The article below really says it all 'between the lines' -browser-formatted at recent (my own mid-'90s take on the subject at afroamer).

perryb

January 2005 Scientific American Magazine December 20, 2004 Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, researchshows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior. By Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger and Kathleen D. Vohs People intuitively recognize the importance of self-esteem to their psychological health, so it isn't particularly remarkable that most of us try to protect and enhance it in ourselves whenever possible. What is remarkable is that attention to self-esteem has become a communal concern, at least for Americans, who see a favorable opinion of oneself as the central psychological source from which all manner of positive outcomes spring. The corollary, that low self-esteem lies at the root of individual and thus societal problems and dysfunctions, has sustained an ambitious social agenda for decades. Indeed, campaigns to raise people's sense of self-worth abound. Consider what transpired in California in the late 1980s. Prodded by State Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, Governor George Deukmejian set up a task force on self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. Vasconcellos argued that raising self-esteem in young people would reduce crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, school underachievement and pollution. At one point, he even expressed the hope that these efforts would one day help balance the state budget, a prospect predicated on the observation that people	with high self-regard earn more than others and thus pay more in taxes. Along with its other activities, the task force assembled a team of scholars to survey the relevant literature. The results appeared in a 1989 volume entitled The Social Importance of Self-Esteem, which stated that "many, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many of the people who make up society." In reality, the report contained little to support that assertion. The California task force disbanded in 1995, but a nonprofit organization called the National Association for Self-Esteem (NASE) has picked up its mantle, aiming (according to its mission statement) to "promote awareness of and provide vision, leadership and advocacy for improving the human condition through the enhancement of self-esteem." Vasconcellos, now a California state senator, is on the advisory board. Was it reasonable for leaders in California to start fashioning therapies and social policies without supportive data? Perhaps so. After all, practicing psychologists and lawmakers must deal with the problems facing them, even before all the relevant research is done. But one can draw on many more studies now than was the case 15 years ago, enough to assess the value of self-esteem in several spheres. Regrettably, those who have been pursuing self-esteem-boosting programs, including the leaders of NASE, have not shown a desire to examine the new work, which is why the four of us recently came together under the aegis of the American Psychological Society to review the scientific literature.
In the Eye of the Beholder Gauging the value of self-esteem requires, first of all, a sensible way to measure it. Most investigators just ask people what they think of themselves. Naturally enough, the answers are often colored by the common tendency to want to make oneself look good. Unfortunately, psychologists lack any better method to judge self-esteem, which is worrisome because similar self-ratings of other attributes often prove to be way off. Consider, for instance, research on the relation between self-esteem and physical attractiveness. Some findings even suggest that artificially boosting self-esteem may lower subsequent academic performance. Several studies have explored correlations between these qualities, generally finding clear positive links when people rate themselves on both properties. It seems plausible that physically attractive people would end up with high self-esteem because they are treated more favorably than unattractive ones--being more popular, more sought after, more valued by lovers and friends, and so forth. But it could just as well be that those who score highly on self-esteem scales by claiming to be wonderful people all around also boast of being physically attractive. In 1995 Edward F. Diener and Brian Wolsic of the University of Illinois and Frank Fujita of Indiana University South Bend examined this possibility.	They obtained self-esteem scores from a broad sample of the population and then photographed everybody, presenting these pictures to a panel of judges, who evaluated the subjects for attractiveness. Ratings based on full-length photographs showed no significant correlation with self-esteem. Head-and-shoulders close-ups fared slightly better, but even this finding is dubious, because individuals with high self-esteem might take particular care to present themselves well, such as by wearing attractive clothing and jewelry. The 1995 study suggests as much: when the judges were shown pictures of just the participants' unadorned faces, the modest correlation between attractiveness and self-esteem fell to zero. In that same investigation, however, self-reported physical attractiveness was found to have a strong correlation with self-esteem. Clearly, those with high self-esteem are gorgeous in their own eyes but not necessarily so to others. This discrepancy should be sobering. What seemed at first to be a strong link between physical good looks and high self-esteem turned out to be nothing more than a pattern of consistency in how favorably people rate themselves. A parallel phenomenon affects those with low self-esteem, who are prone to floccinaucinihilipilification, a highfalutin word (among the longest in the Oxford English Dictionary) but one that we can't resist using here, it being defined as "the action or habit of estimating as worthless." That is, people with low self-esteem are not merely down on themselves; they are negative about everything.
This tendency has certainly distorted some assessments. For example, psychologists once thought that people with low self-esteem were especially prejudiced. Early studies, in which subjects simply rated groups to which they did not belong, seemingly confirmed that notion, but thoughtful scholars, such as Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, questioned this conclusion. After all, if people rate themselves negatively, it is hardly proper to label them as prejudiced for rating people not like themselves similarly. When one uses the difference between the subjects' assessments of their own group and their ratings of other groups as the yardstick for bias, the findings are reversed: people with high self-esteem appear to be more prejudiced. Floccinaucinihilipilification also raises the danger that those who describe themselves disparagingly may describe their lives similarly, thus furnishing the appearance that low self-esteem has unpleasant outcomes. Given the often misleading nature of self-reports, we set up our review to emphasize objective measures wherever possible--a requirement that greatly reduced the number of relevant studies (from more than 15,000 to about 200). We were also mindful to avoid another fallacy: the assumption that a correlation between self-esteem and some desired behavior establishes causality. Indeed, the question of causality goes to the heart of the debate. If high self-esteem brings about certain positive outcomes, it may well be worth the effort and expense of trying to instill this feeling. But if the correlations mean simply that a positive self-image is a result of success or good behavior--which is, after all, at least as plausible--there is little	to be gained by raising self-esteem alone. We began our two-year effort to sort out the issue by reviewing studies relating self-esteem to academic performance. School Daze At the outset, we had every reason to hope that boosting self-esteem would be a potent tool for helping students. Logic suggests that having a good dollop of self-esteem would enhance striving and persistence in school, while making a student less likely to succumb to paralyzing feelings of incompetence or self-doubt. Early work showed positive correlations between self-esteem and academic performance, lending credence to this notion. Modern efforts have, however, cast doubt on the idea that higher self-esteem actually induces students to do better. Such inferences about causality are possible when the subjects are examined at two different times, as was the case in 1986 when Sheila M. Pottebaum, Timothy Z. Keith and Stewart W. Ehly, all then at the University of Iowa, tested more than 23,000 high school students, first in the 10th and again in the 12th grade. They found that self-esteem in 10th grade is only weakly predictive of academic achievement in 12th grade. Academic achievement in 10th grade correlates with self-esteem in 12th grade only trivially better. Such results, which are now available from multiple studies, certainly do not indicate that raising self-esteem offers students much benefit. Some findings even suggest that artificially boosting self-esteem may lower subsequent performance.
Even if raising self-esteem does not foster academic progress, might it serve some purpose later, say, on the job? Apparently not. Studies of possible links between workers' self-regard and job performance echo what has been found with schoolwork: the simple search for correlations yields some suggestive results, but these do not show whether a good self-image leads to occupational success, or vice versa. In any case, the link is not particularly strong. The failure to contribute significantly at school or at the office would be easily offset if a heightened sense of self-worth helped someone to get along better with others. Having a good self-image might make someone more likable insofar as people prefer to associate with confident, positive individuals and generally avoid those who suffer from self-doubts and insecurities. People who regard themselves highly generally state that they are popular and rate their friendships as being of superior quality to those described by people with low self-esteem, who report more negative interactions and less social support. But as Julia Bishop and Heidi M. Inderbitzen-Nolan of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln showed in 1995, these assertions do not reflect reality. The investigators asked 542 ninth-grade students to nominate their most-liked and least-liked peers, and the resulting rankings displayed no correlation whatsoever with self-esteem scores. A few other methodologically sound studies have found that the same is true for adults. In one of these investigations, conducted in the late 1980s, Duane P. Buhrmester, now at the University of Texas at Dallas, and three colleagues	reported that college students with high levels of self-regard claimed to be substantially better at initiating relationships, better at disclosing things about themselves, better at asserting themselves in response to objectionable behaviors by others, better at providing emotional support and better even at managing interpersonal conflicts. Their roommates' ratings, however, told a different story. For four of the five interpersonal skills surveyed, the correlation with self-esteem dropped to near zero. The only one that remained statistically significant was with the subjects' ability to initiate new social contacts and friendships. This does seem to be one sphere in which confidence indeed matters: people who think that they are desirable and attractive should be adept at striking up conversations with strangers, whereas those with low self-esteem presumably shy away from initiating such contacts, fearing rejection. One can imagine that such differences might influence a person's love life, too. In 2002 Sandra L. Murray of the University at Buffalo and four colleagues found that people low in self-esteem tend to distrust their partners' expressions of love and support, acting as though they are constantly expecting rejection. Thus far, however, investigators have not produced evidence that such relationships are especially prone to dissolve. In fact, high self-esteem may be the bigger threat: as Caryl E. Rusbult, Gregory D. Morrow and Dennis J. Johnson, all then at the University of Kentucky, showed back in 1987, those who think highly of themselves are more likely than others to respond to problems by severing relations and seeking other partners.
Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll How about teenagers? How does self-esteem, or the lack thereof, influence their love life, in particular their sexual activity? Investigators have examined this subject extensively. All in all, the results do not support the idea that low self-esteem predisposes young people to more or earlier sexual activity. If anything, those with high self-esteem are less inhibited, more willing to disregard risks and more prone to engage in sex. At the same time, bad sexual experiences and unwanted pregnancies appear to lower self-esteem. If not sex, then how about alcohol or illicit drugs? Abuse of these substances is one of the most worrisome behaviors among young people, and many psychologists once believed that boosting self-esteem would prevent such problems. The thought was that people with low self-esteem turn to drinking or drugs for solace. The data, however, do not consistently show that low adolescent self-esteem causes or even correlates with the abuse of alcohol or other drugs. In particular, in a large-scale study in 2000, Rob McGee and Sheila M. Williams of the University of Otago Medical School in New Zealand found no correlation between self-esteem measured between ages nine and 13 and drinking or drug use at age 15. Even when findings do show links between alcohol use and self-esteem, they are mixed and inconclusive. A few studies have shown that high self-esteem is associated with frequent alcohol consumption, but another suggests the opposite. We did	find, however, some evidence that low self-esteem contributes to illicit drug use. In particular, Judy A. Andrews and Susan C. Duncan of the Oregon Research Institute found in 1997 that declining levels of academic motivation (the main focus of their study) caused self-esteem to drop, which in turn led to marijuana use, although the connection was rather weak. Interpretation of the findings on drinking and drug abuse is probably complicated by the fact that some people approach the experience out of curiosity or thrill seeking, whereas others may use it to cope with or escape from chronic unhappiness. The overall result is that no categorical statements can be made. The same is true for tobacco use, where our study-by-study review uncovered a preponderance of results that show no influence. The few positive findings we unearthed could conceivably reflect nothing more than self-report bias. Another complication that also clouds these studies is that the category of people with high self-esteem contains individuals whose self-opinions differ in important ways. Yet in most analyses, people with a healthy sense of self-respect are, for example, lumped with those feigning higher self-esteem than they really feel or who are narcissistic. Not surprisingly, the results of such investigations may produce weak or contradictory findings.
Bully for You For decades, psychologists believed that low self-esteem was an important cause of aggression. One of us (Baumeister) challenged that notion in 1996, when he reviewed assorted studies and concluded that perpetrators of aggression generally hold favorable and perhaps even inflated views of themselves. Take the bullying that goes on among children, a common form of aggression. Dan Olweus of the University of Bergen was one of the first to dispute the notion that under their tough exteriors, bullies suffer from insecurities and self-doubts. Although Olweus did not measure self-esteem directly, he showed that bullies reported less anxiety and were more sure of themselves than other children. Apparently the same applies to violent adults, as Baumeister discussed in these pages a few years ago [see "More to Explore," below]. After coming to the conclusion that high self-esteem does not lessen a tendency toward violence, that it does not deter adolescents from turning to alcohol, tobacco, drugs and sex, and that it fails to	improve academic or job performance, we got a boost when we looked into how self-esteem relates to happiness. The consistent finding is that people with high self-esteem are significantly happier than others. They are also less likely to be depressed. One especially compelling study was published in 1995, after Diener and his daughter Marissa, now a psychologist at the University of Utah, surveyed more than 13,000 college students, and high self-esteem emerged as the strongest factor in overall life satisfaction. In 2004 Sonja Lyubomirsky, Chris Tkach and M. Robin DiMatteo of the University of California at Riverside reported data from more than 600 adults ranging in age from 51 to 95. Once again, happiness and self-esteem proved to be closely tied. Before it is safe to conclude that high self-esteem leads to happiness, however, further research must address the shortcomings of the work that has been done so far. People with high self-esteem are significantly happier than others. They are also less likely to be depressed.
First, causation needs to be established. It seems possible that high self-esteem brings about happiness, but no research has shown this outcome. The strong correlation between self-esteem and happiness is just that--a correlation. It is plausible that occupational, academic or interpersonal successes cause both happiness and high self-esteem and that corresponding failures cause both unhappiness and low self-esteem. It is even possible that happiness, in the sense of a temperament or disposition to feel good, induces high self-esteem. Second, it must be recognized that happiness (and its opposite, depression) has been studied mainly by means of self-report, and the tendency of some people toward negativity may produce both their low opinions of themselves and unfavorable evaluations of other aspects of life. In other instances, we were suspicious of self-reports, yet here it is not clear what could replace such assessments. An investigator would indeed be hard-pressed to demonstrate convincingly that a person was less (or more) happy than he or she supposed. Clearly, objective measures of happiness and depression are going to be difficult if not impossible to obtain, but that does not mean self-reports should be accepted uncritically.	What then should we do? Should parents, teachers and therapists seek to boost self-esteem wherever possible? In the course of our literature review, we found some indications that self-esteem is a helpful attribute. It improves persistence in the face of failure. And individuals with high self-esteem sometimes perform better in groups than do those with low self-esteem. Also, a poor self-image is a risk factor for certain eating disorders, especially bulimia--a connection one of us (Vohs) and her colleagues documented in 1999. Other effects are harder to demonstrate with objective evidence, although we are inclined to accept the subjective evidence that self-esteem goes hand in hand with happiness. So we can certainly understand how an injection of self-esteem might be valuable to the individual. But imagine if a heightened sense of self-worth prompted some people to demand preferential treatment or to exploit their fellows. Such tendencies would entail considerable social costs. And we have found little to indicate that indiscriminately promoting self-esteem in today's children or adults, just for being themselves, offers society any compensatory benefits beyond the seductive pleasure it brings to those engaged in the exercise.

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Attached is an article on the making of 'The Keys To The House' currently playing in Los Angeles -a nose-rub into another aspect of 'the human condition' -a film most people can not walk out of and some might, in a way, prefer not to have seen.

perryb

December 26, 2004 Los Angeles Times WORLD CINEMA Of disability and nobility An Italian director receives a performance of quiet strength and humor from a teen with multiple disorders. By Susan King, Times Staff Writer When Italian director Gianni Amelio set out to cast the role of a disabled teenage boy in his haunting drama "The Keys to the House," he knew exactly where to scout for likely candidates.    "Swimming is kind of a therapy with this kind of illness," says the veteran director through a translator. "I knew I would find a boy like that in a swimming pool. So I went to a swimming pool near Cinecitta [studios], and on the first day, I met Andrea. It was kind of a sign of destiny."    Andrea Rossi, who was 16 then, was competing in a race the day he caught Amelio's eye. Rossi, who possesses a smile that doesn't quit, has cerebral palsy, epilepsy and mental retardation. But his disabilities didn't stop him from racing against children who had no such disabilities. "He came in first," says Amelio, laughing. "Why did he come in first? He had challenged the 'normal' kids. He said to them, you can race me, but you have to swim with just one arm and a leg. That's a formidable piece of personality. That is when I became aware that I would have to make the film from a positive point — that he is winning against the handicap in some way."

"The Keys to the House," which opened Wednesday, stars Kim Rossi Stuart as Gianni, a young man who had abandoned his baby 15 years earlier when the mother died in childbirth and he learned that the child had problems.    Vivacious, inquisitive and mischievous, Paolo (Andrea Rossi) is both physically and psychologically disabled from the difficult birth and has been living with relatives.    But now Gianni wants to meet Paolo and agrees to take him to a hospital in Berlin for tests in hopes of reconciling and getting acquainted with him. At the hospital, Gianni meets Nicole (Charlotte Rampling), who has spent years taking care of her disabled daughter and helps Gianni come to terms with the grief and guilt he feels over abandoning Paolo    Amelio ("Stolen Children") was originally approached to do a film based on the book "Born Twice," which follows the life of a disabled boy from birth to age 32. But he told the producer, "I wouldn't be capable of telling the same story in a film version. It needed a personal experience of my own on the subject to be able to do that. I think I would have strayed from the spirit of the book. I asked if it was possible for me to write my own story."    He wanted to tell about an "extreme" father and son — "the story of a father who refused his son as soon as he was born.    "On screen, we practically see this feeling of guilt on his face. This practically deformed child somehow personifies the sense of his guilt. That is why I wanted the role of the father to be played by a very handsome actor, handsome in a classical way. Because being handsome would make that fact stand out more, that his child is deformed."

Film Work As Therapy During the 10-week production of the film, Rossi underwent a metamorphosis, Amelio reports. "Andrea, like many kids with the same type of problem, is always treated from a physical point of view because adults keep thinking he is mentally unable to develop his own ideas. I had the feeling that Andrea did have some intelligence to express, and the feeling was right."    Making the movie was mental therapy for Rossi, who turns in a performance of quiet strength, humor and nobility. "This was confirmed by Andrea's doctors," says Amelio. "He has a more adult attitude. He is less detached from things, and he thinks about things more. He has become more mature."    Rossi's father stood beside Amelio on the set every day.    "He said, 'I want to be beside you because I want to make sure what point Andrea can reach, and the things he is unable to do,' " recalls Amelio. "Each day I asked Andrea to do something a bit more but always stopped when I knew Andrea couldn't have gone beyond that part."    Rossi's life, says Amelio, is vastly different from Paolo's. "He lives with a splendid family — with a mother, father and younger sister. They have brought him up as if he was a completely healthy person."    And he attends regular school. "In Italy, all children are required to go to normal school," Amelio explains. "They have a special teacher that kind of follows them during the day."    Still, he says, "there is a real problem with regard to disabled children because almost spontaneously we feel sorry for them. So we try not to ask too much of them. I demanded some kind of effort from [Rossi] and he managed to do this. My greatest joy having made the film is that he has something that has gone beyond the screen."

Amelio didn't spend time rehearsing Rossi and Stuart. "I think the relationship of the actor with the director is more important than the relationship between the actors among themselves. Professionally, actors are very fragile people, even at the level of jealousy. So every actor needs to have the feeling that the director is looking exclusively at him. I wanted to give this feeling to Kim and Charlotte because they are actors."    Alla Faerovich, the severely disabled young woman who plays Rampling's daughter Nadine, has been a friend of Amelio's since 2001, and he elicits a touching performance from her, as well.    "She has a different syndrome than Andrea's," he says. "Her situation is worse, but mentally she's completely healthy. She speaks four languages and has an important job in Berlin. She reads a lot. She loves music."    Amelio chose to set the film's hospital for the disabled in Berlin because he wanted the story to unfold in a city that would be strange for both father and son. "I wanted a disability for the father as well, the disability of being in a foreign city," says the director. "For us Europeans and for some Americans, Berlin reminds us of the Holocaust — a time when children like Andrea were eliminated."    Rossi is now 17, and, Amelio happily reports, he does his homework. "He didn't used to in the past. All he did before was watch TV. Sometimes he comes over to my house to study. His father told me when the film came out in Rome, a kind of miracle has occurred. Before, Andrea was a disabled child. Now he is a person."

