japan, having walked through the 20th century's halls of power half a step behind the famous, and the infamous.

Descended from a long line of scholars, he graduated from Amherst in 1927 and was immediately posted to Japan's embassy in Berlin, where he got to know a fast-rising politician named Adolf Hitler. At his next posting, in London, he counted Winston Churchill among his dinner guests. Back in Tokyo, running the North America desk, he was on duty the weekend of the Pearl Harbor attack, in December 1941.

"A very unfortunate situation prevailed at our embassy in Washington on that gray day," he said in an interview, seated in a leather easy chair, his legs swathed in a blanket, his voice reedy thin but his memory clear. Embassy officers, he recalled 62 years later, "went out drinking" and ignored instructions to decode and deliver a cable from Tokyo.

"The instruction was to deliver the ultimatum one hour in advance of the commencement of the aerial attack on Pearl Harbor," he said. "Whether that would have freed us from the sneak attack curse, well, that is a good question for historians."

Historians generally agree that the ultimatum did not in any case constitute a formal declaration of war.

The recollection is one of many Mr. Kase shared from his centennial perch, memories of a life and a personal history that reflect the same contradictions and compromises that define Japan's own recent past.

BORN near Tokyo one year before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, he has seen the shifting of national borders and national interests in a region where peace treaties and trade pacts are rarities.

An adroit survivor, he retained his place in Japan's elite for most of the 20th century. Like many Japanese of his time, his sympathy for many of Japan's wartime goals was eventually submerged under a strong pro-Americanism.

Nonetheless, in 1995, he opposed a resolution in Parliament calling on Japan to apologize for World War II atrocities. At the time, Mr. Kase was chairman of a largely conservative group, the National Committee for the 50th Anniversary of the End of World War II.

He and others argued that an apology would dishonor Japan's war dead and would ignore the role Japan played in breaking the grip of American, British, Dutch and French colonialism in Asia.

While this historical judgment remains common in Japan, many people in Asia believe that Japan tried to replace European colonialism with Japanese imperialism.

Mr. Kase traces his conversion to supporting the alliance with the United States to that morning on the hot deck of the Missouri. Like many Japanese, Mr. Kase was moved by the words of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

"Here is the victor announcing the verdict to the prostrate enemy," he wrote later in his memoirs of the speech by the supreme commander of the allied powers. "He can impose a humiliating penalty if he so desires. And yet he pleads for freedom, tolerance and justice. For me, who expected the worst humiliation, this was a complete surprise. I was thrilled beyond words, spellbound, thunderstruck."

In his living room here, Mr. Kase was reminded of those words when he was shown a copy of the United States Navy photograph of Japan's surrender ceremony. Holding the cane of then-Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, Mr. Kase stands by attentively, his formal morning coat contrasting with the line of Japanese officers in field uniforms.

"I certainly felt that I and my colleagues were standing at the new start line of rebuilding the nation," he recalled. Losing his grip on American English, he relied on his son, Hideaki, a conservative writer, to translate.

Mr. Kase recalled that he had to borrow a top hat for the ceremony because, six months earlier, his family house in Tokyo had been destroyed in fire raids by American bombers. He moved to this village 30 miles south of the capital, where he lives to this day as a widower. His son and daughter live in Tokyo.

"I was the one who advocated wearing those swallow coats, not because we want to pay respect to American generals, but because we were representing our sovereign," he said, referring to Emperor Hirohito. "I had to borrow a top hat, but it was too small. It didn't matter because I had to hold it. There was a lot of wind on the deck."

EVEN today, he glimpses history beyond the daily headlines — dismissing talk of Japan's decline, marveling over Russia's fall as a player in the Pacific and seeing the greatest threat to Japan today coming from China's resurgence as a military power.

"Throughout my life, from the Russo-Japanese War to the cold war, Russia was the major threat in this area," said Mr. Kase, whose portrait with Stalin dates from his work preparing the 1941 nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. "Now Russia is on the decline demographically, and in science and technology."

Many have said the same of Japan. Even so, Mr. Kase said, Americans make a mistake when they write off Japan as a waning power. Japan's dynamism, he insisted, is not determined by its demographics. "Japan today may appear to be on the decline," he said. "But, once faced with great danger to our existence, the Japanese managed to find the strength to revive through drastic reinvention. We may be approaching the period now."

For the moment, however, the nation looks more and more like Mr. Kase himself. In the last 20 years, the number of Japan's centenarians has doubled every five years, hitting 20,560, the government says.

Mr. Kase said he was pleased to be among the 3,159 men in Japan who are more than 100 years old. But looking to society at large, he predicted that when faced with an external challenge, young Japanese people would respond by renewing the population.

It is judgment rendered from a long view. Indeed, he has already seen the rise and fall in the Pacific of major empires: British, Japanese and Soviet. Watching the rise of American power today, he chided Americans for not enjoying themselves enough. "American society is too tense," he said. "It has no cultural relaxation, like Victorian England."

The key to long life, he said: "Don't work too hard."