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December 19, 2004 The Economist Magazine The servant problem A modest proposal How to solve the biggest issue in modern politics FORGET Iraq and budget deficits. The most serious political problem on both sides of the Atlantic is none of these. It is a difficulty that has dogged the ruling classes for millennia. It is the servant problem. In Britain David Blunkett, the home secretary, has resigned over an embarrassment (or one of many embarrassments, in a story involving his ex-girlfriend, her husband, two pregnancies and some DNA) concerning a visa for a Filipina nanny employed by his mistress (see article). His office speeded it through for reasons unconnected to the national shortage of unskilled labour. Mr Blunkett resigned ahead of a report by Sir Alan Budd, an economist who is investigating the matter at the government's request. In America Bernard Kerik, the president's nominee for the Department of Homeland Security, withdrew last week because he had carelessly employed a Mexican nanny whose Play-Doh skills were in better order than her paperwork (see article). Mr Kerik also remembered that he hadn't paid her taxes. The nominee has one or two other “issues” (an arrest warrant in 1998, and allegations of dodgy business dealings and extra-marital affairs). But employing an illegal nanny would probably have been enough to undo him, as it has several other cabinet and judicial appointees in recent years. There is an easy answer to the servant problem—obvious to economists, if not to the less clear-sighted. Perhaps Sir Alan, a dismal scientist of impeccable rationality, will be thoughtful enough to point it out in his report. Parents are not the only people who have difficulty getting visas for workers. All employers face restrictive immigration policies which raise labour costs.

Some may respond by trying to fiddle the immigration system, but most deal with the matter by exporting jobs. In the age of the global economy, the solution to the servant problem is simple: rather than importing the nanny, offshore the children. Make mine a monoglot Many working parents would hardly notice the difference, and there would be clear advantages beyond lower child-care costs. Freeing up rich-country real estate currently clogged with cots and playpens would lower rents; liberating time currently wasted in story-telling and tummy-tickling would raise productivity. For parents who wished to be present at bed-time, video-conference facilities could be arranged. Luddites and sentimentalists will whinge about the disadvantages of raising a brood in, say, Beijing. Language, for instance: what if one found oneself in possession of a posse of mini-Mandarin speakers? Yet in the age of global culture, few sensible modern parents are susceptible to such small-mindedness. If they were, they wouldn't so commonly leave their offspring in the care of monoglot Mexicans or Poles. Unthinking conservatism may spawn resistance to this eminently sensible idea. But politicians, the people most often embarrassed by the servant problem, should be keen to popularise it—not just for themselves, but also in the national interest. Offshoring could help solve several problems afflicting rich-world economies, including that of ageing populations: after all, you get more bairns for your buck in Bangalore. And why stop at toddlers? Difficult teenagers, the offspring most liable to vex political parents, could be conveniently removed: imagine how much easier George Bush's life would have been had his twins been confined to, say, Pyongyang.

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December 20, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE STATE Getty Deal Raises Questions Conflict-of-interest specter haunts land sale to Eli Broad, a close friend of the trust's CEO. By Jason Felch, Robin Fields and Louise Roug, Times Staff Writers The J. Paul Getty Trust sold a valuable piece of Brentwood real estate in 2002 for $700,000 less than its appraised value to billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, a close friend and professional associate of Getty Chief Executive Barry Munitz, according to trust documents and officials.    Munitz directed his aides to delay listing the property so that he could discuss a transaction directly with Broad, despite what Getty records call "many requests to purchase the property," which is adjacent to Broad's hilltop estate.    Getty executives now say they conducted a proper sale and received full value for the wooded half acre. Broad received no discount, they said, adding that they had consulted counsel to make sure they followed the law.	Eli Broad Barry Munitz    "I played no meaningful, no material, no in-any-way-relevant role in the transaction," Munitz said in an interview. "Everything I did was to try to have the lawyers and the appraisers and the third-party people be sure that there was no conflict of interest for me."
But Getty documents show Munitz spelled out negotiating strategies to his deputies, even as he acknowledged that his relationship with Broad required him to stay out of the deal. He also discussed the property in person with Broad, he said.    A 2000 appraisal put the property's value at $2.7 million, $700,000 more than the sale price in 2002. Median home prices increased 12% in Brentwood during that time, according to a real estate information service.    Getty officials say the land was worth less than the $2.7 million appraisal because a number of limiting conditions would have made it costly and difficult to develop.    Penny Cobey, the Getty's acting general counsel at the time, refused to comment on her advice regarding the land sale, citing attorney-client privilege. But she said: "It should not be concluded that I approved the proposed sale or advised that it go forward."    Munitz's connection to Broad, which included working vacations abroad with their wives, gives the Getty president entry into a tight-knit group of leaders in education, philanthropy and politics. Broad's ties to Munitz and the other Getty board members gives him sway with those who run the world's richest museum.	Foundation executives and tax law specialists consulted by The Times about the sale said it raises legal and ethical questions that could trigger scrutiny from the state attorney general's office or the Internal Revenue Service, which regulate tax-exempt organizations.    Private foundations such as the Getty are exempt from paying taxes because their assets are dedicated to public use, not private benefit. When selling property, they are required to get fair market value.    "The obligation is to always put the interests of the trust first," said Arthur Rieman, managing director of the Law Firm for Non-Profits in Los Angeles, a center that advises foundations nationwide. "If someone gets a discount because of a personal relationship, then that duty is violated."    Munitz's ties to Broad created a conflict of interest that should have kept him from having any role in the transaction, Rieman and other experts said.    "It could be argued that Munitz breached his duty to the organization as a trustee," Rieman said. Munitz's relationship with Broad began over a decade ago and has deepened since he came to lead the $6.8-billion Getty Trust.
They met soon after Munitz arrived in California to become chancellor of the California State University system in 1991.    Munitz asked his staff for a list of 10 influential people with ties to CSU, and invited them to a small dinner party at his house in Long Beach. One of them was Broad, a former CSU trustee and one of the nation's largest philanthropic donors.    Rooted in education, their association soon branched into other realms.    In 1994, Broad recommended Munitz for a position on the board at SunAmerica Inc., his giant insurance conglomerate.    In 1997, Munitz left CSU for the Getty. Two years later, after AIG acquired SunAmerica, Munitz was appointed to the board of KB Home, a position that pays $80,000 a year plus stock options. Broad was chairman of that company until 1993.    Not long after Munitz took the Getty's helm, Broad invited Munitz to sail along the coast of southern France on his yacht, mixing recreation with visits to a string of small museums.    " 'Don't you think it would be nice if you actually knew something about what you are about to get into?' " Munitz recalled Broad, a noted art collector, teasingly asking him. Munitz came to the Getty with no background in the art world.	It was Munitz's first invitation to join Broad's "boat trip summers" and travels to such places as Croatia, Greece and Cuba with a circle of entrepreneurs and philanthropists. The group sometimes included then Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan and billionaire investor Ronald W. Burkle.    Back in Los Angeles, Munitz and Broad's collaborations in the arts, education and politics continued.    Munitz was among a small group of power brokers who walked down Grand Avenue with Broad on a Saturday morning in 1999, helping to inspire the billionaire's vision for downtown revitalization.    Munitz said Broad's interests never extended to the Getty. The period of art that Broad collects is not featured at the Getty, Munitz said, and Broad has never expressed interest in becoming a trustee.    "Eli is a tenacious, impatient, extraordinary person — I love him dearly," he added. "But I would never expect that I was going to look up around my board table and see Eli."    But Getty expense records show that Munitz has a business relationship with Broad that involves the Getty.    In August 1998, after a tour of Greece on Broad's yacht that included visits to Getty-sponsored projects, Munitz was reimbursed by the trust for a $3,200 check he wrote to Broad to cover "gratuities and the use of the phone" on Broad's boat.
A cover letter to Broad from Munitz said the check was "only a very small token of adequate participation, and stands only to reflect our gratitude for your support and for your elegant energy."    The Getty paid for Munitz and his wife to dine at Valentino in Santa Monica with Broad and his wife, Edythe, Getty trustee Louise Bryson and her husband, John Bryson, chairman of Edison International, and another couple. The "working dinner" included conversations about the Getty, education and public television, expense records show.    In 2001, expense records show, Munitz was reimbursed $5,000 by the Getty for "yacht expenses" after another trip to Greece, this time with the Broads, Riordans and Burkles, as well as AIG SunAmerica Chief Executive Jay S. Wintrob and his wife.    During Munitz's tenure, more than half the seats on the Getty's board of trustees have opened up. Some of those who traveled with Munitz and Broad have filled those spots. Today, at least six of the 13 trustees have links to Broad.    Burkle and former Univision President Luis Nogales sit with Munitz on the board of KB Home. Wintrob, added to the Getty board earlier this year, is chief executive of AIG SunAmerica, where Broad is chairman.	In addition, Ramon C. Cortines, former interim superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, who was on the Getty board when Munitz arrived, and USC President Steven Sample, who joined the board this year, are advisors to Broad on education initiatives. In the late 1990s, the Getty did what officials say was a routine review of the trust's property holdings and decided to sell the land across the street from Broad's front gate. The trust had acquired the land years earlier.    Today, Munitz downplays the value of the lot. "At an 89-degree angle to the earth, this is not an attractive lot to build on," he said.    But an independent appraisal obtained by the Getty in 1992, which only considered about 60% of the land included in the 2002 property sale, painted a different picture.    The land is located in "the most prestigious neighborhood in West Los Angeles and the standard by which all others are measured," it said, estimating its value at $1.55 million. Despite the "moderately steep terrain" on its eastern side, the property's "highest and best use is as a site for a single-family residence."
In 2000, a second appraisal done for the Getty put the value of the full lot at $2.7 million.    The initial plan was to list the property publicly, soliciting competitive bids, Getty documents show. The asking price was $2.295 million.    Real estate broker Joan McGoohan said the Getty asked her to approach Oakmont Drive residents first to assess their interest. Specifically, she was asked to approach Broad.    "He basically said, 'Not interested, too expensive,' " McGoohan said.    At the same time, Broad's representatives say he made it clear that he did not want the Getty property developed. A former Getty employee said Broad's attorneys raised a gamut of potential building and fire code issues that could stall construction indefinitely.    Broad's interest in blocking development on the land would be obvious to anyone who has visited his home, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. A large new home there could have crowded the dramatic entrance to Broad's estate and detracted from the sense of space surrounding it.    Broad would not agree to an interview. Through a spokeswoman, he said he counteroffered $1 million for the land.	At that point, the Getty reversed its plan to list the property publicly, McGoohan said, instead opting to negotiate directly with Broad.    "They didn't want to offend Mr. Broad," she said. "They didn't want to upset him."    Officials at large nonprofits say there are ways to protect a foundation's interests when dealing with potential conflicts of interest and property of debated value.    "I would advise that it be marketed publicly," said Janne Gallagher, vice president and general counsel for the Council on Foundations.    "We would certainly have it appraised and sell it through an established broker or independent source," said Nancy Feller, associate general counsel of the Ford Foundation. "We would not do it ourselves."    In fact, Ford Foundation policy prohibits the sale of foundation property to employees, their friends or relatives, even at fair market value, she said.    In the case of the Getty property, Munitz stepped into the process.
In a document obtained by The Times, he instructed two senior deputies on options for dealing with Broad and directed them to send a formal memorandum back to him that included those options.    Munitz's draft ordered his staff to delay listing the property and proposed several alternatives to a direct sale to Broad. One option he suggested was for the Getty to promise not to develop the property in exchange for a tax- deductible donation from Broad.    Another was for Broad to donate "an appropriate residence, named for the donor" to the Getty in exchange for a commitment not to develop the land. The only negotiating partner mentioned in the outline was Broad.    Yet, aware of his ties to Broad, Munitz also instructed his deputies to include a sentence saying, "It is essential to emphasize that our attorneys and advisors feel very strongly about certain alternatives that would not be beneficial to either party, and there [sic] concern that you [Munitz] must maintain some reasonable distance from this decision given your close relationship with Eli."    Munitz sent his draft to Stephen Rountree, the Getty's chief operating officer, and Russell Gould, the senior vice president for finance and investments.	They responded on Jan. 12, 2000, with a final memo addressed to Munitz. "At your request, we have now delayed the listing of the Oakmont properties with Joan McGoohan in order to allow you a chance to discuss the property with Eli Broad next week," it began.    The Gould-Rountree version dropped Munitz's idea of a swap or donation from Broad, but otherwise closely followed his draft.    It added that the Getty had set the asking price on the land at $2.295 million, factoring in the obstacles to its development. It said the trust already had interest from multiple potential buyers, including from an employee of the Getty Center's own architect, Richard Meier.    "We have received many requests to purchase the property, so our expectation was that the property would sell fairly easily for the construction of one great house or as additional personal property for one of the neighbors," Rountree and Gould wrote.    Stressing the property's sharply increasing value, Rountree and Gould suggested that the trust might simply hold on to it.    The yardstick for whether the Getty had received fair market value would be the appraisals and the real estate agent's assessment, the memo said: "As you know, our auditors and the attorney general will examine any sale of the property to determine that the board acted as responsible fiduciaries."
Negotiations with Broad continued for two years.    Broad said he did not recall meeting with Munitz to discuss the property, and said he never negotiated with Munitz himself, only with Rountree, Broad's spokeswoman said.    The Getty did not seek a new appraisal for the Oakmont land, a step the state attorney general's office recommends that all foundations take in such circumstances.    "If you're exercising good business judgment, why would [you] sell it without a current appraisal?" asked Belinda Johns, senior assistant for the attorney general's charitable trust section. Although Johns would not comment on any specific case, she said in general, "You'd want to maximize your assets. In fact, you have an obligation to."    In April 2002, Rountree approved the sale of Getty land to Broad. The final price: $2 million.    The board did not vote on the transaction but was informed of it, Getty officials said. John Biggs, the current chairman of the board of trustees, referred questions about the land sale to the Getty spokeswoman.        The Getty says the documents demonstrate that Munitz handled the sale ethically and responsibly.	In a written response to The Times, Getty general counsel Peter Erichsen defended the trust's actions. "The lot was sold at arm's length for fair market value to the most practical and possible buyer," he said. "Dr. Munitz suggested to Messrs. Rountree and Gould language for them to include in a memorandum to Dr. Munitz, that he could then share with Mr. Broad, to make abundantly clear that it was essential for Mr. Broad and his representatives to work directly with Messrs. Rountree and Gould, because Dr. Munitz could not negotiate or conclude any transaction with him."    Erichsen said the Getty had received a lower valuation for the land in 1999 that put its worth between $1.5 million and $2 million, depending on the usability of the lot.    Further, he said, the property would have required a variance to develop, and as a neighbor Broad would have been able to protest any proposed development with the city.    Broad also may have been able to prevent access to Oakmont Drive, a private road maintained by a neighborhood association, Erichsen said. Claymont Drive, which also borders the property, is a public road.    By negotiating directly with Broad, the Getty saved a broker's commission, Erichsen noted. Realtors say they usually get 5% of the sale price, in this case $100,000. It also saved on other transaction costs, he added.
Rountree is now president of the Los Angeles Music Center, where Broad and Getty trustees Burkle and Lloyd E. Cotsen are among 12 honorary directors.    Rountree said the Getty got a fair price because the Getty's appraisals did not factor in a number of limiting conditions on how the land could be used, such as unresolved questions about access to the two roads it abuts and the lot's steep terrain.    The statement from Broad's representative also said "the appraisal did not take into account that the lot could not be developed because it was in a ravine and on a private street."    Real estate professionals sometimes do factor in such limiting conditions. The Getty would not provide The Times with a copy of the $2.7-million appraisal written in 2000.    "We were overjoyed to sell the parcel for $2 million," Rountree said. "Mr. Broad was well aware of the negative factors affecting the lot, and I know that he felt that $2 million was a very stiff price under the circumstances."	* (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) Land Deal In 2002, the J. Paul Getty Trust sold Eli Broad a Brentwood property for $2 million. Two years earlier, an appraisal had said it was worth $2.7 million. Getty Chief Executive Barry Munitz, a close friend and professional associate of Broad, personally directed the early stages of the deal, Getty documents show. Experts say the deal raises legal and ethical questions. * The Getty Trust sold the property to the Broad Revocable Trust on April 23, 2002, for $2 million. * The property totals 26,392 square feet, or 0.6 acres.

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December 16, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE An Ethnic Center's New Pull Koreatown was once the place one left. Now, focused on a shiny strip of Wilshire, it's a mecca for suburbanites and wealthy immigrants. By K. Connie Kang, Times Staff Writer Set between the Byzantine Revival dome of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and the dancing neon lights of the Art Deco Wiltern Theatre, a new landmark is taking root along the storied avenue.    With its futuristic glass facade and two-story television screen flashing Korean ads, the Aroma Spa and Sports Center is a stark visual contrast to the neighborhood's faded gems like the Ambassador Hotel and Bullocks Wilshire department store. But it is a sign that luxury is returning to Wilshire, and that Koreatown itself is on the move.    Aroma, a five-story shopping center, spa and athletic club, is a replica of a similar facility in Seoul, where pampering affluent customers is a fine art.    Up its marble-floored courtyard, Aroma offers massages, baths, saunas and steam rooms, including some with jade floors and mud walls of red clay imported from South Korea's Cholla province. With the push of a button, golfers can summon a waitress to bring freshly squeezed orange juice while they practice at the indoor driving range.

Koreatown - Tim Cho, 15, practices his swing in the indoor/outdoor golf range at Aroma Spa and Sports Center in Koreatown. The driving range, which is open to the public, features three levels and automatic ball feeders. The five-story, glass and steel building which houses the golf range is a stark contrast to the neighborhood's faded gems like the Ambassador Hotel and the Wiltern Theatre.