China Begins Giving Free H.I.V./AIDS Drugs to the Poor

China Begins Giving Free H.I.V./AIDS Drugs to the Poor
By JIM YARDLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/08/international/asia/08CHIN.html

BEIJING, Nov. 7 — The Chinese government has started providing free treatment for poor people with H.I.V. and AIDS and plans to expand the program next year until every poor person who has tested positive is receiving medical help, a top Health Ministry official said in a speech this week.

The speech on Thursday by Gao Qiang, the executive deputy health minister, confirmed anecdotal reports from AIDS sufferers in central China, who say health workers began handing out free anti-retroviral drugs several months ago in Henan Province, a region ravaged by AIDS.

Mr. Gao's speech, released by the official New China News Agency, was hailed by Chinese and Western AIDS workers as a significant step for a country that has come under intense criticism for its earlier handling of the disease. Even so, AIDS activists warned that China must do far more than give out medicine, and H.I.V.-positive patients in Henan cautioned that problems were already arising with the free drug program.

"It's a very positive thing, but we are not yet there," said Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization representative in Beijing.

Mr. Bekedam said the free drug program was the latest example of what appears to be a new, more proactive attitude toward AIDS taken by China's senior leaders. This week, Beijing was host to one major international AIDS conference, while an AIDS meeting led by former President Bill Clinton will be held here on Monday. China also recently received a $98 million grant, largely to fight AIDS, from the Global Fund.

"It's undeniable that at this very moment China has made some major steps forward in the fight against H.I.V.," said Mr. Bekedam, who heard Mr. Gao's speech.

Exactly how many people have H.I.V. or AIDS in China is a matter of debate. Beijing has been slow to discuss the problem, and its official figures tend to be lower than the estimates of health professionals. Mr. Gao, speaking at an economic forum, said China now had 840,000 people with H.I.V., a figure he attributed to a joint international survey. But some doctors in China suspect that a million people were infected in Henan Province alone after local officials promoted a blood-selling operation in the early 1990's.

Chinese officials and AIDS experts estimate that 150,000 to 200,000 people have already died of AIDS in China.

Mr. Gao said 80,000 people had tested positive for AIDS in China. By the end of the year, he said, 5,000 people should be getting the free medical treatment. Then, according to the New China News Agency, "the free treatment would be available for all poor H.I.V. carriers and AIDS patients next year."

What is not clear is who qualifies as poor in a country where many people live on a few hundred dollars a year. Mr. Gao said the central and local governments planned to spend $850 million to improve and expand prevention and control programs in the provinces. He also said $272 million would be spent on upgrading blood-testing stations in central and western China.

"It's not a very clear definition of who are poor people," said Dr. Cheng Feng, director of the China office of Family Health International, a worldwide nonprofit organization with an emphasis on AIDS/H.I.V. prevention and care. "I'm not sure what that means."

The free drug program began several months ago in Henan, where thousands of poor farmers sold their blood to make money but were unknowingly infected with H.I.V.

Three H.I.V.-positive residents from Henan said in recent interviews that some people taking the free medication had shown improvement, while others had experienced intense side effects like nausea, dizziness and vomiting. Another major problem, they said, is that local health officials are not educating patients on how to use the drugs or what sort of side effects to expect. Nor are they conducting follow-up exams.

As a result, many patients have stopped taking the medication. Experts say China has begun manufacturing some anti-retroviral drugs, but only ones no longer under patent. China is negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of newer, patented drugs, and Mr. Clinton has been working to broker a deal.

The difficult job of building the necessary health care infrastructure to treat such a major AIDS problem is the immediate challenge for China. The inadequacy of its heath care system was exposed during the SARS outbreak earlier this year.

But many experts and activists believe that SARS, and the lessons the government learned, is one reason that senior leaders are no longer trying to ignore the country's AIDS problem. Even so, many activists believe that China's top leaders, including President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, must make high-profile gestures, as they did during the SARS crisis, when Mr. Wen visited SARS medical workers.

"It is a very encouraging sign that China has finally come to terms with providing treatment and care to people with H.I.V./AIDS," said Chung To, whose Chi Heng Foundation helps pay educational costs of AIDS orphans in central China. "However, providing them with medicine is not the solution; it's not the end. It has to be more than that."

Jing Jun, director of the Tsinghua University Center for AIDS Research and Training, which is the host for the conference with Mr. Clinton, agreed that the health infrastructure needed improvement, but he said he hoped that the promise of free medication would encourage people to undergo testing.

Without the promise of free treatment, he said, many people are reluctant to endure the stigma attached to the disease. "It will encourage people to come forward for voluntary testing," he said. "Why should people come out and be tested positively and get nothing?"

Newspaper War, Waged a Character at a Time

Newspaper War, Waged a Character at a Time
By JOSEPH BERGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/nyregion/10CHIN.html

During the blackout in August, reporters for the city's four Chinese dailies did not have electric generators to see them through the night. But that did not stop one of them, Ming Pao Daily News, from trying to best its rivals.

The half-dozen reporters in the Chinatown bureau of Ming Pao wrote their stories in longhand on a large table inside a generator-powered Holiday Inn.

One reporter then walked with the stories uptown and across the Queensboro Bridge to the newspaper's main office, in Long Island City, where five editors who had camped out overnight typed them into the computers as soon as the electricity came back on at 5:15 a.m. By 10 a.m., the papers were in readers' hands.

Although some of the city's 300 ethnic newspapers may have a languid, less-than-fresh feel, the Chinese press is aggressive. And the competition is about to get more cutthroat. The Oriental Daily News, among Hong Kong's biggest newspapers, is considering coming to New York City to become the fifth Chinese daily.

"I can proudly tell you that Ming Pao was the first to get the paper out on the street and free to everyone," said Xiaohui Hu, the newspaper's deputy editor in chief.

The World Journal, another Chinese daily in New York, has its own story of newspaper-war resourcefulness. For weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Chinatown was blocked to traffic, so The World Journal carted newspapers to its readers there by hand truck.

And three of the Chinese dailies crow over how they tore apart their front pages when Madame Chiang Kai-shek died late on Oct. 23; they informed their readers of the death by morning, a day before most other newspapers reported it.

Although some of the city's 300 ethnic newspapers may have a languid, less-than-fresh feel, the Chinese press is aggressive. And the competition is about to get more cutthroat. The Oriental Daily News, among Hong Kong's biggest newspapers, is considering coming to New York City to become the fifth Chinese daily.

So zealous is the rivalry among the dailies for news (and so tight their budgets) that each reporter has a quota of 2,000 words, or, more precisely, 2,000 characters, to write each day, often in two or three stories. The China Press also requires its reporters to shoot three usable photos a day.

"The quality is not so good, but it cuts down the cost," explained I-Der Jeng, its editor.

For the city's 360,000 Chinese and Chinese-American residents, the Chinese-language dailies (and the dozen weeklies) provide generous helpings of news about compatriots in China, Taiwan and Chinese communities elsewhere.

The newspapers regularly parse politicians' moves to measure the impact on the half-century battle over the identity of Taiwan. But they also teach immigrants about American peculiarities like potluck dinners and sleepovers. They explore options for bringing relatives to the United States under opaque immigration laws.

"Our headline today is that the Homeland Security Department requires that, starting next spring, all foreign students have to pay $100 to get into this country," said Joe Wei, the national desk editor of The World Journal. "In other newspapers this is going to be on Page 43."

The Chinese newspapers tell new arrivals about jobs and apartments in Chinese neighborhoods. They specify which schools are high-performing and where to find SAT cram schools.

"You want to buy a Cadillac, instead of going to Potamkin you look through the ads for someplace in Queens run by a Chinese person," said Peter Kwong, professor of Asian-American studies at Hunter College. "They can explain the deal better."

Of course, the dailies chronicle the same news as English-language newspapers: the rape charges against Kobe Bryant (since the arrival of the Houston Rockets' Yao Ming, basketball has become a big sport among Chinese-Americans), a new drug to combat breast cancer, or an announcement by City Hall.

The newspapers also run a lot of articles on crimes against Asians. Wendy Cheung of The World Journal is proud of the scoops she gets from detectives she has cultivated in the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown.

Just as in any good newspaper war, each of the Chinese newspapers is dismissed by the others. The World Journal is called an apologist for Taiwan, The China Press a mouthpiece for mainland China, Sing Tao Daily a tabloid-like scandal sheet, and Ming Pao a small nonthreat.

In each case, the truth is more complicated.

The World Journal, a division of the 50-year-old United Daily News Group of Taiwan, set foot in the United States in 1976 and now has papers in New York, San Francisco and nine other cities. With 25 reporters and 12 translators in the New York area, it is the reigning powerhouse in North America.

"We positioned ourselves as The New York Times for overseas Chinese people," said Tina Lee, the paper's assistant president.

Ms. Lee, 31, a graduate of Stanford University Law School, is the granddaughter of T. W. Wang, the founder of the United Daily News Group (and a friend of the Chiang family). She estimates that her paper has 90,000 readers in New York and 360,000 nationally.

Many readers, she says, are highly educated and high earning, and, despite the paper's origins in Taiwan, a majority are from the mainland. Like circulation claims made by the other newspapers, hers are hard to verify, since the newspapers do not submit their circulation to audits.

Sing Tao Daily, an offshoot of its Hong Kong namesake, is more open to a dash of sensation. It runs a daily page with pictures of revealingly dressed women and is more likely to run a photograph of the shark-mangled body of a man who tried to sneak into the United States. But it follows the news from Iraq as diligently as its competitors and has started a page with news from Wenzhou, a boomtown south of Shanghai that is the latest source of immigrants.

Rick Ho, the deputy general manager of Sing Tao, claims a circulation of 50,000 in New York and says the paper outsells The World Journal in Chinatown and Brooklyn. Still, as a thriving Hong Kong-based paper, Sing Tao would seem to have the most to fear from the arrival of The Oriental Daily News.

Ming Pao, which has been here six years and claims a circulation of 20,000, is also an offshoot of a Hong Kong newspaper, but it regards itself as more of an intellectual's broadsheet. Mr. Hu, the deputy editor in chief, says he is not worried about the more middlebrow Oriental Daily.

The China Press, which claims 45,000 readers in New York, denies the accusations of its competitors that its editorial policy and finances are controlled by Beijing.