It caters to a new generation of affluent Koreans who are changing the city center.    Some are immigrants from South Korea, concerned about economic instability in their country, who invest in California businesses and real estate. Such moves entitle them to an investment visa, known as an E-2, which enables them to stay in the United States.    Others helped form the community in the 1970s and '80s, but then left it for bigger homes and better schools in the suburbs. With their children now in college or working, they are coming back.    "In the old days, it was a status symbol to live away from Koreatown," said Sun-Kil Pak, who moved to Koreatown a year ago from the Westside, where she had lived since the late 1980s. "These days, you're almost embarrassed to live far away. When you go to meetings at night, people tease you, 'Why do you live so far away? Why are you driving home so late?' "    The influx is helping shift Koreatown's geography. The community was formed in the late 1960s and early '70s along a dilapidated stretch of Olympic Boulevard near Western Avenue. But now, Wilshire is emerging as the main drag, especially for the newcomers.    Developers are converting several high-rise office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard into luxury apartments. A few blocks away, the shuttered I. Magnin department store, for generations a hangout for white-gloved ladies who lunched, has become Wilshire Galleria, an upscale Korean arcade featuring high-end jewelry and apparel, beauty treatment boutiques and an art gallery.	The eight California-chartered Korean banks in Koreatown are all within several blocks of Wilshire, sometimes called the "Korean Wall Street." They now have combined assets of about $9 billion.    The 2000 Census found 92,000 Koreans in Los Angeles — about half of them within the traditional Koreatown boundaries of Hoover Street on the east, Norton Avenue on the west, Pico Boulevard on the south and Beverly Boulevard on the north.    But real estate brokers, bankers and community leaders estimate that several thousand more have arrived in the last few years — from South Korea and the suburbs. The local banks also report an increase in investment from South Korea, a sign that immigrants are purchasing property and businesses.    Koreatown has been known for its hip and exotic night spots, but the district has also seen a boom in businesses geared toward the older generation. In addition to the steam rooms at Aroma, patrons now crowd into a variety of "song rooms" in Koreatown, where they can belt out nostalgic 1950s and '60s-era songs from their youth.    "There are two cultures in Koreatown," said Charles J. Kim, a child of Koreatown who is national president of the Korean American Coalition. "Sauna culture and cafe culture."    For Jung-In Lee, 53, the decision to move back to Koreatown, where her family lived in the early 1980s, came within months after their younger son, Jim, started at UC Berkeley in 1998.    During the nearly 12 years the family lived in Walnut, Lee often spent three hours a day commuting to and from her Koreatown job in publishing, she said.
Lee said her family moved out of Koreatown because of schools and crime. She said that when she saw one of her sons go into a liquor store with a classmate after school, she realized it was time for the family to move.    But during her time in the suburbs, she was so stressed out from the commute that she barely had time to enjoy their four-bedroom "dream house."    "Now, I have a life," said Lee, who lives a mile from her office. "I can play tennis before going to work. I can even get up at 8 o'clock and make it to work on time. Can you imagine that?"    Their younger son lives at home while working and attending graduate school. But the older son, John, an associate at the downtown law firm Nossaman, Guthner, Knox & Elliott, lives in the Miracle Mile — "a 20-minute jog" from his parents' place.    "I enjoy being right in the middle between downtown and Westside," he said. "It's 15 minutes door-to-door" from his apartment to his office.    There are trade-offs, of course. Her husband, Sang-Chul Kim, a 55-year-old business consultant, said he misses the spaciousness of Walnut and a backyard with fruit trees.    "Koreatown is congested and doesn't look clean," he said.    But its proximity to the mansions of Hancock Park makes up for it, he said. "Every evening after work, I take a walk in Hancock Park. I enjoy all those beautifully tended gardens without paying a gardener."    Insurance agent Nam-Tai Cho, who lived in Northridge, Van Nuys and Calabasas for two decades while raising his family, likens living in Koreatown to "coming home."	He and his wife, Hea-Kyung, bought a condo on Wilshire Boulevard near his office 18 months ago.    "Sometimes I go home for lunch," Cho said. "If I have a meeting at night, I go home to take a short break first." On Monday evenings after work, the Chos attend a weekly Bible class at their church nearby — something they couldn't even consider when they lived in the San Fernando Valley.    Since they moved to Koreatown, they have changed homes twice, settling a year ago not far from Aroma.    A leader in the transformation of Wilshire is David Y. Lee, 50, an internist turned real estate tycoon.    His Jamison Properties Inc., which owns 27 high-rise buildings on Wilshire, is by far the largest landlord in Koreatown. Lee began buying in 1995, when insurance companies such as Travelers, John Hancock and Equitable were leaving the area.    Over the last few years, those office buildings have been filled by a mix of tenants, including government agencies and trade schools as well as Korean entrepreneurs and professionals.    His current projects include a shopping center behind the Equitable Plaza at Wilshire and Alexandria, and three condominium complexes, with 190 units.    Lee believes that the recent influx of Korean professionals has helped the revival, though he said it is by no means complete.    Concerns about crime remain a nagging issue that keeps people away — especially young families.
Moreover, the area has yet to attract high-end non-Korean restaurants, boutiques, bookstores and movie theaters. Lee and others had once hoped the Ambassador Hotel site could be used to lure upscale retailers to the area. But the Los Angeles Unified School District, which owns the land, intends to build a school there.    "Not getting the Ambassador Hotel was a loss for the Korean community," he said.    Despite these shortcomings, there is no question that Koreatown is in demand.    "All of a sudden, the area is becoming hip with places to go," said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.    Real estate agents are hard pressed to locate newer condos and townhouses near Wilshire for their clients.    The scarcity of desirable residential stock has hiked condo prices to $550,000 and up, according to real estate agents.    "They're overpriced, but it's a case of supply and demand," said Suky Lee, a real estate agent with Nelson, Shelton & Associates in Beverly Hills, who has many Korean clients.    Adding to the crunch are investors from South Korea, who see Koreatown as a safe harbor to invest a portion of their assets. To people from Seoul, where an average condo runs $1 million, even the most expensive condos in Koreatown can seem like a bargain.	"They may not look that nice from the outside, but on the inside, they have nice wooden floors and beautiful kitchens," said E.J. Kim, president of Calvest Realty. "So, they don't mind spending $750,000 for a condo or a townhouse."    For visitors from South Korea, one way to remain in the United States is by investing in residential property, restaurants, coffee shops, factories, strip malls or other businesses, say Koreatown bankers and lawyers.    Then, they can apply for the E-2 investment visa.    That's what Scott Hwang, 32, did soon after arriving in Los Angeles from Seoul in 2001 on a student visa. He bought a restaurant in Koreatown and operated it for nearly two years. Earlier this year, he sold it and bought Cafe Spot at the corner of 6th and Catalina streets. He also bought a condo on Wilshire at the edge of Hancock Park.    The Spot, with oak paneling and tables, and an extensive menu of beverages and desserts, is dignified enough to attract older customers by day and hip enough to draw younger Koreans by night.    Hwang's investment enabled him to get an E-2 visa, which means he can stay here as long as he continues to own a business.    He spends most of his time running the cafe, which is open until 4 a.m., and handling other business matters. He heads to Aroma each day to work out.    Hwang, who was in the car repair business in Seoul, said his days are busy but rewarding. He regrets not having family close by to help make decisions, though he adds he is looking for a wife.
"In America, you are rewarded for the work you do. It gives me much joy to work," he said.    To qualify for an E-2 visa, an applicant is required to make a "substantial investment," which means about $150,000 to $250,000, said immigration law attorney David Y. Kim. The visa also enables the investor's spouse to get a work visa and their children to come live here.    It also could mean huge savings in tuition for Korean students in the University of California system. Some South Koreans buy condos in Koreatown for their children who attend colleges in the area.    Benjamin Hong, president and chief executive of Nara Bank, estimated that up to a third of the assets of the eight Korean banks in Los Angeles come from South Korean investments. At least 10% of customers at the bank's Olympic Boulevard branch making loan requests are seeking E-2 visas, said branch manager Young K. Oh.    No one knows how many E-2 visas are issued to Korean nationals, because the federal immigration agency does not maintain statistics by country.    But several prominent Koreatown immigration lawyers said the number of clients seeking E-2 visas has more than doubled in the last two years.	The changes have created a Koreatown that is heavy on Korean adults but light on children. Even parents who work in the area complain about the schools and lack of parks.    But there are some signs that this too is slowly changing.    Ophthalmologist Paul C. Lee, 41, his wife, Candice, and their two young children are relatively recent arrivals.    Lee opened his Lasik surgery clinic in Koreatown four years ago, commuting from the family's home in Temecula. The drive was so long that he ended up renting an apartment in Torrance.    The Lees then bought a townhouse on Wilshire, a five-minute drive to his office and their children's school at St. James Episcopal Church on Wilshire. Recently, they traded in the townhouse for a house, committed to raising Bryanna, 7, and Brennan, 5, in Koreatown.    Koreatown doesn't offer the athletic fields and other suburban amenities of Temecula. But it's close to his mother, offers plenty of Korean food and culture for Lee's family, and feels like home.    "I've come to appreciate the confluence of different cultures," Lee said. "I want my children to be exposed to that."

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December 11, 2004 The Economist Magazine Floods in the Philippines The usual suspects MANILA The government has few options bar rhetoric AS THE toll of dead and missing from landslides and flash floods in the north-east of the country passed 1,500 last weekend, President Gloria Arroyo led a chorus of blame directed at illegal logging. It was a familiar refrain, heard almost every year since 1991, when floods killed at least 5,000 in the eastern district of Ormoc, and since when little has been done to counter deforestation. Hundreds of logs that appeared to have been felled by saws lay amid the wreckage of the most ravaged communities, in the provinces of Quezon and Aurora, suggesting that deforestation did, indeed, contribute to the destruction brought about by a not untypical series of tropical storms. However, this is still an assumption. Given the human suffering, it is politically more palatable for Mrs Arroyo to blame businessmen engaged in illegal logging, rather than government officials for taking bribes to allow them to do it, or her own reluctance to tackle population growth. A fast-growing population means there are more poor slash-and-burn farmers, and more people living in marginal areas liable to flooding or landslides. President Arroyo reacted by ordering the suspension of all logging, legal or illegal, although subsequently exceptions began to emerge. She compared illegal loggers to terrorists, and put Victor Corpus, a former military-intelligence chief and one-time communist guerrilla, in charge of a drive to stamp it out. Mrs Arroyo pressed Congress to pass a law putting an end to all logging. The Philippines already has laws to prevent the indiscriminate cutting of timber, but they are not properly enforced.

Besides, action against logging is probably too late. It is thought that more than half the Philippines' land area of 300,000 square kilometres (116,000 square miles) was forest a century ago. Now only about 70,000 sq km remain. If the thousands who have perished since the Ormoc disaster were the victims of deforestation, it is likely that the floods and landslides that killed them were the result of damage done to hillsides and river beds years beforehand. The best solution is to plant trees on a heroic scale. But the billions of dollars required to do it are not available to a government in the throes of a fiscal crisis from which it does not expect to escape until 2010. The sad truth is that years of floods and landslides lie ahead.