"We are not the spokesman for the Chinese government," said Mr. Jeng, the editor, adding that his roots were in Taiwan. "We have a lot of mainland China news because we think it serves the interest of overseas Chinese in the U.S."

The day that other Chinese front pages in New York were full of accounts of a wake for Madame Chiang, Mr. Jeng's paper placed the story on Page 16.

The competition is fevered possibly because each newspaper is aware of its precarious existence, given the passions of China-Taiwan politics.

There were 10 Chinese daily newspapers in the New York area in the mid-1980's, but some made gaffes and folded. For instance, the Taiwan-linked China Times showcased the Chinese team in the 1984 Olympics, angering its Taiwanese backers. The Centre Daily News, also Taiwanese, supported the Chinese government's crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and lost not just its readers but its staff.

With more readers comfortable in English, the newspapers have revised their format, printing Chinese text horizontally, from left to right, rather than vertically, from top to bottom. That allows them to insert English phrases like "early decision" or "the official preppy handbook" into articles. (Reporters use English keyboards, writing Chinese characters by typing in a phonetic version of a Chinese word; this brings up a menu of possible Chinese characters.)

The newspapers are also aware that even successful immigrant papers can have a paradoxically perilous existence.

In the 1920's, The Forward, in Yiddish, had a daily circulation of 250,000. It helped acclimate its readers and their descendants so well to a new land that its Yiddish edition is now a weekly with about 5,000 readers.

"It's something that we think about," Ms. Lee of The World Journal said. "But Chinese is the second-most-spoken foreign language behind Spanish, and the rate of immigration in this country is tremendous. So at this point we still see it as a growth market."

Return of the Club Scene

Big, Loud Clubs Seek New Glitter
By JULIA CHAPLIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/fashion/09CLUB.html

I DIDN'T invite her," said Eve Salvail, a model with a dragon tattoo on the side of her head, who gets $500 to linger a few hours and look cool at Avalon, the latest incarnation of the Episcopal church in Chelsea once known as Limelight.

It was 3 a.m. on a recent Sunday, and Ms. Salvail, a part-time employee known as a tastemaker — a k a eye candy — watched helplessly from her free V.I.P. table in the hip-hop room while the uninvited woman, who looked like the Colombian pop star Shakira with streaked hair and a mini-kilt, wrapped herself around a stripper pole. When the woman began a deafening tap dance in her knee-high boots, two male models in Ms. Salvail's entourage gathered their free glasses of vodka and cranberry juice, slid out of the banquette and left.

"She's scaring people away," Ms. Salvail said. "I wish she'd just sit down."

So it goes on the front lines of New York's latest attempt to revive the glittery era of huge dance clubs — that halcyon 80's moment of celebrities, downtown artists and well-dressed nobodies mixing under strobe lights at Danceteria and the Palladium.

A new batch of entrepreneurs is betting that chic New Yorkers, after years of holing up in low-key lounges, are ready to hit the dance floor with the masses again. Over the next four months, no fewer than five clubs — each with room for hundreds or even thousands of dancers and featuring new-generation diversions like bungee-jumping cocktail waiters and raw-food kitchens — will open in two square blocks of West Chelsea. The area — bounded by 10th and 11th Avenues and 26th and 28th Streets — is already thick with art galleries. Now it bids to become the center of New York clubland.

"Tenth Avenue is great, because it's wide enough for limos and Escalades to pull up outside," said Noah Tepperberg, who is opening one of the clubs, so far unnamed, on 10th Avenue near 27th next month.

Among the others to come are Spirit, which is to open this month in the old Twilo space on 27th Street; Crobar, a branch of a club with sites in Miami and Chicago, which plans to open next month; and Quo, due in February, whose name, in a very loose translation from the Latin, means "where it's at," its owners say.

Applications to add more clubs are pouring in, according to Community Board 4, which oversees West Chelsea. They would include an Indian-theme nightclub and a dance club on 16th Street. Add the Avalon and Club Deep, both of which opened between Avenue of the Americas and Fifth Avenue in September, along with lounges that were already in the neighborhood (Lot 61, Glass, Bungalow 8, the Coral Room), and the Studio 54 question is, Who is going to fill all these places?

David Rabin, president of the New York Nightlife Association and an owner of Lotus, a lounge on West 14th Street, said: "I can't figure out how all these places are going to make money. New York has been hit so hard by unemployment, particularly in the finance and dot-com industries that drive trendy night life. If one or two were opening I'd think, `Well, yeah, maybe.' But this many at once is really puzzling."

A bigger question, perhaps, is how the new discos will escape the kinds of drugged-out club kids who, in legions, contributed to the demise of New York's last dance-club wave. That boom, in the 1990's, was a dark chapter riddled with drugs, violence and elephant pants. After a crackdown on clubs by the Giuliani administration, which made it nearly impossible to get the cabaret licenses required for dancing, night crawlers retreated to small lounges catering to a privileged few. Dancing became a naughty and spontaneous act for the drunken and daring, performed atop cocktail tables and on banquettes. (Places like Lotus and Bungalow 8 regularly replaced the stiletto-punctured upholstery.)