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December 12, 2004 The Daily Breeze A vicious cycle The United States is deporting gang members but there's a boomerang effect: The culture is spreading across the Americas and winning recruits who see Los Angeles as the promised land. By S. Lynne Walker Copley News Service TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras -- Marlon Fuentes is a big man in his cell block at Honduras' largest prison. His face is tattooed. His talk is tough. He menaces with threatening stares.    A gang member from Hollywood, Fuentes spends his time behind bars impressing Honduran "homies" with his exploits in California. He joined Los Angeles' infamous 18th Street gang when he was 12, was arrested for selling dope and brandishing a deadly weapon, then deported in 1995.    Fuentes, 27, is the United States' violent export, a Honduran citizen shipped home under an immigration policy that Central American governments insist has helped spread the deadly gang culture throughout the Americas.    From Honduras to Hollywood and back to Honduras again, Fuentes moved in a distorted world where gang members identify themselves with tattoos and build networks via the Internet that bypass international borders.    Two decades ago, gangs were rare in Central America.    But in the mid-1990s, the United States stepped up deportations of criminals, many of them gang members from the 18th Street and rival Mara Salvatrucha 13.	Marlon Fuentes, 27, joined Los Angeles' 18th Street gang when he was 12 and built a 13-page rap sheet. He was deported in 1995.    Today, gangs are Central America's No. 1 crime problem.    Thousands of violent young men experienced in handling sophisticated weapons and evading law enforcement have been sent back to countries they haven't seen since they were children.    Some are dropouts. Many barely speak Spanish.    They survive by building networks of teenagers who are abandoned, unemployed and devoid of hope.    For these new gang members, as well as the deported veterans, the goal is the same: to make their way back to the United States and reach the gang mecca of Los Angeles.    L.A. gang members teach their new recruits what they know best -- robbing, stealing cars, selling drugs and, sometimes, killing.    "We've done a great job of exporting the gang culture all over the world," said Al Valdez, supervising investigator of the Orange County District Attorney's Office gang unit. "Now the gang phenomenon is international."
Today, more than 35,000 youths are members of gangs in Honduras, a country of 7 million people. El Salvador has approximately 30,000 gang members and Guatemala has 14,000. In Mexico, where nearly 1,000 Central American gang members have been arrested in the past two years, gangs are taking hold in cities on the southern and northern borders, including Tijuana.    The deportations haven't slowed the growth of gangs in the United States. Since 1992, the number of gangs has increased 625 percent, according to U.S. immigration officials.    The National Youth Gang Center estimates the United States now has 750,000 gang members. California has roughly 365,000 members, 100,000 of them in Los Angeles County. Every state in the nation now reports being plagued by gangs.    "I sound like Paul Revere riding across the country and shouting the alarm, 'The gangs are coming. The gangs are coming,' " said Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton.    Gang members deported from the West Coast sometimes sneak back across the border and head for East Coast cities. Since they are not known by local police, they can extend the reach of their gangs into virgin territory.    "We're everywhere," boasted a Mara Salvatrucha 13, or MS 13, gang member in Los Angeles. "Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, L.A., Washington, New York, Denver. There's a few in Missouri. There's homies in Canada, too. Wherever we go, we recruit more people. There's no way they can stop us. We're going to keep on multiplying."    Gang experts said U.S. immigration officials failed to anticipate the effect of deportations on other countries.    "The world is too global to export a problem and not expect it to come back," said David Brotherton, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who has authored two books on gangs.	"In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, there's a whole new inner city youth subculture that originated in the First World," he said.    "We've created this insoluble problem and these countries can't respond. There's no social work infrastructure. There's no rehabilitation. There's no money. They have enough trouble just providing basics for their own people."    For Central America's countries, the problem is certain to grow early next year when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, launches a nationwide gang-enforcement program.    "We're trying to come up with ideas and different strategies" to combat gangs whose violent activities "pose a serious threat to national security," said Michael Keegan, the ICE spokesperson in Washington, D.C., on gang enforcement.    Already, ICE agents are patrolling U.S. cities and rounding up foreign-born gang members.    In Charlotte, N.C., more than 100 gang members were arrested during an ICE operation last year. In San Diego, ICE agents arrested 45 gang members during a five-week operation in October and November.    In Los Angeles, where more than half the homicides are gang-related, ICE set up an international gang crimes unit three months ago and began exchanging intelligence with the police department.    Bratton favors the new initiative. "I think deportation works," he said.    With more gang members being sent home, Central American countries are desperately searching for their own strategies to combat gang violence.    The Honduran congress last year unanimously passed one of the toughest anti-gang laws in the hemisphere.
El Salvador followed suit with its own version of what has become known as the Mano Dura, or "firm hand" law, which allows police to detain any young man with a gang tattoo. Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas moved in that direction in May, approving five-year prison sentences for simply belonging to a gang.    The crackdown has raised international concerns that gang members are being hunted down and killed by police. Even so, governments throughout the Americas are pushing ahead to forge a united front against the 18th Street and MS 13 gangs.    Mexico City's former police chief spent a week in Honduras earlier this year studying gang-fighting methods. El Salvador's consular representatives in Los Angeles recently asked L.A. police officials for a briefing on their anti-gang strategy.    In the South Bay, gang investigators from Torrance, Redondo Beach and Inglewood met earlier this month for a two-day workshop that drew law enforcement officials from across the nation.    The focus was on the MS 13 because the gang is "up and coming," said an Inglewood detective who asked not to be identified.    "We'd better know who we're dealing with. If we don't, we're going to get saturated."	Gang violence touched Torrance in May, when a suspected gang member was shot at Sur La Brea Park.    The Torrance Police Department was so concerned about the potential for violence during a hearing on the case earlier this month that 10 officers were sent to the courthouse.    Torrance Detective Henry Flores said as law enforcement cracks down, "gangs are migrating and continuing their criminal enterprise."    Every time gangs are uprooted, they surface in another neighborhood, another city, another country. They move with the assurance that no matter where they go, fellow gang members will feed them, house them, orient them and possibly provide them with weapons.    As the gang culture spreads, people in the Americas find themselves linked in a new and uncomfortable way. Residents are frightened to walk their neighborhood streets at night, police aren't adequately staffed or trained, parents are grief-stricken by the senseless deaths of their children.    From Honduras to Hollywood the story is the same.    Residents watch with fear, frustration and helplessness as gangs take their neighborhoods -- and their children -- away.
Melrose Hill is an idyllic Hollywood neighborhood of bungalows and vintage streetlamps, a showpiece listed for historic preservation. Last year, Los Angeles Magazine called the 42-home neighborhood one of the 10 best in the city.    But at night, when residents of this tight-knit community lock their doors, they hear gunfire in the distance. The MS 13 has encircled their neighborhood, making it an island of middle-class American life in the center of random and relentless violence.    Hollywood is home to the largest MS 13 clique in Los Angeles.    Gang members drift in "fresh from Central America," police say, and stand outside the Hollywood Video near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Western Avenue until a homie steps out of the shadows to help them.    "There's another world around us," said a lifelong Melrose Hill resident who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals against his family.    "You see what's going on in the surrounding streets, you see young Latino men posturing and you think, 'Oh, God.' And you drive on. You wonder if the prudent thing wouldn't be to flee like other white people."    A woman was shot in the head just a mile from Melrose Hill last year as she drove her husband and three children home after a Thanksgiving dinner. Police suspect an MS 13 gang member from El Salvador fired the fatal bullet.    At Melrose Hill Neighborhood Organization meetings, the gang problem is always at the top of the agenda, said Brian Brady, 48, who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years with his wife and three children.	"Everybody knows they're not going away," Brady said. "If there's an answer to this problem, then it's pushing them to other places because there are always going to be gangs."    A few miles away, Hollywood Boulevard has become the 18th Street gang's turf.    The gang members hawk their drugs and sometimes shoot at rivals who slip in among the hundreds of thousands of tourists passing through every year.    Frank Flores, 30, who works the gang detail in the LAPD's Hollywood precinct, has seen scores of immigrant children join gangs, get arrested and then get sent back to countries they barely remember.    "We have seen some who've come full circle -- here in L.A., deported, then back again," he said. "It's frustrating."    Jorge Potter is one of those who has come full circle.    After being deported in 1989, the Hollywood gangbanger introduced the 18th Street gang to his neighborhood in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula.    Potter's role as an 18th Street leader eventually made him a target of Honduran police, so he returned to the United States illegally and made his way back to Hollywood.    There, Potter said he had a religious conversion -- the only way a gang member can leave his gang without being killed -- and started working in a Hollywood discount store.    In June, however, he was deported to Honduras again. He was detained by immigration agents in Las Vegas, where police had twice arrested him on misdemeanor charges.
Potter said he was going to divide his time between working at a clothing factory and witnessing to youths in San Pedro Sula -- which now has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America -- about the evil of gangs.    But when he stepped off a chartered plane guarded by U.S. marshals, he was wearing a muscle shirt that showed off his elaborate tattoos, including the number 18 tattooed on his right arm.    His voice carried a touch of pride as he talked about his gang.    "The 18th Street is No. 1 in Los Angeles," said Potter, now 36. "It's the biggest in the world." Latino kids living near downtown Los Angeles formed the 18th Street in the late 1960s to defend themselves against established gangs.    The MS 13 sprang up in the late 1980s, created by the children of Salvadoran immigrants who fled to California during a bloody civil war.    The MS 13, which now operates in 30 states, is "a little more violent and a little more calloused" as well as more experienced in protecting members than its 18th Street rivals, said Joseph Esposito, one of the top deputies in the hard- core gang division for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office.    "If their members commit serious crimes, they are organized enough to move them to Minneapolis or Seattle or another city and start an enclave there," he said.	Jessica is a member of the MS 13, born in Guatemala and trained in the streets of Los Angeles. She has been the target of gunfire more times than she can remember. She is also a full-time office worker and the mother of an 8-year-old daughter.    She came to Los Angeles when she was 5 years old, brought by her mother, who saw Los Angeles as a city of endless opportunities.    While her mother struggled to support the family, young Jessica discovered a different Los Angeles.    She started touching up her eyes with heavy black liner and slipping into gangster clothing after she left home in the morning. Eventually, she stopped going to school and started hanging out.    She took a 15-second beating during an initiation ritual when she was 14 and became an official member of the Mara Salvatrucha 13.    Now 26, Jessica has survived longer than most of her homies.    But her safety zone has been reduced to a series of city blocks whose boundaries are set by rival gang members.    "On every block, on every corner, a homie has gotten shot and killed," said Jessica, who asked that her last name not be published for fear of losing her job.    After 12 years as a gang member, she can't decide which direction her life should take.
"Being bad is so easy and being good is so hard," Jessica said. "I get bored by the routine. For me, it's the street, the adventure, the thrill of danger. People tell me that to change I have to get away. But I like being here.    "Anyway, I'd probably go to another state and find the 'hood again. You can always find someone from the MS because it's so big."    Jessica had a chance to start over after she posted her profile on the Yahoo personals page and met a Camp Pendleton Marine.    The young Texan took an instant liking to her, even flying her to Houston to meet his parents and paying for her trip to a Marine gala in Las Vegas.    But Jessica didn't love him, so she broke off the romance.    "I had a choice of a good man, benefits for life, or a guy from the street with no papers," she said.    She chose a 25-year-old gangbanger who goes by the name of "Puppet." Like Jessica, Puppet is an immigrant. He was already a member of the MS 13 when he arrived in Los Angeles at the age of 13.    Puppet was deported to El Salvador in June. Three weeks later, he called Jessica and told her he had killed a rival gang member.    He's trying to get back to the United States, but Jessica is terrified that 18th Street rivals will kill him before he makes it across El Salvador's border. In September, he was in surgery for six hours after 18th Street members hacked at his head, ribs and back with machetes.	Jessica paid for his surgery with money collected from L.A. gang members. Now she's trying to scrape together Puppet's $3,000 passage back to Los Angeles.    Meanwhile, MS 13 members in El Salvador are urging Puppet to be their leader. And local cops are watching him because he's from Los Angeles.    "The new law (in El Salvador) is locking up the guys who are getting deported. The cops think they're the leaders," Jessica said.    "Some of them are. Like Puppet. He will be one of them." The Rev. Arnold Linares ticks off the gangs that held residents hostage in his Honduras neighborhood of Rivera Hernandez before the anti-gang law went into effect.    The MS 13. The 18th Street. And the Normandies, named for Normandie Avenue in Los Angeles.    "All this came from the United States," Linares said, shaking his head. "One 18th Street member killed (rival gang members) with an AK-47 his gang sent him from the United States especially for the job."    For five years, Linares, the 35-year-old pastor of the Place for Everyone Baptist Church, has tried to lead young men out of gang life.    Charitable organizations gave him six computers. A church in Memphis, Tenn., bought uniforms, balls and trophies for the soccer league he started for gang members. But he gets no government support for his efforts and in June, government officials evicted his league from the community soccer field.
Linares often confronts danger as he struggles to help gang members.    When he stood at the gate of gang leader Mario Montalban's house, he found himself looking down the barrel of a homemade shotgun.    Linares raised his big, worn Bible above his head and Montalban, trailed by his second in command, lowered the shotgun.    Montalban, 26, started his Barrio 11 gang when he was 16 years old after a failed attempt to migrate illegally to the United States. He was attacked by gang members when he crossed the Guatemalan border into Mexico, then sent home by Mexican authorities.    Montalban said he was "one of the worst," making homemade shotguns and forcing the working people of Rivera Hernandez to pay "rent" before they could walk down his street. He was high on drugs from morning to night. And he murdered at least six people. He stabbed his last victim in the throat with a screwdriver.    After Montalban accepted Linares' offer to join the soccer league, he disbanded his gang and converted to Christianity. But his decision to go straight didn't mean Montalban was given a job and welcomed back into society.    As a criminal, Montalban made enough money to feed his two young daughters and elderly mother. Now that he has gone straight, they sometimes go hungry.    When Linares walks the streets of Rivera Hernandez, he worries about Montalban and the others he has pulled away from gangs.	"We have so many kids in the streets doing nothing. If they can't find work to feed themselves, they do the easiest thing -- they rob people," Linares said. "We are asking the government to give them a place for recreation, to give them work. This is not just a spiritual matter. It is question of jobs." In Southern California, which has had gangs for nearly 100 years, the solution is just as elusive.    "We live in a nation where we want instant results. Unfortunately, the programs -- suppression, intervention and prevention -- take a little while to gestate," said Valdez, of the Orange County District Attorney's Office.    Although gangs have now sprung up in every state in the nation -- the MS 13 and the 18th Street have been reported as far away as Hawaii -- Valdez said "there is a tendency for the very affluent communities of America to deny that gangs exist. It's always somebody else's problem."    Los Angeles County, which has almost 1,000 different gangs, has responded with more police, more crackdowns, more arrests under gang injunctions.    In Redondo Beach and Wilmington, injunctions have resulted in a marked decrease in crime. Since the Wilmington injunction went into effect in March, at least 75 gang members have been arrested.    But the injunctions, which allow police to arrest gang members simply for hanging out together in court-designated "safety zones," have drawn criticism from civil rights activists.
"Injunctions are a way of outlawing normally legal behavior," said Los Angeles civil rights attorney Constance Rice. "You can't gather. You can't drink together. You can't talk together. You can't go to a restaurant together. It's a suppression method."    City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo acknowledged that, "we are imposing on their civil liberties. That's the whole idea. We do that all the time in our society for safety reasons and the Supreme Court says that's OK. People in our communities deserve protection, too."    But pushing gang members from one place to another is not the solution, said the Rev. Gregory Boyle, who works with gang members in East L.A. Nor are massive deportations the answer to the international gang problem, he said.    "The police are passing them off to the INS. And what do folks do? They get deported and they come back," said Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries to help gang members break their criminal ties.    "The idea is to banish them, to demonize them. Tell me how that approach will keep a 15-year-old from doing it again."    Lately, Boyle has been receiving phone calls from foreign-born gang members locked inside the immigration detention facility on Terminal Island, waiting to be flown to the nations where they were born.    Among the deportees waiting nervously in the facility in June was Oscar Zapata, who was to be sent home to Honduras. Zapata, 42, said he was out of the 18th Street gang, but a routine "stop and frisk" by L.A. police showed he was wanted by immigration authorities.	Zapata joined the 18th Street gang in the early 1970s, shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles. His childhood in Honduras had prepared him for gang membership.    At age 9, he was tortured by police and incarcerated with adult men in San Pedro Sula's prison. At 12, he was conscripted into the Honduran Army and taught to fight with an M-16 rifle. When he was released by the army, he lived on the streets of Honduras until his mother took him to California.    By the time Zapata got to Los Angeles, "I wasn't afraid of anything. I had lost my fear. I came here with a different mentality," he said.    He was deported to San Pedro Sula two years ago after being arrested on drug charges, but he quickly returned to California. Zapata is appealing a judge's order to deport him this time because he's afraid he cannot survive the tactics of Honduran police.    Beads of sweat stood on Zapata's forehead as he remembered how the Honduran police kicked the body of a gang member and said, "This one is dead."    "I am afraid of the police. Nobody can stop them," he said. "If they send you to prison in Honduras you are going directly to your death."    Nearly 1,500 tattooed young men have been arrested since Honduran President Ricardo Maduro began his anti-gang campaign 16 months ago.    Almost 200 of them died in two separate prison fires -- one in an 18th Street cell block and the other in an MS 13 cell block -- in which the guards were either found negligent or directly responsible. In the most recent fire, on May 17 in San Pedro Sula, 61 of the 107 gang members who died hadn't been convicted of a crime.
Aida Rodriguez blames the Honduran government for the death of her 24-year-old son, Alan, who died in the inferno. A veteran of the MS 13, Alan was serving a 69-year sentence for double homicide.    "If the government was going to have an anti-gang law, then they should have prepared prisons for them because they knew they were going to capture a lot," she sobbed.    Ramon Custodio, who heads Honduras' National Commission for Human Rights, calls the incarceration of the gang members "a massive illegal detention" and vowed to ask the Supreme Court to declare the law unconstitutional.    "Because you're tattooed or because you behave this way or the other, you can be captured and taken to prison," Custodio said. "The principle of innocence doesn't exist any more in this country." Christian Antunez hides from Honduran police in the single room he shares with his wife and 18-month-old daughter.    He has tattoos on his biceps, forearms, back and stomach. Above his right eyebrow are the faint letters NLS, or Normandie Street Locos, for the MS 13 clique he identified with in Los Angeles.    Antunez has never been to the United States. He was introduced to gang life by his cousin, who grew up in L.A., joined the 18th Street and then became a leader. When the cousin was deported to Honduras, he brought back his expertise in gang warfare.    By his own admission, Antunez was a violent gang member. He was given a distinctive nickname: Mr. Crime. He murdered one man and said he participated in the deaths of others.	"Sometimes you have to kill or be killed," he said.    Antunez, 25, says he is out of gang life now, but until he burns off all his tattoos, he is in constant danger of being arrested under Honduras' anti-gang law. The only time he ventures out of his house is for his monthly trip to a clinic in San Pedro Sula called Adios Tatuaje, or "Goodbye Tattoo."    "It's a human hunt in this country," Antunez said.    "You know what they are doing with the anti-gang law? They are putting all the young people in jail. There is no rehabilitation. You know what rehabilitation is for the government? To kill them like dogs in the street."    Suyapa Bonilla, who runs Adios Tatuaje out of a room in her house, said many of her patients "came here crying because companies would not give them a job." Some had tried to gouge out their tattoos with a knife or the tip of a hot machete.    The demand for tattoo removal is so great that Adios Tatuaje has clinics in El Salvador and Guatemala and is about to open one in Nicaragua. Even men and women who've never been gang members feel compelled to remove their tattoos.    Juan Carlos Brito, 24, pulled up the sleeve of his T-shirt to show the heart on his bicep that he'd gotten in the Merchant Marine.    "I am sorry I have one," he said as he waited at Bonilla's clinic for his treatment to begin. "I have never been a gang member. But this law affects me, too."    Oscar Alvarez, the country's minister of security, shrugs off accusations by human rights activists that the gang crackdown is turning Honduras into a police state as it was in the 1980s when hundreds of suspected leftists were tortured and murdered by a secret military unit.
Law and order, not human rights concerns, are on the public's mind, he said. And Alvarez, who is rumored to be considering a presidential bid, is at the vanguard of the politically popular effort.    "The public was crying out, 'I want security,' " he said, "because this affects the people who are the least protected in the country."    Demographics underscore the seriousness of the problem, he said. In Honduras, 51 percent of the population is younger than 18. In El Salvador, more than half the population is under the age of 24.    "We have to stop more youngsters from becoming gang members," said Alvarez. "If we don't do something about it, we are predicting a very grave future for our country." At Honduras' Tamara National Penitentiary outside the capital of Tegucigalpa, an 18th Street gang member named "Lucifer" mocks officials who believe they can stem gang violence.    "If you can't control gangs in the United States, how are they going to end it in this (expletive) country?" cackled the 22-year-old convicted murderer as gangsta rap throbbed and inmates pumped iron in the searing Honduran sun.    Paul Antonio Zelaya is an example of the problems faced by both countries.	Born in Honduras, his mother took him to Los Angeles when he was 3. At age 11 he joined the 18th Street gang.    On his bulging right bicep, Zelaya, who also goes by the name Ricky Alexander, shows off the tattoo bearing his California prison number.    He was deported to Honduras in 2003 after being paroled from Imperial County's Centinela State Prison. Three months later, he was arrested by Honduran police for robbery.    Zelaya and his fellow Los Angeles inmates talk about going back to the United States, to the city they consider home.    So does a prisoner who calls himself Looney, even though he has never set foot in the United States.    Looney is one of 18 children in his dirt-poor family. Four of his brothers are also in gangs -- two in the MS 13 and two in the 18th Street.    In 1995, family members who had already settled in Los Angeles sent him money to make the trip. But he got arrested for stealing and has been in prison off and on ever since.    He imagines Los Angeles as "a beautiful city" where homies can find "a blessed peace," because "there is not a lot of violence against them."    "They have cars, TVs, food on the table. Everything. Everything. Everything," he said.    "Los Angeles is a paradise."

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December 3, 2004 Science Magazine Vol 306, Issue 5702, 1665 Amphibians in Decline The IUCN Global Amphibian Assessment (GAA), which commenced in 2001, has just been completed, and Stuart et al. (p. 1783, published online 14 October 2004) present the key findings. The data set covers 5743 species, and confirms that the current conservation status of amphibians is alarming, with 1856 species (32.5% of the total) being globally threatened, 2468 (43.2%) in decline, 435 (7.6%) in

rapid decline, and 129 (2.2%) having disappeared since 1980 (many of which are probably extinct). These numbers indicate a much worse situation than seen so far for any other taxonomic group. Of the rapidly declining species, 50 are subject to overharvesting, and 183 are facing severe habitat loss. A third group of 207 species has declined catastrophically, even in situations where there are no obvious threats.

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December 3, 2004 Science Magazine Vol 306, Issue 5702, 1665 TOXICOLOGY: Factory Study Shows Low Levels of Benzene Reduce Blood Cell Counts Erik Stockstad Although the workers weren't sick, the results hint that low doses of benzene may alter the bone marrow and could lead to health problems, some experts say. The study also provides the first direct evidence in humans that benzene harms the progenitor cells that give rise to blood cells. "It really breaks new ground on the potential effects of low levels," says toxicologist Bernard Goldstein of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health. There's no doubt that benzene, a widely used industrial chemical, can be harmful. Workers highly exposed to benzene fumes, for example, run an increased risk of leukemia and bone-marrow toxicity. But the risk from smaller exposures is unclear. Now a tightly controlled study in Chinese factories, reported on page 1774, provides reason for concern: Workers who inhaled less than 1 part per million (ppm) of benzene--an exposure considered safe under U.S. occupational guidelines--had fewer white blood cells than did unexposed workers.

Hazard? A study of shoe workers in China suggests that even low doses of benzene affect blood cells. (sm4c031.gif) Benzene is ubiquitous. People are commonly exposed to it from secondhand cigarette smoke, gasoline vapors, and air pollution, although typically only on the order of parts per billion. Studies of the chemical's health effects in industrial settings, where benzene is used as a solvent and in chemical manufacturing, led the United States in 1987 to regulate the maximum allowable workplace exposure at 1 ppm of benzene averaged over 8 hours.

To determine whether blood cells are affected at even smaller exposures, a group of researchers from the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, the University of California, Berkeley, and other institutions compared 250 workers exposed to benzene-laden glues in two shoe factories in China to 140 unexposed workers who sew clothes in other Chinese factories. The researchers carefully gauged benzene exposure by taking urine samples and testing air in the factories, as well as at each worker's home. After 16 months, they took blood samples from the workers. As expected, workers exposed to benzene at levels of 1 ppm and higher had fewer white blood cells, such as granulocytes and B cells, than did unexposed workers. But this also held true for the 109 workers exposed to less than 1 ppm benzene, even after controlling for smoking and other potential confounding factors. These workers had on average 15% to 18% fewer granulocytes and B cells than did unexposed workers--raising concerns about bone-marrow health, says Qing Lan of NCI. Luoping Zhang of the University of California, Berkeley, and others in the research team also studied the effect of benzene on the progenitor cells that give rise to blood cells. They found that the ability of progenitor cells to grow

and multiply declined with higher exposures. "The key point is that high levels of benzene had a more toxic effect on the progenitor cells than on mature cells," says study co-author Nathaniel Rothman of NCI. "That may suggest we're underestimating the effects of benzene by just studying mature cells." But Richard Irons of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver and Fudan University in Shanghai suggests that counting progenitor cells from blood samples probably does not accurately reflect what's happening to such cells in bone marrow. Irons, who leads a $20 million industry-funded study of benzene effects in Shanghai, also says it's possible that the low-dose changes seen in the Science paper stem from exposure to other chemicals or factors such as nutrition. "Because the magnitude of the changes are so small, it becomes difficult to discriminate between transient effects and benzene toxicity," he says. Still, the findings may lead to demands for lowering the benzene exposure standard, says geneticist Gilbert Omenn of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor: "This paper should cause a stir in occupational and environmental health circles."

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December 3, 2004 Science Magazine Vol 306, Issue 5702, 1665 Revisiting the Bhopal Tragedy Twenty years after the event, researchers are returning to the site of the world's worst chemical spill to pick up health studies that some believe were set aside too soon Charlene Crabb* BHOPAL, INDIA--Ashraf lies on a corner bed in the ophthalmology ward of the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre (BMHRC), a thick, white bandage covering his left eye. For the second time in 3 years, the 38-year-old is recuperating from cataract surgery. His sight has not been the same since the night 20 years ago when water entered a storage tank filled with methyl isocyanate (MIC) at a pesticide factory here, triggering a runaway reaction that sent a lethal cloud of chemicals wafting through his neighborhood. The vapors attacked his eyes, which led to a severe infection that gave way to chronic tearing and gradually, cataract-clouded vision. The gases also ravaged Ashraf's lungs, and today he suffers from chronic breathlessness and fatigue. Like thousands of survivors, Ashraf has turned to the BMHRC medical staff for help with the injuries he received in the world's worst chemical accident. More than half a million people claim to have been exposed to the MIC-derived cloud on the night of 2 to 3 December 1984. At least 3000 men, women, and children died from breathing the lethal gases. And now at least 5000 survivors line up every day outside clinics and hospitals here to be treated for gas-related illnesses.	Heavy toll: Researchers are planning health studies of those living near the ruins of the pesticide plant. (sm4c032.gif) Despite a flurry of studies in the 1980s documenting the initial effects of MIC exposure, scientific follow-up has waned. An ambitious long-term monitoring effort led by the New Delhi-based Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) ended in 1994 when the council abruptly pulled the plug. ICMR handed oversight of its cohort of 80,021 gas victims and 15,931 nonaffected Bhopal residents to the Madhya Pradesh state government, which still keeps tabs on the original ICMR cohort, now numbering about 50,000 people, through the Centre for Rehabilitation Studies (CRS).
ICMR has never fully discussed why it removed itself from the gas tragedy. But some scientists speculate that the government, eager to modernize India's economy, was concerned that tallying up the health consequences too aggressively would scare away foreign investment. Many still bemoan ICMR's decision. It was "ridiculous," says Nalok Banerjee, research officer at CRS. "The state government has no specific expertise in designing studies." Confounding matters, the Indian government in 1985 filed a civil suit against the Union Carbide Corp. in the United States--parent of the firm that owned and ran the plant--and imposed restrictions on publishing data on the Bhopal incident, deeming some details too sensitive to be released. The legal wrangling dragged on for 6 years, and subsequent disaster-related lawsuits are still in the courts. "Unfortunately, a lot of research never got published because the scientists retired, or moved on, or lost interest," says Indraneel Mittra, director general of BMHRC. In May, ICMR published the first of three promised technical reports on the investigations it carried out through 1994. Checking the data was slow and difficult work, says immunologist Nirmal Kumar Ganguly, director general of ICMR, who adds, "It took a long time for the government to give clearance for publication."	The 117-page document describes the findings of some 20 epidemiological studies, noting that death, miscarriage, and general morbidity rates were higher in exposed areas in the decade following the gas leak. Most long-term complications involved the eyes and lungs, but the report gives few specifics. "After 20 years they should have come out with some complete results," says Bhopal oncologist Shyam Agrawal, a member of a new Indian Supreme Court-appointed advisory panel for the gas victims. More details may be elucidated in the next several months when the technical reports on ICMR's toxicological and clinical studies are published. Researchers in India and North America are poised to conduct a handful of studies that could shed new light on the Bhopal tragedy and its health consequences. Although not lavishly funded, they cover topics from the biology of lung surfactants to the MIC gas cloud. Picking up the pieces BMHRC in a perverse way owes its very existence to the gas leak. The medical complex opened 4 years ago and is operated with interest accrued from about $20 million from the sale of Union Carbide's 50.9% stake in the Indian subsidiary that ran the infamous pesticide plant. Recently, the hospital trust's board members earmarked $1 million to develop research facilities, and
in August, they okayed the start-up next year of an epidemiology and biostatistics department. The department will study the 270,000 gas victims registered at the hospital and its eight outreach clinics. Because each patient is issued a memory chip- equipped "smart card," the potential new cohort is fully enumerated, identified, and easy to track--a situation found nowhere else in India or any other developing country, says Mittra: "It gives us a unique opportunity to do first-class epidemiological studies, whether gas-related or not." Other BMHRC research teams set up shop earlier this year. One group plans to delve into the anomalies in lung surfactants of gas victims. Pulmonary surfactant is a lubricant packed with proteins and phospholipids that fights off respiratory pathogens and aids breathing by keeping a low surface tension in the lungs' tiny air sacs, or alveoli. The researchers will compare the levels of various phospholipids and proteins in exposed and nonexposed patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonary fibrosis, bronchial asthma, and pulmonary tuberculosis. Once an internal board approves the $45,000 project, BMHRC will provide start-up funds. Another BMHRC research group aims to use new molecular technology to look for genetic mutations that MIC, a suspected mutagen, or other chemicals in the gas cloud may have triggered in gas victims and their children. Studies	conducted in the 1980s detected alterations in the chromosomes of some gas victims. More recently, cytogeneticist Narayanan Ganesh of the Jawaharlal Nehru Cancer Hospital and Research Centre, has noted birth defects such as syndactyly--fused or webbed fingers or toes--and pigeon chest among the offspring of people who were exposed to the lethal cloud. The new research team is awaiting approval to revisit these findings. The health of young adults who were exposed in utero to the gas is the focus of a $75,000 study getting under way at the comparatively cramped offices of the Sambhavna Trust Clinic, just west of the derelict pesticide factory. Community health workers are tracking down almost 400 children born to women who were pregnant at the time of the gas leak and participated in a 1985 study led by Daya Varma of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. That study, published 2 years later in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that 43.8% of 865 pregnancies in 3270 families ended in miscarriages. The current project, which Varma is also heading and which is being funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, will analyze the health problems of the young people and measure various physical parameters. It builds on work, reported by the team last October in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found growth retardation in young boys, but not young girls, who were exposed to the gas in the womb or as toddlers.
Ramana Dhara, a specialist in occupational and environmental medicine at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, hopes to determine what toxins were unleashed that night by recreating the runaway reaction at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) hazardous materials test site in Nevada. If that study gets funded--it's couched in terms of emergency preparedness for a terrorist attack--scientists at DOE's Frenchman Flats facility will add water to a tank of MIC and monitor the resultant gas cloud. Early autopsy studies as well as analyses of the gooey residue left in the Bhopal storage tank found about two dozen chemical constituents. "But we still don't know exactly what compounds were in the cloud itself," Dhara says. By determining the cloud's contents, Dhara and his colleagues could answer one of the more acrimonious debates that raged for months after the tragedy: whether victims should have been treated with sodium thiosulfate, an antidote for cyanide poisoning. In the days immediately after the leak, there was no information about the toxicity of MIC nor what chemicals could result from its pyrolysis and their toxicities. Doctors suspected that the color of the lungs--"cherry red"--was due to hydrogen cyanide, which binds to hemoglobin and blocks its ability to transport oxygen. A study of 20 gas victims given the antidote found a reduction in symptoms and an increased excretion of thiocyanate in urine, evidence to some that cyanide was present and that the treatment was helping people. But the medical community soon split over the efficacy of administering sodium thiosulfate, saying there was not enough evidence to back up its use, and abandoned it as an antidote for the majority of gas victims when the issue was moot. The potential findings of the experiment in the Nevada desert will have no direct impact on the treatment of gas survivors today because "the chemicals have long since left the bodies of the victims," Dhara says. "But at least the information should be out there, if only to say to the victims that we've finally got some answers." Although the recent ICMR report notes that it would be "desirable" to extend	the long-term observation of the Bhopal cohort to monitor for "cancer and long-term involvement of other organs," that hasn't happened. Banerjee says CRS has little money to do comprehensive epidemiological studies on the cohort of gas victims. "How can you cook food," he says, "without fire." ICMR did set up an outpost of its population-based registries in Bhopal in 1986 to monitor for various cancers that experts thought would ensue after the chemical exposure. Surprisingly, the expected rise in cancers of the blood, bone marrow, and lung never materialized. "There are slight differences between the exposed and nonexposed population, but they are not significant," says Biswajit Sanyal, director of the Jawaharlal Nehru Cancer Hospital and Research Centre. Sanyal and other Bhopal doctors nonetheless are bracing for cancers to begin popping up in the gas-affected population in the next 5 years. "A person can get lung cancer 30 years after smoking," says BMHRC's Mittra. "In the same way, it is still possible that the rise in cancer incidence is yet to be." Another source of cancer risk is pollution from the derelict pesticide plant, which looms as a general threat to Bhopal's future. Abandoned shortly after the gas leak, the site was never properly cleaned up. Its remediation is the subject of an ongoing civil suit in U.S. courts by gas victims who claim that chemicals, including some carcinogens, are leaching into the drinking water of some of the city's poorest neighborhoods, where more than 20,000 people live. In May, the Indian Supreme Court directed the state government to supply clean drinking water to the residents. Plans for a pipeline to bring potable water to the affected communities have yet to be drawn up. In the meantime, gas victims are marking the 20th anniversary of the tragedy with demonstrations in Bhopal and New Delhi. "They are thought of as second-class citizens," says Agrawal. "But the gas victims are a scientific treasure. The opportunity to study them should not be wasted." Charlene Crabb is a science writer in Paris. With reporting by Pallava Bagla.

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December 3, 2004 Science Magazine Vol 306, Issue 5702, 1665 BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change Naomi Oreskes Policy-makers and the media, particularly in the United States, frequently assert that climate science is highly uncertain. Some have used this as an argument against adopting strong measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, while discussing a major U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report on the risks of climate change, then-EPA administrator Christine Whitman argued, "As [the report] went through review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change" (1). Some corporations whose revenues might be adversely affected by controls on carbon dioxide emissions have also alleged major uncertainties in the science (2). Such statements suggest that there might be substantive disagreement in the scientific community about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. This is not the case. The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental

Programme, IPCC's purpose is to evaluate the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action, primarily on the basis of peer-reviewed and published scientific literature (3). In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents ... that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations" [p. 21 in (4)]. IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise" [p. 1 in (5)]. The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: "The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue" [p. 3 in (5)].

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society (6), the American Geophysical Union (7), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling (8). The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies' members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords "climate change" (9). The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.

Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point. This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect. The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it. Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.^

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December 5, 2004 Los Angeles Times First of Five Parts Deadly errors and politics betray a hospital's promise A Times investigation finds King/Drew far more dangerous than the public knows. Community pride, timid county leadership stand in the way of a remedy. By Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein and Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writers ON a warm July afternoon, an impish second-grader named Dunia Tasejo was running home after buying ice cream on her South Los Angeles street when a car sideswiped her. Knocked to the pavement, she screamed for help, blood pouring from her mouth.    Her father bolted from the house to her side. An ambulance rushed her to the nearest hospital: Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.    For Elias and Sulma Tasejo, there was no greater terror than seeing their 9-year-old daughter strapped to a gurney that day in 2000. But once they arrived at King/Drew, fear gave way to relief.    Dunia's injuries were minor: some scrapes, some bruises and two broken baby teeth. The teeth would have to be pulled.    "They told me to relax," Sulma recalled. "Everything was fine."    At least, it should have been.    What the Tasejos didn't know was that King/Drew, a 233-bed public hospital in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, had a long history of harming, or even killing, those it was meant to serve.

Over the last year, reports by journalists and regulators have offered stark glimpses of failings at King/Drew: Nurses neglecting patients as they lay dying. Staff failing to give patients crucial drugs or giving them toxic ones by mistake. Guards using Taser stun guns on psychiatric patients, despite an earlier warning to stop.    Over the same period, a team of Times reporters has been systematically examining the hospital. They conducted hundreds of interviews, studied years of malpractice cases and reviewed records of the hospital and its regulators. They looked closely at individual departments and physicians. And, to put their findings in perspective, they consulted outside experts in hospitals and medical care.