The empire built by the club owner Peter Gatien crumbled when federal agents labeled his Limelight "a drug supermarket" and shut it in 1996. In a separate case, the club's star promoter, Michael Alig, pleaded guilty to manslaughter for killing a clubgoer who was a reputed drug dealer (the subject of the recent film "Party Monster"). And in 2001, Twilo, a big black room with all-night D.J. parties, was also closed by the authorities. A favorite of glow-stick-twirling ravers, it kept an ambulance to run victims of drug overdoses to emergency rooms.

Some old club hands say it is going to be hard to change a business that has habitually thrived on hard drugs and bad behavior. "Where are they going to get a club crowd that isn't young and on drugs?" asked Steven Lewis, who was a director of Danceteria, the Palladium and Club USA, and who went to prison himself for nine months on drug charges. "I'm sure the 22-year-olds that do go out and are creative and cool would rather be at a divey rock club in the Lower East Side or Williamsburg."

Residents of the club district are essentially powerless to block them, community board members say, because the area is zoned for manufacturing. "Many residents oppose the opening of all these nightclubs," said Kevin Kossi, a co-chairman of Community Board 4. But instead of trying to block the issuance of liquor licenses and risk being overruled by state authorities, Mr. Kossi said the board has persuaded the clubs to help control the likely throngs of pedestrians, the heavy late-night street traffic and the thumping music.

But some say the clubs will bolster the area. "It's better to have clubs, which are a controlled grittiness, than what used to be there, which was a derelict area with prostitutes and people having sex in cars," said Danny Emerman, an owner of Glass, a lounge, and Bottino, a restaurant, both on 10th Avenue.

Almost all the owners interviewed for this article said they were trying to attract "an older, more sophisticated crowd," a code phrase that some of them acknowledged means "no 21-year-old `bridge and tunnelers' on Ecstasy."

Callin Fortis, an owner of Crobar, said the club's entertainment would influence the behavior of its crowd. "We're not going to book one trance D.J. for 14 hours in a big dark room," he said. "It's going to be like a creative playground." Crobar, which will hold 2,750 people, will feature live performances, an art gallery, acrobats on trampolines and what he described as bungee jumpers delivering cocktails. (Next door to Crobar, a branch of the "upscale" topless club Scores plans to open early next month.)

Like many of the other new clubs, Crobar is being designed to feel less like a giant disco and more like a series of lounges. It will have a V.I.P. lounge, an ultra-V.I.P. lounge and several small rooms catering to different subsets and designed by fashion companies including Heatherette (the flamboyant fashion-techno crowd), As Four (a downtown rock crowd) and Supreme (alternative hip-hop and street wear).

Richie Rich, a designer for Heatherette who was once Michael Alig's assistant at Limelight, said the new clubs would have it easier because indiscriminate drug consumption is no longer so acceptable. "Now it's become cool to get up earlier and be professional," he said, although he acknowledged that he may just be growing older.

Robert Wootton, an owner of Spirit, the 35,000-square-foot club in the former Twilo space, is betting that the neo-clubgoer enjoys tarot readings, astrology and organic foods. Testing the outer limits of a concept, Spirit will combine nightclubbing and New Age. It will be divided into zones: Body, a dance area with "uplifting" house music; Mind, a spa with aromatherapy and massage; and Soul, an organic and raw-food restaurant. It will have no V.I.P. areas. "The concept doesn't really make sense on paper," Mr. Wootton said. He said he had "no idea" if it would make money, but it was something he felt called upon to do.

The competition is heating up among club owners to enlist the city's top promoters, models and night-life regulars to draw in the many thousands of paying customers they will need to stay in business. On the weekends, Avalon pays more than 100 people, including promoters and eye candy, to pull not just a crowd, but the right crowd.

"It's like 50 dogs fighting over a bone, and the bone is the A-list," said Ronnie Madra, who promotes parties at Lotus and Avalon and is considering offers from several of the new clubs. One of his tactics is to hire what he calls "extroverted beautiful people" like Ms. Salvail, whose sole purpose is to hang out and look good, a job description at other clubs, too, like Plaid and Lotus.

"I say here's $200, all you can drink and a table to fill with a few of your good-looking friends," Mr. Madra said. "When the average person walks past and sees them there having fun, it makes the place seem a lot more `happening.' "

On a recent Saturday night at Avalon, such social engineering seemed to be paying off. The club, which has a $25 cover charge, was mobbed at the entrance, with a line down the block. Inside, the Habitrail-like hallways were jammed with Japanese and German tourists and other curiosity seekers. But a few glitches were apparent: the lounge crowd and the techno dancers were not getting along.

Up in one of the three V.I.P. skyboxes, to which entry could be gained only with the password "Brazil," Morgan Handbury, 21, a model from Canada who moved to New York City last month, was clutching her cocktail. "You can get this big club thing anywhere in the world — Miami, South Africa," said Ms. Handbury, who was wearing Levi's and a lingerie top. "I'd much rather be in a small lounge without all these random people. I hate the lighting in here, and the music is awful."

She craved a smoke. "but there's no way I'm walking through that crowd to get outside," she said.