The investigation reveals that King/Drew is much more dangerous than the public has been told.    Among the findings: • Errors and neglect by King/Drew's staff have repeatedly injured or killed patients over more than a decade, a pattern that remains largely unscrutinized and unchecked. Some lapses were never reported to authorities — or even to the victims or their families. And some people learned of the severity of the failings only by suing or, in several instances, from Times reporters who sought them out to learn about their care.    • Although King/Drew opened in 1972 with the promise that it would be "the very best hospital in America," it is now, by various measures, one of the very worst. It pays out more per patient for medical malpractice than any of the state's 17 other public hospitals or the six University of California medical centers.    • Entire departments are riddled with incompetence, internal strife and, in some cases, criminality. Employees have pilfered and sometimes sold the hospital's drugs; chronic absenteeism is rampant; assaults between hospital workers are not uncommon. Despite King/Drew's repeated promises to regulators, the problems have gone unfixed for years.    • The hospital's failings do not stem from a lack of money, as its supporters long have contended. King/Drew spends more per patient than any of the three other general hospitals run by Los Angeles County. Millions of dollars go to unusual workers' compensation claims and abnormally high salaries for ranking doctors.	• The hospital's governing body, the county Board of Supervisors, has been told repeatedly — often in writing — of needless deaths and injuries at King/Drew. Recently the supervisors have made some aggressive moves aimed at fixing the hospital. But for years, the board shied away from decisive action in the face of community anger and accusations of racism.    King/Drew, founded in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots, has stood for more than three decades as a symbol of justice and political power to many black people in South Los Angeles and beyond. In reality, if not officially, the hospital was established by and for African Americans; the majority of its staff always has been black.    "That hospital means hope to us," said Karimu McNeal, 52, an African American woman treated successfully for colon cancer at King/Drew in 2002. "When you go into the hospital and you see people that look like you and take care of you, it gives you hope for the whole race that we're achieving and doing something."    Mixed with community pride is an undercurrent of concern about King/Drew's standards. For about three decades it has been known by an unflattering nickname, "Killer King." Patients have fled ambulances to avoid it, according to paramedics and one ranking fire official. And police officers say they have an understanding among themselves that, if shot, they will not be taken there.    The Tasejos, immigrants from Guatemala, didn't know any of this the day their daughter was hurt. All they knew was that she needed help.
In the seven hours after Dunia's arrival, the hospital would commit a series of medical errors in treating her, each compounding the one before.    By the middle of that night, the couple were standing outside the pediatric intensive care unit, bewildered and increasingly frightened. Alarms were ringing and doctors were running by. The Tasejos tried to catch the eye of a physician who had reassured them earlier.    "He looked at me," Elias Tasejo recalled. "He kept walking."    Here is an account of Dunia's care, based on her medical records, a state health department investigation, a medical expert consulted by The Times and interviews with her family:    To keep her still during a precautionary CT scan, her 65-pound body was pumped with enough drugs to sedate a grown man.    Paralyzed by the medications, she had to be hooked up to a ventilator to help her breathe. Its settings were wrong; a blood test showed she was being starved of oxygen.    The settings were adjusted to give her more. But inexplicably, an emergency room doctor ordered a trainee physician to pull out Dunia's breathing tube 20 minutes later. No one checked to see whether she could breathe on her own.    For the next two hours, Dunia's nurses failed to monitor her vital signs or breathing, records show. By the time she was transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit, she was flailing from lack of oxygen and calling, "Mama."	The medical resident who admitted her to the ICU was unable to operate a machine to check her oxygen levels, and didn't seek help for at least 15 minutes.    By then, Dunia's heart and lungs had stopped working. Doctors resuscitated her, but later that day she was declared brain dead.    After two days, she was removed from life support.    "This child should not have died," said Dr. Lorry Frankel, chief of pediatric intensive care at Stanford University's children's hospital, who reviewed Dunia's records for The Times. "If she had been taken to any pediatric center that had appropriate policies and procedures in place she would still be alive today."    Frankel described Dunia's care as "appalling" and "really pathetic."    After her death, a team of doctors took the Tasejos into a room and promised to find out what had killed her.    Elias Tasejo said the associate medical director handed him a business card. He kept it in his wallet for three years, thinking he might hear back. He never did.    "Our daughter is dead," he said earlier this year, "and we have no idea why."
Hospital defenders What happened to Dunia, and others like her, rarely figures in the public debate over King/Drew. Community activists, who fought so hard for the hospital's creation, are far more consumed with the fear that it could be closed.    When King/Drew is threatened, it is often Lillian Mobley — long the hospital's most visible defender — who takes the microphone.    Last January, she stood facing about 200 people in an auditorium at Grant AME Church in Watts. As cheers of adoration washed over her, Mobley, a thin woman of regal bearing, thrust her chin forward in a characteristically defiant pose.    Moments passed. When the last voice had been stilled, when every head turned her way, only then did she speak.    "The hospital," she said gravely, leaning on a cane, "is being closed piece by piece."    There were murmurs, shouts of dismay.    "We have to stand together to fight this battle," said Mobley, her voice rising. "We have to rise every morning under God's will to save Martin Luther King."    That meeting, held to protest planned cutbacks at King/Drew, was one of many such gatherings she has addressed over the years.    Strong-willed and fiercely protective, Mobley, 74, is at the forefront of a coterie of African American leaders, most now in their 70s and 80s, who defend King/Drew with the same intensity that they once devoted to the civil rights movement.    To them, it is part of the same struggle.	Some vividly recall how things used to be, when they had to find a ride to the main county hospital some 15 miles away. It was a long trip if you didn't have a car — and most people didn't. "Twenty-five dollars sick" meant you were in bad enough shape to pay for a cab across town.    Many remember the case of Leonard Deadwyler, a black man who in 1966 was rushing his pregnant wife from their home in Watts to County General Hospital (today's County-USC) in Boyle Heights when police stopped him for speeding. An officer approached his car and shot him to death. The shooting was determined to have been an accident, but many saw it as a racist killing.    They also remember how the voters of Los Angeles County, mostly white, refused to pay for King/Drew's construction, forcing Supervisor Kenneth Hahn to find money elsewhere. Even now, threats to trim the hospital's budget revive fears that whites are trying to take it away.    "We see something that we fought really hard for," said Dr. Herbert Avery, 71, an obstetrician who helped plan the hospital and served briefly on its staff. "And now it's being driven down under the ground under the guise that the people out there they're black and Mexican and they're too stupid to run a hospital and a medical school."    Mobley's group is small, and its members hold no elective office, yet they are the curators of King/Drew's dream. They are often called simply "the Community," reverently spoken, as with a capital C. It is a status they have guarded ever more zealously as the neighborhoods around them have become increasingly Latino.
"If you're going to work at King/Drew, you have to work with the Community," said Dr. Thomas Yoshikawa, chairman of the internal medicine department. "You just can't come in and say, 'I'm the new kid on the block. I'm going to play the game my way.' No, you have to play the game their way."    Defying them can draw charges of racism — even when the transgressor is African American.    In the fall of 2003, members of Mobley's group paced the lawn in front of the hospital, as one bellowed through a bullhorn: "Marcelle Willock, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide."    Willock, who is black and Latina, is dean of the hospital's affiliated medical school at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. The protesters contended that she had not done enough to protect and support key programs.    While racial politics sometimes play out on its expansive front lawn, inside the hospital, King/Drew's legacy is on display.    In the lobby are prominent portraits of King; his wife, Coretta; and local political dignitaries posing beside former Presidents Clinton and Johnson. A photograph of King being greeted by the late Supervisor Hahn is hung in two places there and in at least six others around the hospital.    Down winding hallways is one of the hospital's greatest points of pride — a trauma unit with state-of-the-art equipment. More gunshot wounds have been treated here in recent years than at any other hospital in the county. Many in	surrounding neighborhoods credit the unit's surgeons with saving their lives or those of their sons and daughters.    "There's a lot of violence in the world today, especially in this community," said Lee Russell, 40, yanking up his shirt to display rope-like scars from a November 2003 shooting and stabbing. He praised the King/Drew doctors and nurses, saying that if the trauma center hadn't been nearby, "I would be dead . I'm their walking miracle."    Last month, the Board of Supervisors voted to close the trauma unit to focus on fixing the rest of King/Drew, which like other county hospitals treats patients regardless of insurance status. In September, the board agreed to hire private turnaround consultants for $13.2 million. The supervisors' actions were their strongest to date, brought about only by threats to King/Drew's federal funding and national accreditation.    The trauma unit's closure, especially, drew residents' ire. "Don't disrespect or underestimate our community," read a banner hung last month at a rally of more than 1,000 hospital supporters.    King/Drew has become the "proxy for an entire community's identity," said Los Angeles civil rights attorney Connie Rice, who is African American.    That creates tension between those who see the hospital in strictly medical terms and those who see it as an embodiment of their dreams for racial self-determination.    "You're talking about the fact that the nurses weren't trained to use monitors," Rice said, "and they're going back to '60s Watts."
Community of grief Over the years, King/Drew has created another community, one bound by a common grief.    Jereatha Thomas belongs to it. She rushed her 27-year-old daughter, Demetria, to King/Drew in June 2003.    In the emergency room, printouts from three electrocardiograms stated plainly that Demetria Thomas had suffered a massive heart attack. Two labeled it "acute," the other "extensive."    No one acted on the findings for more than 10 hours, as doctors pursued other theories. By the time a cardiologist pointed out the obvious, it was too late, said two experts who reviewed her medical records for The Times.    Two days later, shortly after being transferred to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for more specialized care, Demetria died.    Jereatha Thomas has never recovered. She moved out of the house she shared with Demetria, unable to live with the memories. She works three jobs until she's too tired to think.    "Since the time my daughter passed away, people have come up to me and said, 'My aunt, my uncle, my friend died the same way,' " Thomas said. "It was a lesson to be learned for me. I would never go back to King. Never, ever."    Thomas decided to hold the hospital accountable in the only way she knew how: She sued. Her case is pending.	Every hospital makes mistakes, some of them fatal. Filing a lawsuit is one of the few recourses patients and their families have when something goes wrong. But taken together, the malpractice cases involving King/Drew portray a place where things often go wrong — sometimes in the same way, over and over.    King/Drew spent $20.1 million on malpractice payouts during fiscal years 1999 to 2003, an extraordinary sum for a public hospital its size in California. Adjusting for the number of patients the hospital saw, that figure is more than at any of the state's other public hospitals or the University of California medical centers.    Even County-USC Medical Center, which is three times larger and not without troubles of its own, spent less. (King/Drew's payouts cannot be compared to those at public hospitals outside the state, because California has strict limits on malpractice damages.)    The Tasejos' award was added to the tab this October, more than four years after Dunia's death. Weary of the legal battle, the family settled for $195,000.    Her father plans to build an altar at her grave in Guatemala, enshrining the dress and shoes she wore that July day.    "I want to get the [legal] papers so I can put them in the tomb and say, 'Look. It's over, honey,' " he said.    Malpractice awards are just one sign of trouble at King/Drew.
From 1999 to March 2004, the hospital was cited for violating California health regulations more often than 97% of hospitals statewide, according to a Times analysis of state data. It had more violations than any of the county's three other general hospitals.    The two most prominent national accrediting groups rate King/Drew among the nation's most troubled institutions.    It is the only hospital in America to have received the lowest possible rating in its last two reviews from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The group has ordered the closure of three of King/ Drew's 18 doctor- training programs: surgery, radiology and neonatology. A fourth, orthopedic surgery, may be phased out under pressure from the council.    King/Drew is also one of only seven U.S. hospitals that the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has said should lose overall accreditation this year. The group accredits 4,579 hospitals nationwide. King/Drew has appealed the decision, but if it fails, it could be forced to close all its doctor-training programs and lose nearly $15 million in private insurance contracts.    "This hospital," said Dr. Dennis O'Leary, the joint commission's president, "has problems of orders of magnitude that are substantially greater than almost all other hospitals in this country."    Even the top county health official finds King/Drew's failings hard to fathom.    "I'm not sure who would imagine the depths of the problems," said Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, director of the Department of Health Services. "I'm not sure anybody has the life experiences to prepare themselves for this."	It is only through brutal experience that some patients and their families learn of the dangers at King/Drew.    Sherry Ridley, a 43-year-old airport security guard, underwent elective surgery there for ovarian cysts in November 2002.    First a doctor in training stitched through her colon in error, essentially blocking it, according to a surgical note in Ridley's medical records. No one caught the mistake for two weeks as her stomach painfully bloated. A second resident's belated repair job failed.    Over the next couple of weeks, a senior surgeon opened the patient up eight times, trying to scrub out a worsening infection. More medical equipment sprouted from Ridley nearly every day; wires and hoses protruded from her like tentacles. Swollen with fluid, she ballooned from 187 to 321 pounds. Bands had to be looped around her abdomen to hold her incision together.    Ridley, the mother of two sons and one of seven close-knit siblings, died five days after Christmas.    "My sister went in there healthy," said Gail Gordon, her eldest sister. "She went from a human being to a monster when she passed."    The number of patients harmed or killed at King/Drew is impossible to tally.    The Times asked Michael Pine, a national health quality expert, to compare complications and deaths at King/Drew with those at all other hospitals in California. After reviewing six years of data collected from hospitals by state health authorities, Pine said he was unable to reach firm conclusions. King/Drew, he said, often left out information about whether patients came in with complications or developed them at the hospital.
"There are definite problems in the way they're reporting their data," said Pine, whose firm is based in Chicago.    Separately, The Times discovered cases in which medical errors were reported neither to the county coroner nor the state health department as required — let alone to uncomprehending families.    The circumstances of Barbara J. Robinson's death might never have been known but for a last-minute call to the coroner's office from a King/Drew surgeon who was not involved with her care.    In February 2002, doctors suspected that fluid was building up around Robinson's heart, dangerously compressing it. But when they finally sought an echocardiogram image to confirm their theory — 11 hours after her arrival at the King/Drew emergency room — the only technician available said he wasn't qualified to perform the procedure, according to Robinson's medical records. Three hours later, the patient began to slip away. Without an image of her heart for guidance, a doctor seeking to drain fluid plunged a needle into her chest.    Robinson, 46, died within hours. A doctor wrote on her preliminary death certificate that she had died from natural causes.    After her body had already been embalmed, the King/Drew surgeon called the coroner's office, suggesting that Robinson's doctor might have made a fatal mistake.    An autopsy confirmed that the needle had struck her coronary artery, spilling blood from her heart.    Cases like these sometimes pass unnoticed.    But many of King/Drew's mistakes are well known to the elected leaders responsible for overseeing the hospital, a board so powerful its members are called "the five little kings."	Vows of action Spurred by media reports of lapses in patient care at King/Drew, county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke held a news conference to announce "swift and decisive action."    "Due to a series of highly publicized problems, irregularities, illegalities and tragic mistakes the public's confidence in this major county medical facility has been shaken," she said. "It is unacceptable for anyone who depends on King hospital to fear that they won't get the level of care they expect and deserve."    It was time for "drastic action." The hospital, she said, needed a "crisis management task force" and a major administrative shakeup. Her colleagues on the board approved Burke's plan.    "This," said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, "is a major step; it's a beginning at MLK."    Those remarks might have been made this year. In fact, they were delivered nearly nine years ago.    Many such pledges have been made in the years before and since. But they have not produced meaningful change.    In 1989, the supervisors were jolted by a Times investigation into King/Drew that described a series of botched cases. In one, an 18-year-old shooting victim survived even though her throat was mistakenly slit by trauma surgeons.    The supervisors ordered an investigation and pushed for a top-level task force. They also removed the hospital's administrator, provoking a wave of community protest.
King/Drew drifted out of the spotlight — for a while. But notorious cases arose periodically in subsequent years, grabbing public attention and prompting more promises of reform.    In 1992, Nelson Yamamoto, a 26-year-old sheriff's deputy, was taken to King/Drew with four gunshot wounds. Joking with nurses as he arrived, he was dead two days later. The coroner said the deputy died of the gunshot wounds. But the district attorney later faulted the care provided by doctors, in particular a surgeon who administered a lethal combination of heart drugs.    "We have no doubt that there are many competent, dedicated healthcare professionals at Martin Luther King hospital," the district attorney's report said. "But we cannot turn a blind eye to the facts as we have found them."    The doctors involved in Yamamoto's care were never charged. The incident, however, cemented some police officers' impressions that King/Drew was not a safe place to go.    In 1994, Aleta Clemons, a 42-year-old woman who went to King/Drew for a hysterectomy, was infused with blood that had tested positive for the AIDS virus. But no one had bothered to check the test results.    In 1998, Blanca Maldonado, 52, drank a glass of tissue preservative, a poisonous chemical mixture accidentally left on her hospital bed stand by a doctor in training. She staggered to the closest nursing station, pleaded for help and died a short time later.    Each of these cases led to promises by the Board of Supervisors that King/Drew would be fixed.    A pattern emerged: A crisis would bring superficial reform, followed by a short period of relative calm, soon to be followed by another crisis.	"Members of the Board of Supervisors tiptoe around Martin Luther King hospital," said political consultant Kerman Maddox, who is black. "They have to pay attention when they're forced to pay attention, but when they're not they'd rather ignore it and hope it'll go away. They'd rather not get in battles with people in the community, because they would appear to be racially insensitive."    Few people have been in a better position to know what is going on at King/Drew than the supervisors. They receive county, state and federal reports spelling out the hospital's most severe patient care failings, along with other documentation.    The supervisors also must sign off on malpractice payments of more than $100,000 — two dozen from King/Drew in the last six years alone. Confidential paperwork describes precisely what went wrong and how the hospital plans to fix it.    Yet, again and again, the board has professed shock at the hospital's tragedies.    Last year, when a series of crises erupted at King/Drew, the supervisors — four of whom have been on the board more than a decade — reacted much as they had before. They called for another task force, which had virtually the same mission as the 1996 group and was even staffed with some of the same people.    Top health department officials took control of King/Drew's operations. And under their watch, the hospital was twice threatened with the immediate loss of federal funding for, among other things, repeatedly bungling medication orders.
When the supervisors announced plans early this year to scale back the hospital's prized neonatal unit, community activists, led by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), geared for a fight.    Waters threatened at a protest meeting to climb "on top of [the] desk" of health department officials. A short time later, the county backed off, saying its proposal needed further study.    While the board vacillates, patients suffer. A cry of despair In July 1994, Dr. Wilbert Jordan drove to a gold-colored house, trimmed with white, just a block from King/Drew.    Jordan had the sort of news he felt he could deliver only in person: The hospital had given Aleta Clemons, a mother of three, HIV-tainted blood. She might be infected with the deadly virus.    She seemed almost calm when he told her. It wasn't until he was outside that he knew she understood.    "I will never forget the scream and the cry that she let out as I was walking to my car," the doctor said. "It was chilling."    Jordan, a specialist in infectious diseases, said hospital officials had tried to dissuade him from telling Clemons about the mistake. He felt it was his duty.    Two weeks later she learned that she was, in fact, infected with HIV.    Clemons, now 53, hadn't planned on going to King/Drew at all. She was supposed to have her hysterectomy at Harbor-UCLA. She'd even stored her own blood there in advance, on a doctor's advice. But when she began hemorrhaging unexpectedly, her sister took her to King/Drew because it was closer.	"I begged her not to take me there," Clemons said. "But she said that I would have bled to death."    In late 1995, Clemons took her questions and concerns about what happened to Supervisor Burke. Jordan went with her.    Burke was full of promises, Clemons recalled, wanting to make sure she had a job, a formal apology and a house of her own. Clemons said she never got those things.    Burke said she did not recall meeting with Clemons. "At no time did I say I would get her a house or a job," the supervisor said. "Whenever she calls, we try to do whatever we can to assist."    Clemons did get a $450,000 legal settlement, paid out over more than a decade, and the promise of free lifetime care — at King/Drew.    "This," Jordan observed, "is like having to live with the person that raped you."    Even 10 years later, Clemons thinks about going to the Board of Supervisors to remind it of Burke's other pledges.    "I tried to get up the courage, because I really want to talk to them face to face," Clemons said. "Every time, I just get depressed. I can't go."    In recent months, her health has deteriorated markedly. Her gait is no longer steady. She takes 16 pills daily.    She lives in King/Drew's shadow. She can see it from the rear window of her apartment.    "Every time I look at that hospital I think about what happened to me," Clemons said. "That hospital took my life away from me."
* (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) Malpractice costs Based on the number of patients it treated, King/Drew spent more on malpractice than any of the state's 17 other public hospitals or the six UC medical centers between July 1998 and June 2003. Malpractice is just one measure of a hospital's quality. Hospital / Malpractice costs per patient treated* Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Med. Ctr $201.67 UCLA Medical Center $179.88 UC San Diego Medical Center $149.93 UC Irvine Medical Center $147.45 San Francisco General Hospital Med. Ctr. $125.71 Kern Medical Center $125.59 Olive View-UCLA Medical Center $123.36 UC San Francisco Medical Center $111.27 Contra Costa Regional Medical Center $100.78 Ventura County Medical Center $88.73 UC Davis Medical Center $84.29 Harbor-UCLA Medical Center $83.77 Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center $66.46 San Joaquin General Hospital $52.94 Arrowhead Regional Medical Center $37.44 Santa Clara Valley Medical Center $36.77 Alameda County Medical Center $27.22 Alameda County Medical Center $27.22 Riverside County Regional Medical Center $22.77 Modoc Medical Center $21.91 Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center $20.05 Tuolumne General Hospital $16.20 Natividad Medical Center $9.66 San Mateo Medical Center $1.07 Trinity Hospital $0	* The Times collected data from each hospital on malpractice payouts over five years. In order to account for differences in hospital volume, the newspaper used a weighted formula to adjust for the number of inpatients discharged and outpatients treated. Sources: Data provided by each hospital or its county, Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Graphics reporting by Steve Hymon and Charles Ornstein * About the series Four Times reporters and a photographer spent a year systematically examining long-troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, founded with high aspirations after the Watts riots. This series, in five parts, covers the severity of the hospital's recurring medical lapses, its managerial shortcomings and the political conditions that have thwarted effective reform. The series was reported and written by Times staff writers Tracy Weber, Charles Ornstein, Mitchell Landsberg and Steve Hymon. Staff photographer Robert Gauthier took the pictures. PART ONE Deep trouble: A hospital inspired by the civil rights movement fails — sometimes kills — those it was meant to serve. PART TWO The myth of poverty: King/Drew is not underfunded. It is mismanaged. PART THREE Unheeded warnings: How one pathologist got hired and remained on staff despite misdiagnoses and legal woes. PART FOUR Broad failure: Beyond individual workers' shortcomings, whole departments are in disarray. PART FIVE Timidity at the top: The county Board of Supervisors shies away from reform, paralyzed by community protest and racial politics.

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December 3, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE CHUMASH|SUDDEN WEALTH A Life of Payouts, Not Handouts *Casino riches recast the Chumash landscape. Tribal members, with spending power like never before, confront new challenges. By Glenn F. Bunting, Times Staff Writer SANTA YNEZ, Calif. — Growing up on the reservation, Kenneth Kahn waited in line with his mother for brick cheese, powdered milk and other government surplus food. He does not have a college degree or a paying job.    Yet at 27, he has accumulated more wealth than many working Americans will see in a lifetime. Every month, Kahn receives a check for nearly $30,000 — his share of profits from the Chumash Casino Resort.    Scattered in his yard on the reservation here are a silver Range Rover, two oversized pickup trucks, a high-powered speedboat and a pair of all-terrain vehicles. He owns a vacation home in Lake Tahoe and recently paid $1.6 million for a five-acre estate in Santa Ynez.    "People ask me if I think I deserve it," says Kahn, his shiny, dark hair neatly bundled in a ponytail.    "Not more than my ancestors," is his standard reply. "I don't care how many casinos we build," he says. "We could never overcome what was taken from our ancestors."

For much of the past two centuries, the Chumash of Santa Ynez lived in anonymity and abject poverty. As recently as the 1960s, reservation homes lacked running water, electricity and phone service. A decade ago, some Chumash still relied on welfare and donated clothing.