In a bar off the main dance area where the D.J. Josh Wink was spinning, Tyson Gorrie, 28, a lawyer who recently moved to Manhattan, was wigging out. "There's too much of a money vibe here, man," he said. "I'm not into it. It's like a Euro place where you've got to buy a bottle just to get a girl to talk to you."

A couple of blocks away, Club Deep, which caters mostly to a clientele from outside Manhattan, was gelling better. The two-level space with five V.I.P. areas was packed at 1 a.m. Young men in Von Dutch trucker hats and leather pants and young women in tight spandex tops inhaled cocktails and bobbed their blow-dried hair to Chingy's "Right Thurr."

The club, decorated with amber-tinted mirrors, candles and several giant photographs of half-naked women, looked like a trendy lounge, only much bigger. A large dance floor with spinning colored lights was deserted. Lauren Greenfield, a 24-year-old stripper from Queens, stood by the bar with her friend Jennifer Fernandez, 28, a high school teacher from Edgewater, N.J., who was celebrating her birthday.

"At most places you go out to, 80 percent of the guys are going to be duds, which leaves 20 percent who are eligible, right?" said Ms. Greenfield, who said she had no intention of putting a toe on the dance floor. "Now at a big club, that 20 percent is going to be a much higher number. I want to go up to the V.I.P. area where the rich guys are."

In the V.I.P. area directly in her line of vision, Nick Arsenis, 23, an accountant from Queens, and a 24-year-old friend, Scott, who would not give his last name, were sizing up the crowd from behind a velvet rope as they mixed cocktails from carafes of orange and cranberry juice and a $300 bottle of vodka. "We don't like to dance," said Mr. Arsenis, who wore a button-up shirt and jeans and had gelled hair.

Scott, who looked roughly the same, nodded. "We just like to sit up here with bottles and meet cute girls," he said.

Photo District Face-Off

Face-Off
By STEVE KURUTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/nyregion/thecity/09feat.html

Ray Higgs marched into his tiny, hastily furnished office wearing the tense look of a man juggling six projects at once and dissatisfied with them all. It was barely noon on a Monday, and Mr. Higgs already seemed tired. "This business," he said, "is very high pressure."

Mr. Higgs runs Company Photo, a new film-developing lab on West 22nd Street off Seventh Avenue on the western fringe of the photo district, a six-block chunk between 17th and 23rd Streets crowded with processing labs, frame shops and equipment rental houses. Mr. Higgs is a doughy, anonymous-looking fellow, but in this part of town he is a boldface name.

For nine years, his bend-over-backward work ethic and highly personal service (3 a.m. calls from panicked clients are not uncommon) have made him a valuable ally to dozens of the city's professional photographers and made them deeply loyal. As Matt Salacuse, a photographer who has known Mr. Higgs for several years, put it: "Everywhere else, you're dealing with lackeys. With Ray, you're getting the boss to run your film. It's like the owner of Starbucks asking if you need more milk in your latte."

Mr. Higgs's reputation is less glowing a block and a half away at Coloredge, arguably the city's most popular film lab. Until August, he worked there as a sales representative. But when the owner, Raja Sethuraman, learned that Mr. Higgs planned to open a rival lab and try to hire away Coloredge employees, he confronted him. The next week, Mr. Higgs and three partners opened Company Photo.

The result is a feud that has roiled the New York photo world, a small but deeply contentious and pressurized part of the city's economy. Each side is scrapping for business, and photographers, many of whom have international reputations, are caught in the middle. Chief among them is Annie Leibovitz, who has a new book out and whose ubiquitous celebrity portraits and glossy Vanity Fair magazine covers have been processed at Coloredge for five years - and had been overseen by Mr. Higgs.

Complicating matters, Coloredge has sued Mr. Higgs in New York State Supreme Court, accusing him of unethical business practices and more than $600,000 owed on unpaid invoices. The lawsuit offers a glimpse of a rough-and-tumble industry that has become even more cutthroat as the city's decades-old love affair with the captured image has intensified.

New York has long served as both a muse and a base for everyone from art-world photographers like Diane Arbus to paparazzi like Ron Galella. And because the industries that employ commercial photographers - advertising, fashion and magazine - are based here, the city is a magnet for thousands of would-be photographers.

Although few New Yorkers know the names of labs like Coloredge, their fruits are everywhere; the mammoth Louis Vuitton billboard showing Jennifer Lopez at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue is one high-profile image processed at Coloredge.

As digital technology allows unprecedented access to the art form, amateurs and aspiring professionals are increasingly passing on one-hour processing in favor of professional labs, of which the city has about two dozen. The feud between Coloredge and Company Photo shows that the battle in the multimillion-dollar business is fierce.

Trouble, Then Trust

Ray Higgs, 47, does not come across as a person capable of creating a minor tremor in this world, much less an industry-shattering rift. Bald, with a belly that lurches past his belt, he has never been a photographer. Though he is knowledgeable about film developing, he has never done that, either.

Mr. Higgs stumbled into the business after his dream of being a comedian fizzled. "I never planned on getting a job," said Mr. Higgs, who grew up in Dutchess County, N.Y. "I was going to get discovered, like a solar system."

In the late 70's, when Mr. Higgs started out, much of the photo district was farther uptown, with several labs clustered around 38th Street and Madison; it was there, in 1979, that Mr. Higgs began as a billing typist at Reproduction Color Specialists. The industry has long been dominated by companies run by Indian immigrants - primary among them Duggal Digital Solutions on West 23rd Street - but the staffs are a multiethnic stew. "It was like working at the United Nations," Mr. Higgs said of his time at the company.

The lab catered mainly to advertising agencies like Ted Bates, retouching work by hand; Mr. Higgs recalls a popular Revlon campaign that featured Raquel Welch. He worked at the lab five years before getting fired. "I was young, and thought I knew everything,'' he explained, "and my big mouth got me in trouble."

Mr. Higgs then moved to Tartaro Color and then to a lab called Frenchy's. "It was the first lab to go digital," Mr. Higgs said, "which scared the hell out of everybody."

During the 1980's, when advertising budgets were still flush, catering to individual photographers was considered marginal business. Not until Mr. Higgs landed at the C-Lab, in 1994, did he begin developing the relationships with photographers that became his trademark.

Troy House, a fashion photographer, met Mr. Higgs back then. "Something about Ray clicked," Mr. House said. "He was this dorky guy with a New York Giants shirt on, but he was someone I could get along with. More importantly, he was someone I could trust."

Michael Lavine, who has snapped photos of everyone from Cher to the Notorious B.I.G., also befriended Mr. Higgs. In the spring of 1997, armed with a Rolodex of loyal photographers and two decades of experience, Mr. Higgs moved to Coloredge. A Cultural Way Station

Occupying a slim office building on 21st Street off Fifth Avenue, Coloredge is set up much like a factory. Separate parts of the business - color processing, black-and-white developing, digital retouching - are on designated floors, and the lab's 140 workers each have a specialty. The photographers who entrust their work to the lab include Michael Thompson, who shoots celebrities like Jennifer Aniston for the cover of W magazine, and Mario Testino, a frequent contributor to Vogue.

A photographer's reputation is built squarely on the ability to deliver high-quality prints - on time. For photographers, Mr. Higgs's appointment was the beginning of a six-year golden era of what many photographers considered to be unparalleled service.

Aside from the shooter's own eye, nothing is more important than the lab, the place film is transformed from negative to developed image, where those images are color-corrected and transferred to contact sheets and ultimately prints. The labs are, in many ways, cultural way stations; from the large, emulsion-filled tanks emerge the images that will be seen in magazines, on billboards and at galleries around the city and around the world. The photos for Taryn Simon's book "The Innocents," featuring prisoners exonerated through DNA testing, for example, were printed at Coloredge.

The process is art and craft: through a mix of chemicals and light, a single image can be exposed dozens of ways. It is also a lucrative business. A fledgling photographer bills about $15,000 a year in lab fees; with postproduction costs, someone of Ms. Leibovitz's stature could spend more than $250,000. Media giants like Condé Nast spend millions of dollars a year. On a busy day, a lab will process 1,500 rolls of film.

Many things can go wrong. Images can come back under- or overexposed; a lab may miss a deadline, causing the photographer to do the same. Negatives can be scratched or, worse, a roll of film lost and with it, perhaps, the shot.

Because negatives are a photographer's lifeblood, and because this crucial step in the process is largely out of their hands, finding a trustworthy lab is essential. Mr. Higgs understood this innately and working in a corner office on the ground floor of Coloredge, he labored overtime to calm clients' nerves.

Mr. Higgs personally signed off on each order and, if necessary, ran images dozens of times, at no extra charge, until a photographer was satisfied. Shooters develop their own style, and Mr. Higgs memorized them all. So if a photographer were, say, in Africa, and a magazine needed to see a print, Mr. Higgs could make sure the image was developed to the right specifications.

Once, when Mr. House was out of the country and needed pictures sent to a client, Mr. Higgs was having surgery. "Ray calls me from his hospital bed and says, 'I'm looking at your prints and they're great,' " Mr. House said. "He had them messengered to the hospital. I'm like, 'Ray, it's not that important.' "

In some cases, photographers have one day to shoot an assignment and get the prints to an editor. Mr. Higgs became known as the go-to guy for rush processing, getting film developed ahead of schedule.

For established photographers, like Mr. House and Ms. Leibovitz, such service is customary. But Mr. Higgs also treated promising beginners with equal respect, something rare in the photo world. Emily Shur, who takes pictures for Entertainment Weekly and GQ, said that when she started out, other photo labs were unhelpful, but Mr. Higgs was different. "Ray treated me like I was important," she said, "and schooled me on how to handle myself professionally."

According to Coloredge management, however, Mr. Higgs was less than courteous toward colleagues. Mario Delgado, Mr. Higgs's assistant for five years and, according to him, the only 1 of 15 assistants who eventually stayed with him, considers him a mentor but said he could be tough to work for. "Ray is moody and demanding," Mr. Delgado said. "If things didn't go a certain way, he'd fly into a rage."