Then came the casino. Since 2000, when California voters granted Native American tribes the exclusive right to offer Las Vegas-style gambling, each of the 153 members of the Santa Ynez band has received more than $1 million in casino income.    The torrent of money has caused a jarring transformation in the life of the Chumash. It has provided financial security and a bounty of material goods. It has enabled the Chumash to revive their language and instruct their children in the tribe's ancient traditions.    But the sudden riches also have sparked conflict and fevered spending. Some tribal leaders worry that the monthly casino check is simply a new form of dependency, as corrosive as the welfare payments of old.    In the decades before gambling, many Chumash Indians toiled as ranch hands, truckers, maids and farmworkers. Now, they hire day laborers to tend their own sprawling estates.    They play golf at country clubs and vacation in Paris, Madrid and Maui. So many tribal members own vacation property in the Sierra Nevada that they jokingly call the area "Chumash North."    Members who once subsisted on rice and beans enjoy gourmet meals and expensive bottles of champagne at their own upscale restaurant, the Willows. Women who once wore hand-me-downs and turquoise beads wear precious jewels and have cosmetic surgery.	"We're not standing in line anymore to get cheese," says Julio Carrillo, 60, a member of the tribe. "It's like the American dream . We got ours."    Gambling proceeds pay for free medical care at a modern Chumash clinic and subsidize private schooling, tutors and college tuition.    And a people who had been relegated to the margins of history are reclaiming their identity. A decade ago, the tribe — formally the Santa Ynez Band of Mission Indians — had been largely assimilated into the local Latino community. Many were ashamed to acknowledge their Native American ancestry.    Now, casino earnings are underwriting efforts to build a Chumash museum, scour European collections for Chumash artifacts and revive the Chumash Inezeρo language.    Powerless for so long, the Chumash are asserting their sovereign rights with new vigor, aided by lawyers, lobbyists and consultants.    "Given the way we were raised, we could never have imagined what we have today," says tribal chairman Vincent Armenta.    Yet the costs of newfound wealth are as striking as the luxury cars that ply reservation streets and the private pools that dot backyards.    Some of the Chumash have run through their riches, spending themselves back into debt. So many people have gotten overextended that the band has withheld money from members' monthly checks to pay overdue car loans and taxes.
The casino money has ignited bruising internal battles over ancestry. Some tribal members are challenging the bloodlines of their fellow Chumash, contending that they lack the one-fourth Indian blood required for enrollment in the band.    The money has also added to the bitterness of marital breakups. With legal support from the band, several Chumash Indians have fought to prevent former spouses from collecting casino money as part of divorce settlements, arguing that the tribe, as a sovereign nation, is exempt from California's community property laws.    But the Chumash don't dwell on the downside of instant wealth.    Kenneth Kahn, for one, sees only progress. Growing up, he was barely aware of the world beyond the reservation. Going away to college never occurred to him.    "My mom worked two jobs. I never saw her," Kahn says. "If I had any direction, it would have been a different deal."    Today, Kahn makes sure his 7-year-old son, Austin, has opportunities he didn't. The boy attends a private Christian academy, is assisted by a tutor and attends after-school and summer programs — all made possible by the casino.    Last year, Kahn was elected to the five-member business council that runs the tribal government. "I'm not proud of getting money for doing nothing," he says. "I want to do the best I can to earn it."    He is taking classes in political science and communications at Santa Barbara Community College and is thinking of pursuing a four-year degree.	Years ago, Kahn's grandmother, Rosa Pace, led the effort to bring drinking water, medical care and other basic services to the reservation.    Yet Pace, now 75, feels a deep ambivalence about the wealth generated by the casino. She is among a group of Chumash elders who call themselves "guilty Jag owners."    Pace still washes dishes by hand and only recently yielded to relatives' demands that she have a garbage disposal installed.    "It's difficult," she sighed. "I do feel guilty." Ancient Tradition Historians say that Chumash Indians have maintained a continuous presence in Southern California for at least 5,000 years.    The earliest recorded sighting by a European was in October 1542, when Spanish explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo encountered Indians in wood-plank canoes along the Santa Barbara and Ventura County coastline.    The Chumash were expert hunters and fishermen who produced stone cookware and intricate basketry. Chumash society was hierarchical, with chieftains and shaman priests at the top of the pecking order and craftsmen and laborers at the bottom. Distinct Chumash dialects were spoken in each of dozens of villages.    The population began to diminish in the early 19th century with the establishment of five mission-based communities in Chumash territory, according to John R. Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
A 1798 survey counted about 1,200 Chumash in 14 villages in the Santa Ynez Valley. In 1804, Old Mission Santa Ines was built. By 1856, the number of Chumash in the valley had dropped to 109 — a 90% decline caused largely by measles, smallpox and other diseases introduced from Europe.    A small cemetery next to the mission cathedral holds the remains of about 1,700 Indians, marked by crumbled tombstones and splintered crosses covered in moss. One small headstone reads simply: "Baby."    During the late 1800s, the Catholic Church relocated the Chumash in Santa Ynez to Zanja de Cota Ranch, a 99-acre flood plain. The church eventually donated the land to the Indians, and in 1906, the U.S. government created the nation's only federally recognized Chumash reservation.    This would become the tribe's salvation, giving the Santa Ynez band a sovereign territory on which to operate a casino. But at the time, there was no hint of such a windfall.    Life on the reservation was harsh. The Chumash lived in dilapidated adobe dwellings. Rosa Pace remembers the sight of families climbing into trees from rickety rooftops to escape the floodwaters of Zanja de Cota Creek. Alcohol abuse was rampant.    "Santa Ynez was a frontier town," says Johnson, who has studied the Chumash for three decades. "Some of the Indians developed into pretty rough customers. A couple of them ended up in San Quentin. But they persisted. They were people who made the best of what they had."	The Armenta clan embodies the tribe's impoverished past and its perseverance. Loreto and Florencia Armenta raised 10 children on the reservation during the Depression. The family lived in a lean-to without walls or windows and slept on steel cots lined up on a dirt floor. They bathed in a swimming hole and wore clothes made from discarded flour sacks.    "We didn't have anything," says Eva Pagaling, 80, one of the family's four surviving children.    Over the years, tribal members married into Mexican and Filipino families and grew detached from the reservation. Many left to work on the region's farms, picking fruits and vegetables.    In the early 1900s, the federal government began a decades-long practice of shipping Indian children to Catholic boarding schools.    "There was a movement to get Indian children away from their cultural awareness and teach them the West way," says Jim Fletcher, regional superintendent of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. "In the 1930s, the perspective was: 'How do we get them above the poverty line, get them an education and build them up.'"    Pagaling remembers the look of fear in her mother's eyes when federal agents showed up on the reservation. "Mother told us to go hide in the willows," she says. "She was afraid they would take us away."    Eventually, Pagaling and two sisters were sent to Saint Boniface School in Riverside County. Every morning at 6, the Native American boarding students were required to line up wearing oversized military boots, Pagaling recalled. Their chores included scrubbing toilets and mopping floors.
She and her sisters returned to the reservation after a year. Like many of their generation, they were unaware of their Chumash lineage.    "We thought we were poor Mexicans," she says. Hitting the Jackpot For many years, a rustic campground on the reservation provided the tribe's only source of steady revenue. The Chumash closed the site in the 1970s because it failed to generate enough money to cover the cost of utilities and water.    The band turned to gambling in 1983. A high-stakes bingo parlor attracted gamblers from as far as the San Francisco Bay Area and provided part-time employment for dozens of Indians.    "The days of begging for water are over," proclaimed then-tribal chairman Edward Olivas.    But the bingo hall closed in 1988 because of rising debts and a business dispute with outside investors. It reopened in 1990 in partnership with entertainer Wayne Newton, only to fold five months later, $250,000 in debt.    The band's run of bad luck ended in 1994. Following the lead of other Southern California tribes, the Chumash began offering slot-machine games, despite warnings from law enforcement authorities that the devices were illegal.	The casino's first general manager, Michael Lombardi, recalled gazing at a collapsed ceiling in the middle of the old bingo hall during his initial meeting with then-tribal chairman David Dominguez.    Outside, Chumash families huddled in the cold, waiting to receive surplus food from a tractor-trailer known as "the commodity truck."    "I want there to be a day when that truck no longer comes to my reservation," Lombardi recalled Dominguez telling him.    The band borrowed $600,000 to renovate the bingo facility and purchase 210 slot machines. Tribal members worked on the casino floor, provided security, directed parking and cooked burritos and fry bread for patrons.    Within three months, the band had paid off all of its start-up loans and installed 350 additional machines. The casino produced $31 million in revenue during its first year.    "When we put slot machines in that made $300 a day, everybody was in shock," Lombardi said.    Even more remarkable were the profit margins. By 2000, the tribe was collecting $70 million a year in revenue — and keeping 69% as profit, according to internal reports.    That same year, California tribes spent $24 million promoting a ballot initiative to legalize the reservation casinos and allow Indians to offer Las Vegas-style games of chance.
Proposition 1A passed, and casino revenue continued to soar. The Chumash spent $157 million on a new, Mediterranean-style gambling complex, which opened last year. The Chumash Casino Resort has 2,000 slot machines, a 106-room luxury hotel and an auditorium where Jay Leno, Fleetwood Mac and Whoopi Goldberg have performed.    The tribe recorded its first $1-million day in July, and casino revenue is expected to surpass $200 million this year — a 40% increase from 2003.    The Chumash band allocates about 15% of its share of casino profits to the tribal government and various services and benefits. The remaining 85% is distributed directly to the 153 tribal members.    Only "enrolled members" of the Santa Ynez band — people who have one-quarter Chumash blood — are eligible for these monthly payments. Because Chumash frequently marry outside the tribe, most households have just one enrolled member.    Thousands of Chumash Indians outside Santa Ynez get no share of the riches because their separate tribes lack federal recognition. This is a source of bitter resentment in the broader Chumash nation.    "They've turned their backs on us," said Al-lu-koy Lotah, a Chumash medicine woman and leader of the 80-member Southern Owl clan.    The Santa Ynez tribal government has used gambling proceeds to repave roads, erect street lights and build a sewage treatment plant. It has also acquired adjacent property, expanding the reservation by 49 acres to accommodate future development. Within the next decade, Chumash leaders hope to build a school, a day care center, a health club and a bank.	They are also investing in higher education. Now, there are just four college graduates among the band's members. But in recent years, tribal subsidies have helped nearly 100 Chumash attend a university, community college or trade school.    Last year, the band achieved two "firsts" when one Chumash descendant enrolled in Stanford University and another graduated from law school — at the University of San Diego.    Like many Chumash elders, Eva Pagaling could never have hoped to leave Santa Ynez for college. She worked for many years on an assembly line, packing frozen broccoli into food cartons.    Pagaling still lives on the reservation, in the modest, stucco house she and her late husband bought in 1979. She still remembers the excitement of moving into the home, her first to have electrical outlets and natural gas.    As she ticked off the improvements in her life since the casino opened, Pagaling also spoke of the disorientation brought on by so much wealth.    She maintains her bearings, in part, by clinging to old habits. Pagaling still buys $6 shirts at thrift shops and discount stores. "I love Wal-Mart," she says. "I don't care if I have money or not. I want to be the way I always was."    Pagaling keeps putting off plans to buy a four-wheel drive sport utility vehicle to make the trip to her Lake Tahoe vacation home. She confesses to lingering regrets about the thousands of dollars she spent on a flat-screen television.    "I'm used to being poor and not having enough," she says. "I know I can afford things. But for me, to spend that money . It's difficult."
Fast Spending When gambling revenue began to flow in the mid-1990s, there was widespread fear that the casino would not last long; law enforcement officials had repeatedly threatened to shut it down.    "They spent the money as fast as they could," said Lombardi, the former casino manager. "They figured the gravy train was going to end."    Many members had never used banks and continued to store their money in tin cans and in glove compartments of abandoned vehicles. Today, most have bank accounts. But the impulse to spend quickly persists.    "A lot of these people lived a very primitive lifestyle," says financial advisor Stephen Drake, who has counseled tribal members on their finances. "They are going on a lot of trips and buying nice, very fancy cars. That, I believe, is human nature."    Tribal members privately acknowledge that some Chumash have gotten in over their heads, despite their robust casino income. In several cases, the band has garnished a member's share of gambling revenue to pay off debts.    Among those in financial distress is Gilbert Cash, the chairman of the tribal gaming commission who oversees gambling at the casino.    Cash, 38, has filed for personal bankruptcy twice in the past two years, piling up $128,502 in debts, including $60,000 in unpaid income taxes, according to court records. Cash says he fell behind because he wasn't prepared to be thrust into a higher tax bracket. Members who reside on the reservation pay only federal income taxes.	Battles over casino wealth have complicated marital breakups. Two years ago, the band decreed that tribal income, by "custom and tradition," is for the benefit of members only.    At the time, several Chumash members, including tribal chairman Vincent Armenta's sister, Maria Feeley, were embroiled in divorces.    Chumash attorneys have argued in court that Tribal Resolution 852 takes precedence over California's community property law. "We do not want the money to go to spousal support for nonmembers," attorney Lawrence Stidham said during a recent divorce proceeding.    Stidham said that all tribes "struggle to protect and preserve" casino profits for Native Americans who have long endured unemployment and poverty.    In August, a state appellate court ruled against the tribe in the Feeley case, clearing the way for her ex-husband, Randy Jacobsen, to collect $3,500 a month in alimony.    "When you think about it, it is astounding what the tribe is trying to get away with," said Vanessa Kirker, Jacobsen's attorney.    Other tribal members have succeeded in denying spouses a cut of gambling profits.    Lewis Gray said has fought unsuccessfully for several years to compel his estranged wife, Cheryl, to make monthly support payments.    Gray, 45, who is not a member of the tribe, said Cheryl walked out on him several years ago, leaving him to provide for eight of their children, ages 6 to 17. He quit his job as a construction foreman, Gray said, to become a stay-at- home father in Fontana. He said he has run up $40,000 in credit card debt.
Last year, a judge ordered Cheryl to pay $12,166 a month in child support and alimony. Her family has made sporadic, partial payments. But the tribe has refused requests from child-welfare officials to withhold the full amount from her casino checks, according to Gray and his attorney.    "My lawyer says we can't do anything about it because they are a sovereign nation," Gray says. "This is not fair to me and my kids. It's not right."    At a June divorce hearing involving Manuel Armenta, a brother of the tribal chairman, Stidham was asked how ex-spouses could support themselves if casino money was off-limits. The Chumash lawyer replied that they could throw themselves on the mercy of the tribe.    "I wouldn't put myself in the position of being humiliated," Armenta's wife, Zita, said in an interview. "That tribe would not do anything for me." A Life of Comforts Dominica Valencia raised her three children in a one-bedroom shack near the reservation. She ran her own doughnut shop in the mornings and worked as a housekeeper in the afternoons. For years, her husband, Michael, also held two jobs — as a welder and as a heavy equipment operator.	The Valencias no longer have to work. They donate their time to Native American programs, including the reservation clinic, pow-wows and a talking circle for Indian inmates at Lompoc's federal penitentiary.    They also enjoy their newfound affluence. They own three homes and vacation in Hawaii every year. Once a week, they cook ribs on the backyard barbecue for their three dogs.    Yet along with the comforts have come unexpected complications.    The Valencias rarely entertain guests at home because the conversation often gets around to their casino riches. They were distressed several years ago to open their mailbox and find that the envelope containing the monthly check had been opened — apparently by someone unable to contain his curiosity.    "It always comes back to the money," Dominica says. "I get tired of that."    She and her husband worry about the effect of wealth on young people. The Valencias said they were floored one afternoon when their teenage son asked: "Where is my share?" They say they sat him down and explained that he is not entitled to an extravagant lifestyle just because he is Chumash.    Dominica, 44, a member of the tribe's education committee, is concerned that Chumash youths are growing accustomed to waiting for the casino check, just as their parents stood in line for surplus food.    "Some are going to college and building for the future," she says. "Then there are those who have no drive or ambition . We're trying to tell kids there is more out there. Don't be content with just getting money."
* (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) Return to the fold The experiences of three influential members of the tribe reflect the difficult times once faced by the Chumash, on and off the reservation. Adelina Alva-Padilla Adelina Alva-Padilla married at 16 and had seven children in as many years. A single mother, she raised her family in the Watts area, serving Quaker Oats for dinner, washing clothes by hand and rarely giving a thought to her Chumash origins.    Then in 1981, she moved back to the reservation, heeding her mother's deathbed request. Like other city dwellers, she was not welcomed. "They told me to get the hell out," she recalls.    Today, at 68, she is the spiritual leader of the tribe. Her one-story house is a sacred place where the Chumash pray, chant, mourn, dance and sing. She treats the sick with burning sage, condor feathers and hot sweats.    When the casino checks began flowing a decade ago, she bought her husband a house in his native Mexico. But she has eschewed most other indulgences. In her living room, Alva-Padilla keeps photos of two schoolteachers in Mexico with artificial legs and an impoverished South African man who is pursuing his dream of attending trade school.    "This," she says, "is what I do with my money." Grace Romero Pacheco Grace Romero Pacheco dropped out of high school after a year and worked menial jobs — housekeeping at a motel, trimming seafood in a fish factory. She went on and off of welfare while raising seven children.    Not until the late 1950s did she learn about her Chumash ancestry. She moved onto the reservation in 1979. Once a month, she stood in line to collect rations of peanut butter, canned carrots and other government surplus food.	"It came in handy," she says. "I was thankful for it."    Now 71, Pacheco is a pillar of the reservation community. A former member of the tribe's business committee and its gaming commission, she serves on the elders council and is learning the Chumash language.    She no longer needs food handouts. She enlarged her house to accommodate four generations of Romeros. A new Infiniti FX45 sport utility vehicle sits in the driveway. Two daughters and three grandchildren work at the Chumash Casino.    "I want a better life for my grandchildren," Pacheco says. "I want them to be proud of who they are." Vincent Armenta Vincent Armenta was raised on his parents' walnut and lima bean ranch in Lompoc. In 1979, the family moved into one of the first government- subsidized homes on the reservation.    After high school, Armenta moved to Compton and worked as a welder.    He returned to Santa Ynez a decade ago and was elected tribal chairman in 1999.    He is one of 45 members of the Armenta clan who belong to the tribe. Altogether, they collect about $16 million a year in gambling proceeds.    Armenta's 20-year-old son is a blackjack dealer at the Chumash Casino Resort. His 15-year-old son spent the summer as a bellhop in the resort's new hotel. "They need to learn the value of work," he says. "I had to do it when I was younger, and they have to."    Armenta, 41, doesn't radiate wealth. He wears jeans, running shoes and rumpled golf shirts, washes his own car, and says money hasn't changed him.    "I'm the same person today I was 20 years ago. I have the same friends. I eat the same vegetables. I haven't changed at all."

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November 27, 2004 The Economist Magazine Charlemagne - A civil war on terrorism How much of a threat does Islamic radicalism pose to western Europe? GEERT WILDERS should be feeling good. This week the Dutch MP launched a new political party—demanding a halt to non-western immigration to the Netherlands for five years and a tougher line against Islamic radicalism. Some national opinion polls already put his party in second place. But Mr Wilders admits he is not sleeping well. His life has been threatened by the Islamic radicals he excoriates and it is no longer safe for him to live at home. Instead he moves between safe houses, and can travel only in an armoured car, surrounded by bodyguards. “It's like being trapped in a B-movie,” he says. The Dutch security services are taking no chances because three weeks ago Theo Van Gogh, a prominent Dutch film-maker who had made a movie attacking Islam's attitude to women, was murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. And this was not any old street killing. Mr Van Gogh was dragged from his bike, shot six times and his head was nearly sliced off by an Islamic radical, who then impaled a five-page letter attacking the enemies of Islam on the chest of his dying victim. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Dutch politician of Somali Muslim origin who was repeatedly threatened in the letter, is also in hiding and, unlike Mr Wilders, has not re-appeared in parliament. Other prominent politicians and even some journalists now have permanent armed protection. “You're nobody as a columnist unless you have an armed guard,” jokes one eminent Amsterdamer.

The current atmosphere in the Netherlands will provoke some knowing nods on the other side of the Atlantic. For some months, leading American intellectuals have been pointing to what they see as the growing threat to western Europe from militant Islam. At a recent seminar at the Brookings Institution, Francis Fukuyama argued that “Europeans are threatened internally by radical Islam in a much more severe way than Americans are in terms of their external threat.” According to Mr Fukuyama, Europeans have hitherto been deterred from debating the threat by a “stifling political correctness”. But events like the Van Gogh murder are changing the debate. It is increasingly common for mainstream European politicians to call for much tougher measures against Islamic radicals and a more aggressive insistence on western liberal values. These demands have been heard with increasing force in all the west European states with significant Muslim populations—including France, Germany, Britain and Belgium—but above all in the Netherlands. There is broad agreement that some limits to inflammatory speech must be defined—but where to set those limits and what to do with those who overstep them is still deeply controversial. Some Dutch politicians are arguing that Muslim sensitivities should be catered for by strengthening the blasphemy laws—Mr Van Gogh had outraged Muslims by broadcasting pictures of verses of the Koran scrawled on a naked female body and referring to Muslims as “goat-fuckers”. But others respond that a strengthened blasphemy law would go in the wrong direction. “There is no way you can appease Muslim radicalism,” says one academic, “If you go down that route, you will end up banning the sale of alcohol in supermarkets.”

Islam, Europe and demography The debate on how to respond to Islamic radicalism has been made no easier by the confusion of several different arguments: about terrorism, about levels of immigration into Europe from the Islamic world and about the assimilation of immigrants. Some take an alarmist view of current demographic trends. Bernard Lewis, a British historian at Princeton University in America, said recently that by the end of the century “at the very latest”, the European continent would be “part of the Arabic west, the Maghreb”. This comment has been widely quoted—including by Mr Wilders in the Dutch parliament. But a glance at the figures suggests that Mr Lewis is a better Arabist than mathematician. At present there are not more than 13m Muslims in the European Union, out of a total population of 457m. Even if there is a massive surge of immigration and the fertility of white Europeans falls even further, it is difficult to see how this will lead to a merger between Europe and North Africa. The demographic picture in particular places is admittedly more dramatic. The Muslim population of France is now nearly 10% of the total. And it is officially projected that the three largest Dutch cities will have 50% non-western populations (most of them Muslim) by 2020. Yet even these figures need not be alarming, if Muslim populations assimilate easily. It is here that

traditional liberal attitudes are undergoing a re-think. For Mohammed B, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh, was not a marginalised or oppressed figure. He spoke excellent Dutch and was studying for a diploma. It looks increasingly apparent that—as with the 9/11 hijackers—the problem is not lack of integration or opportunity, but a vicious ideology. Depending on the numbers of people gripped by this ideology, that conclusion could be re-assuring or worrying. The Dutch secret service reckons there are only about 150 Islamic radicals on the fringes of terrorism in the country. This suggests the problem could ultimately be treated as a law-enforcement issue, as with the Baader-Meinhof gang that terrorised Germany in the 1970s. But Mr Wilders quotes Dutch academics who estimate that around 10-15% of the Dutch population of 1m Muslims sympathise with jihadist ideology. He says that the 150 suspected terrorists should be deported or imprisoned immediately. But he also demands a similar fate for those Dutch citizens who endorse jihadist ideology, whether in print, in a sermon or in an internet chat-room. Mainstream Dutch politicians still recoil from such measures, believing them to be incompatible with traditional freedoms—and likely to radicalise Dutch Muslims further. Launching a war on terrorism is one thing; a civil war on terrorism is altogether more daunting.

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November 27, 2004 The Economist Magazine Obituary Iris Chang, chronicler of a massacre, died on November 9th, aged 36 AMONG the many issues that bedevil relations between China and Japan, the most intractable occurred almost 70 years ago. In 1937 around 50,000 Japanese troops descended on Nanking, China's former capital, and took charge there. What happened next is a matter of lasting controversy. The Chinese say that more than 300,000 civilians were killed, and 80,000 girls and women raped. The Japanese divide into different schools of thought. At one extreme, the “Great Illusion” school argues that almost no civilians were killed, and that most of the deaths were legal killings of soldiers in plain clothes. At the other, the “Great Massacre” school thinks as many as 200,000 Chinese may have died. Scholars on both sides continue to revile each other either as Japan-bashers, or as apologists for imperialism. Complete article

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November 29, 2004 newsweek Rejecting the Next Bill Gates by Fareed Zakaria As Condoleezza Rice enters the state department, she will face a number of pressing foreign policy problemsthat she cannot solve. This will not be for lack of effort or intelligence on her part. It's just that many foreign-policy crises involve the interests and activities of countries across the globe, and changing these takes time. STAYING HOME: Students at Tibet University And even then, whether it's Iran, North Korea or darfur, there is no quick fix that Washington can impose. But there is a growing danger for the United States that needs urgent attention, can be solved and is almost entirely within Rice's power to handle. It's the foreign-visa crisis. Left unattended, it is going to have deep and lasting effects on American security and competitiveness. The facts are plain. U.S. visa procedures have become far too cumbersome, and bureaucrats are turning down far more applications than ever before. One crucial result is the dramatic decline of foreign students in the U.S.-the first shift downward in 30 years. Three new reports document the magnitude of

this fall. Undergraduate enrollment from China dropped 20 percent this year; from India, 9 percent; from Japan, 14 percent. The declines are even worse in graduate schools: applications from China have dropped 45 percent; from India, 28 percent. Some Americans might say, "Good riddance, it's their loss." Actually the greater loss is ours. American universities benefit from having the best students from across the globe. But the single most deadly effect of this trend is the erosion of American capacity in science and technology. The U.S. has powered ahead in large part because of the amazing productivity of America's science and technology . Yet that research is now done largely by foreigh students. The National Board of Science (NSB) cocumented this reality last year, finding that 38 percent of doctorate holders in America's science and engineering work force are foreign-born. Foreigners make up more than half the students enrolled in science and engineering programs. The dirty little secret about America's scientific edge is that it's largely produced by foreigners and immigrants. Americans don't do science anymore. The NSB put out another report this year that showed the United States now ranks 17th (among nations surveyed) in the proportion of college students majoring in science and engineering. In 1975 the United States ranked third. The recent decline in foreign applications is having a direct effect on science programs. Three years ago there were 385 computer-science majors at MIT. Today there are 240. The trend is similar at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, Berkeley.