At some point, as stated in the lawsuit, Mr. Sethuraman, Coloredge's owner, began to suspect that Mr. Higgs was offering clients free or reduced services, including unnecessary rush processing, at Coloredge's expense. "Ray was giving photographers perks, but he wasn't the one paying the technicians' payroll," Mr. Sethuraman said in an interview a few weeks ago. "He was using our facility to make himself look good."

Stylistic differences between the two men may have worsened their differences. While Mr. Higgs is emotional, Mr. Sethuraman is cool. Thin, with a rascal's mustache, he wears Armani shirts and resembles an Indian Burt Reynolds.

In court papers, Mr. Higgs denies Mr. Sethuraman's allegations. And Mr. Higgs's defenders, like Mr. Lavine, say that offering discounts and exceptional service to customers is the cost of doing business and that he did exactly what he was hired to do.

Mr. Higgs earned a commission on each order, but, according to Mr. Delgado, he also brought significant revenue to Coloredge. Mr. Sethuraman felt otherwise. On Aug. 4, he summoned Mr. Higgs to a meeting where, Mr. Sethuraman said, he confronted him. "Ray thought he was a color lab sage," he said. "Only Mr. Eastman is a sage."

Fathers and Sons

In many ways, Mr. Higgs's messy departure is business as usual in the photo district, where allegiances are tenuous and breakups common. The patriarch of this combative world is Baldev Duggal, an Indian photographer who moved to New York in 1957. He became a pioneer in the business, working in his apartment on East 49th Street washing prints in his bathtub.

In the early 1960's, Mr. Duggal invented the "dip-and-dunk" process, in which negatives are hung upright on hangers and dipped into large, emulsion-filled tanks. He was also the first to start a lab in the current photo district, when he moved, in 1961, to West 20th Street off Fifth Avenue. "I used to hire a car service to pick me up right at my door," Mr. Duggal said. "The neighborhood wasn't so good then."

But cheap rents, lofts perfect for studios and Mr. Duggal's lab helped transform the area into a destination for photographers. In time, frame shops and rental houses followed. Mr. Duggal also played father to the New York processing industry by staffing his lab with both relatives and ambitious Indian immigrants, including Mr. Sethuraman. Like fruit bursting from a tree, many of them broke off and set up their own labs - Baboo Color Labs, Manhattan Color, Coloredge - each of which is Indian-owned and can trace its roots to Mr. Duggal.

And, according to Baldev Duggal's son Michael, what Mr. Higgs is accused of committing at Coloredge is reminiscent of when Mr. Sethuraman struck out on his own from Duggal. "My father hired Raja and helped him get his citizenship," the younger Mr. Duggal said. "Yet he was making plans to open Coloredge and hire away our employees while he was still working here." However, Mr. Duggal went on to say that he did not like to focus on the past or the politics within the photo district.

While the industry has a fractious history, Coloredge and Company Photo are clearly embroiled in something far more personal than a business rivalry, and for many, the fallout has been uncomfortable.

"I couldn't sleep for a week," Mr. Delgado said, referring to the multiple calls and offers he received from both companies. "All I wanted to do was punch in, work hard and go home. But I got caught up in the politics."

Mr. Delgado eventually agreed to stay with Coloredge, secured with a substantial raise and a three-year contract. For the photographers, his decision made things more complicated. "I like Mario, and I like Ray," Ms. Shur said. "I didn't know what to do."

Ms. Leibovitz's choice was more cut and dried. An employee at her studio on West 26th Street who wished to remain anonymous said that while Ms. Leibovitz was happy with the service Mr. Higgs provided, her loyalties are to Coloredge.

The split has resulted in two competing labs run by two different men. Both Mr. Sethuraman and Mr. Higgs come from modest backgrounds and worked hard for their success. Mr. Sethuraman's wood-panel office is filled with rare framed prints, gifts from photographers like Mr. Testino and Cindy Sherman. By contrast, Mr. Higgs's office is nearly bare, and his company hums with the nervous energy of a start-up.

Mr. Sethuraman is also able to move effortlessly within the sphere of art and fashion. Not long ago, the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was in Paris when Mr. Sethuraman's name came up. "I must meet this Raja person," Mr. Lagerfeld said. "Everyone brings their film to him."

Ultimately, however, success in film processing rests on superior customer service, and Mr. Higgs has set the bar high. "Ray has the ability to interpret what I need, and to get it done," said Mr. Lavine, the music photographer. "And if he can't get it done, he still gets it done."

Mr. Sethuraman has his supporters, too. Michael Thompson has remained with Coloredge, said his assistant, Kevin O'Brien, because of the superior service. "I've been in Brooklyn at 1 a.m. and they've come to pick up film," Mr. O'Brien said. On another occasion, Mr. Testino was on a shoot in the Hamptons when he called Coloredge and asked that film be sent by messenger in 40 minutes. Mr. Sethuraman chartered a helicopter and delivered the film on time.

In an attempt at diplomacy, some photographers now give business to both labs. And while Mr. Higgs's absence at Coloredge is still felt, his former assistant, Mr. Delgado has been anointed "the new Ray." But, as Mr. House, the fashion photographer, observed, "There are worse things in life than having two quality people fighting for you."