Falling foreign enrollments will produce a broader but no less profound loss for the United States. America has spread its interests, ideas and values across the world by many means, but perhaps the single most effective one has been by educating the world's elites. For example, Western ideas about the benefits of free markets and free trade have become the global standard. This may have much to do with Western foreign and trade policies. But surely this shift has been strengthened and facilitated by the fact that so many of the people in the ministries of finance, trade and industry in the developing world were educated at Western universities. The U.S. government can claim very little credit for Chile's remarkable and successful freemarket revolution. But the University of Chicago -which trained most of the economists who spearheaded those reforms in Santiago- can. Foreign students return home from America bringing with them an appreciation for American values, ideas and, indeed, for America itself. But that hegemony of ideas is often a greater and more lasting source of power than brute force. When historians write about our times, they will certainly note that America dominated the international agenda for decades through this distinctive form of power.

But that hegemony is weakening for four reasons. First, America has become less attractive in the eyes of the world. Second, Washington is making it tougher to come here. Third, there is greater competition and more alternatives for the world's best students. (The biggest beneficiaries of the American decline have been universities in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.) And finally, there are more opportunities around the globe. A software engineer in India can make a good living in Bangalore, and not have to leave his country, culture and family behind. Some of these problems can't be solved by the secretary of State. But America's image abroad is something she can help improve. And visas are entirely under her control. I understand the need for greater scrutiny after 9/11. But it has given already cautious bureaucracies a new rule: "When in doubt, deny the application." Every visa officer today lives in fear that he will let in the next Muhammad Atta. A sa result, he is probably keeping out the next Bill Gates. Write the author at Fareed Zakaria

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November 27, 2004 Los Angeles Times Sweat, Fear and Resignation Amid All the Toys Despite Mattel's efforts to police factories, thousands of workers are suffering. By Abigail Goldman, Times Staff Writer GUANGDONG PROVINCE, China — Just off a wide dirt road that leads to a densely packed jumble of factories, workers behind one guarded metal gate toil seven days a week, sometimes as many as 24 hours straight, making toys for about 20 cents an hour.    It is a pace that makes them almost numb to the poor ventilation, the lack of bathroom breaks and a fear that they will be beaten if they complain.    Sweatshops aren't unusual, of course, in a country that possesses a large and cheap workforce and a permissive government hungry to attract big business. What makes this situation notable is that these workers make products for a company widely considered one of the most socially responsible American firms: Mattel Inc.    The El Segundo-based toy manufacturer was one of the first U.S. companies — and the only major player in its industry — to establish an independent system for monitoring and publicizing how factory workers are treated. In fact, Mattel routinely checks and rechecks hundreds of plants around the world, aiming to ensure that they comply with its 112-item code of conduct.    The seven-year effort has paid off — at least to a point.	When it comes to limiting work hours, ensuring fair pay and improving health and safety standards, "Mattel is one of the best," said Chan Ka Wai, associate director of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, which has done extensive investigations into working conditions in the Chinese toy industry.    Yet for all of that, tens of thousands of workers who make Mattel products still suffer.    One big reason is that half of the toys displaying Mattel's familiar red logo are made in facilities, like the one here in an industrial area of Shenzhen, that the company doesn't own.    "Mattel has no way to know the truth about what really goes on here," said a 24-year-old worker at the Shenzhen factory. "Every time there is an inspection, the bosses tell us what lies to say."    Labor advocates agree that the situation is difficult. Mattel may be doing a lot to turn its own factories into showplaces, Chan said.    "But their vendors look very different," he added.    As increasing numbers of Western manufacturers shift production to China and other developing countries, Mattel's experience underscores how difficult it is to guarantee humane working conditions and still make the ever-cheaper goods that consumers demand. It also raises the question of how much responsibility a single company should bear when it operates in parts of the world where poverty is omnipresent and the exploitation of workers is rampant.    The Times interviewed workers at 13 factories in southern China, Indonesia and Mexico that make Mattel products, including company-owned facilities and contractor-run plants.
Visits to five of the factories were arranged by Mattel. The Times talked independently with employees at the other plants, where workers agreed to tell their stories only if they and their employers were not identified by name.    Many said they were worried about retaliation from supervisors. Others expressed concern that if Mattel knew about the conditions, the company would cancel its contracts, casting the workers onto the streets.    "It's good that they monitor, but not if it costs our jobs," said the Shenzhen factory worker, who has performed a variety of tasks for a Mattel contractor in the last two years, most recently stamping eyes onto plastic animals. "It's better to have bad conditions than no job at all." Inside Vendor No. 5 Across Guangdong province, on the northeast outskirts of the Guangzhou city limits, Li Xiao Hong helps churn out toys at one of Mattel's best-regarded contractor factories.    Vendor No. 5, as it's known, boasts dorms with TV rooms, a library, sports facilities, classrooms — even karaoke machines to help Li and her co-workers unwind after a long stint on the factory floor.    Still, conditions are far from ideal.    The plant's work areas are so poorly lighted that they seem permanently shrouded in gray. A strong smell of solvent wafts across the facility as rows of workers hunch over pedal- operated sewing machines and gluepots.    Li is the fastest worker on a long, U-shaped assembly line of about 130 women who put together Mini Touch 'n Crawl Minnie, a scampering version of the Disney character activated by a baby's nudge.	Li moves with lightning speed — gluing the pink bottom, screwing it into place, getting the rest of the casing to adhere, tamping it down with a special hammer, pulling the battery cover through its slats, soldering where she glued, testing to make sure the leg joints on the other side still work, then sending it down the line.    The entire process takes 21 seconds.    She generally works 5 1/2 days a week, up to 10 hours at a time. Her monthly wage — about $65 — is typical for this part of China, enough for Li to send money back home to her poor farming family in Henan province and to afford a computer class in town.    But Li pays a heavy price: Her hands ache terribly, and she is always exhausted — a situation to which the 20-year-old seems resigned.    "People at my age should expect some hardship," said Li, clad in bluejeans and a pink factory blouse, which she left unbuttoned to reveal a white T-shirt emblazoned with the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. "I should taste bitterness while I'm young."    Besides, many here apparently have it worse.    Last year, Mattel's independent auditors noted that the overtime extracted by Vendor No. 5 often exceeded the maximum allowed under Chinese law and under what Mattel calls its Global Manufacturing Principles.    The extra hours, inspectors found, were not completely voluntary because workers were forced to seek permission to leave after their regular shifts, another violation of Mattel's rules. Some were found to have worked for nearly three weeks without a day off, which ran afoul of both Chinese law and company mandates.
Robert A. Eckert, Mattel's chairman and chief executive, said he wasn't surprised that some contractor factories had violated Mattel's wage-and-hour restrictions. What's important, he said, is that the company work with its business partners to recognize and correct the problem.    So far, Mattel has terminated 33 suppliers for violating its standards, while refusing to add 28 others to its list of approved vendors because they failed to meet the company's code.    Eckert made clear, however, that firing factories isn't the goal.    "Our job is to fix it," he said. "We're not in the business to try to cut off plants." Establishing Standards Mattel began monitoring factories almost two decades ago, when it focused on issues of health and safety, and greatly expanded the notion of what it should be accountable for in the mid-1990s.    It was a time when activists around the world were stepping up campaigns against Nike Inc., Gap Inc. and others for allegedly using sweatshop labor outside the United States.    For Mattel, the stakes were particularly high. A worker abuse scandal like the one that tarred Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Kathie Lee Gifford clothing line in 1996, when activists found that items were made by children working in deplorable conditions, would be especially disastrous for a maker of kids' toys. Negative headlines would scare off customers and spook Wall Street.	"There isn't a reward for doing the right thing," noted Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Harris Nesbitt in New York. "But there is a penalty if you get caught doing the wrong thing."    Mattel later added a "social compliance" component to its program, which included a strict set of rules about working hours, wages, factory conditions and age requirements.    The company formalized these standards in 1997 when it established the Mattel Independent Monitoring Council, a nonprofit group of observers funded by the company but administered through the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York.    The group, now called the International Center for Corporate Responsibility, was charged with monitoring factories and publishing detailed reports as a check on Mattel's internal audits. Critics have questioned the monitors' independence. For its part, Mattel points out that it is the only major toy company to release outsiders' findings.    (Its largest competitor, Hasbro Inc., has said that all its contractors must comply with International Council of Toy Industries ethics guidelines, modeled largely on Mattel's program, by the end of 2005. But Hasbro does not make public its independent auditors' reports.)    Beyond scrutinizing its vendor plants in the developing world, Mattel has also built its own first-rate facilities, complete with comfortable living quarters for its workforce.
The factory floor at Mattel Die-Cast China in Guanyao is bright and airy. Instead of the usual snaking assembly line, where workers perform the same task over and over and over, many MDC employees move around to different stations, often making an entire toy themselves; this helps eliminate painful repetitive-stress injuries.    MDC's residence halls are more modern and nicer than dorms at top Chinese universities. In their off hours, workers crowd into the television rooms on each floor or play badminton on outdoor courts. Some head to the gym or to computer centers to practice lessons they learn in free classes offered on site.    The quality of life here is written on the face of nearly every MDC worker: They smile, a rare expression at other plants.    "People can sense the difference if you're pushing them for the bottom line or for themselves," said Rug Burad, the general manager of the plant, where Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars originate.    "You want them to be their best so they produce the best. That's the priority." Crowding in Indonesia Even at Mattel's own factories, change doesn't come overnight.    On the eastern side of Jakarta, past the garbage-strewn streets in the main part of the city, Mattel's twin Indonesian production facilities rise up out of the green fields like gleaming, white-tile temples.	The Dua and Satu factories — where half of the world's more than 100 million Barbie dolls are made each year — consist of low-rise buildings connected by walkways with lush overhanging plants. The campuses, built in the early 1990s, feature computer rooms, a library, a health clinic, sports fields and a community garden. Management here has given a nod to both fun and faith: The complex includes a disco as well as two mushollas, prayer rooms for the workers, 90% of whom are Muslim.    Still, most of the dorm rooms, which house about 40% of the factories' 10,000-plus workers, fail to meet Mattel's guidelines for the maximum number of workers per room (16) and the minimum amount of personal space allotted to each (20 square feet).    Instead, the rooms are crowded with four rows of four bunk beds lined up side by side, mattress to mattress. For all but those in the outside beds, getting in and out can require a feat of gymnastics.    Mattel is moving to a less crowded format — two bunk beds in a row, each with a lamp, fan and curtain shielding the bed from the open area — to come into compliance with its own guidelines. But those changes, Mattel said, take time.    "We can point to deficiencies in the system," said Jim Walter, Mattel's senior vice president of worldwide quality assurance, who oversees the ethical manufacturing initiatives, "but I'm going to look at how far we've come."
For some, it's still not far enough.    In 2001, a report by the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee rapped Mattel, along with Hasbro, Walt Disney Co., Wal-Mart and others, for making toys in brutal Chinese sweatshops. The National Labor Committee in New York, the group that exposed the problems with Wal-Mart's Kathie Lee Gifford clothing line, followed with another critique the next year.    Marie-Claude Hessler-Grisel, a French human rights advocate, still sees many of the same problems that were highlighted in those reports.    Hessler-Grisel says she appreciates that Mattel has poured more than $500 million into its own state-of-the-art facilities and spends about $10 million a year on monitoring factories, upgrading plants and training contractors.    But given that Mattel earned more than $500 million last year on sales of nearly $5 billion, she expects the company to do a lot more and to do it faster.    "These workers can't wait forever for a change," she said.    "I have nothing personal against Mattel," added Hessler-Grisel, a tiny woman with short gray hair and red-rimmed glasses. "You always go after No. 1, and it trickles down." Enjoying a 'Day Off' Around the world, workers at factories making Mattel toys complain about one thing above all else: the grueling hours.	Mattel's rules state that the most anyone can work is 12 hours a day, six days a week — and that's only for very limited periods and when overtime is voluntary. Regular workdays aren't supposed to exceed 10 hours a day, including overtime. What's more, factory employees are not supposed to work more than 13 days in a row. But according to more than a dozen workers, the reality is something else.    Near Shenzhen, outside a large vendor plant, two 20-year-olds eating a lunch of boiled noodles recounted how they routinely worked 11 hours a day, six days a week. The worst time, they said, comes during the monthly changeover, when their group goes from the day shift to the night shift — and they must plow straight through, with barely a break in between.    In Indonesia, a 21-year-old woman who worked at Mattel's Jakarta plant talked about friends and colleagues who have assembled Barbie dolls for 30 days straight without time off.    Even at a Mattel-owned plant in Guanyao, where the hours are within company guidelines, workers are so fatigued that those who return early from lunch sleep at their spots on the assembly line, their heads resting on their hands.    In environments like these, the slightest break can seem like a tremendous perk.
Near the city of Dongguan, two young women recently sat in a fourth-floor room sectioned off by crude corrugated-metal walls. They have little to show for their drudgery; they share a mattress and a hot plate. But they said their life at a Mattel contractor factory had been good. Unlike at the last plant where they worked, the Mattel vendor gives them a "day off."    But as the two friends described their "day off," it became evident that they don't get anything close: On Sundays, they explained, they get to leave work at 5 p.m., having put in eight hours instead of the typical 12.    "That's a gift," said one of the women, a migrant from Henan province who frequently flashed a broad, toothy grin that made her look even younger than her 20 years. "You don't have to work through the night." Fear of Retaliation At the Shenzhen factory, where about 1,000 people are employed, it seems everybody knows the drill.    Before Mattel comes through twice a year for inspection, workers said, managers promise to pay them time-and-a-half if they repeat the company line: that they work just eight hours a day, six days a week, as allowed by Chinese law.    In truth, they slog for far longer than that.    Inside a tiny metal-walled shed a short walk from the factory, the 24-year-old worker reclined on his bed with his fiancee by his side and recalled how he was recently ordered to work 24 hours straight without rest.	"On the second morning we just kept working," he said, wrinkling his nose as the eye- watering vapors of cooking peppers drifted through the room from a building a few feet away. His fiancee pressed the tummy of a defective Winnie the Pooh that she had rescued from the trash at work. The bear meowed three times — she had sewn in a computer chip from a pet toy that someone had found on the factory floor — and the woman laughed.    If all goes well, the couple said, they can each earn about $65 a month, half of which they send home to their families in rural China.    Newcomers and slower workers, they pointed out, sometimes get no pay at all: There is nothing left after charges are subtracted for meals and rent, as many workers live in company housing.    The couple said they and their colleagues sometimes thought about complaining, but the memory of what happened last year to one who did always stopped them. At first, they said, the worker was shouted down by the floor manager. Then, about 8 p.m., as he was leaving the factory, he was stabbed repeatedly by a group of men.    Mattel said it was unaware of any such incident.    Few people saw the stabbing, and no one knew what ultimately happened to the victim, the couple said, although some heard his screams. They didn't dare help or call the police, they said, lest they suffer the same fate.
Squalor in Mexico More than 7,000 miles from China, along the U.S.-Mexico border, a 41-year-old Mattel factory worker rocked back and forth on a rusted metal chair and talked about life at the job site — and beyond.    The Tijuana facility where this woman earns the equivalent of $50 a week, Mattel's Mabamex plant, is clean and well maintained. The company strictly enforces its work-hour rules here, and she has few complaints. Mabamex appears little different from factories on the U.S. side of the border.    But outside the 550,000-square-foot factory, the scene of squalor is all too familiar: Like most maquiladoras — assembly plants that produce goods principally for export — Mabamex is surrounded by the hovels where its workers live.    The dwellings are made of sheets of scrap metal and prefabricated wooden walls — often, discarded garage doors from across the border. Few homes have anything other than earthen floors. Fewer still have running water. Most bathrooms consist of a system of buckets and open rivulets, which wash the waste downhill.    The Mattel worker, a mother of four, said she would like to move her family somewhere nicer. But given her salary, there is very little that she can do.    "When we collect our checks, we feel bad about how little money we make," she said. "We feel the pressure."    For a company like Mattel, it is a tricky proposition figuring out what its obligation to workers — as well as to society at large — should be.	"Is it Mattel's responsibility to determine and pay a living wage? I don't think so," said Walter, the company's quality assurance chief. "But should Mattel prompt a local government to determine what a reasonable wage is? We should have some impact on that."    The struggle between morality and profitability goes right to the top of the company.    "Do we want to make people's lives better? Absolutely," said Eckert, Mattel's CEO. "Do we want to unilaterally do things that make us uncompetitive and therefore our products don't sell and therefore nobody gets employed? No."    Few, if any, of the Tijuana maquiladoras do better for their workers than Mattel does, said Alfredo Hualde, director of the Department of Social Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a research institution in Tijuana.    Hualde notes that to have even the most basic amenities — sanitary drinking water, indoor plumbing — the 150,000 maquiladora workers would probably need to see their pay doubled. And that's unimaginable when the Mexican government is doing all it can to keep factories from fleeing Mexico for cheaper locales such as China.    "The main objective is to keep the maquilas here in Mexico to create employment," Hualde said. "The quality of the employment is secondary."    When the Factory Closes    At the Shenzhen factory, the man who worked 24 hours straight learned during the summer that there is something worse than laboring in terrible conditions: being out of a job.
Work at the plant started to dry up, and the man went 22 days without getting paid.    Eventually, he landed a new job at a nearby eyeglasses factory. The management is fair, the hours are blessedly shorter, and the pay is better, he said. He and his fiancee were even able to move into a slightly larger apartment with tile, instead of concrete, floors.    His fiancee hasn't been so lucky, though. When the Mattel contractor finally closed in August, the only job she could find was at a nearby toy factory — another Mattel supplier.    Conditions there, she said, are worse. The hours are longer and the wages lower. Workers are instructed to keep two timecards so that auditors can't detect the illegal overtime and insufficient pay. There is no clean drinking water at the factory, she said, and no food for those who, like her, often work the graveyard shift.    The woman longs for the day she can leave, she said. But she doesn't know when that will be.    *    Zhang Xiuying of The Times' Shanghai Bureau and Sari Sudarsono of the Jakarta Bureau contributed to this report.    *    Additional photographs, as well as articles about Mattel factory manager Rug Burad and human rights advocate Marie-Claude Hessler-Grisel, can be found at latimes.com/mattel.	* (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) Story of strife 1988 • The General Accounting Office reports that sweatshops are becoming prominent again. 1989 • State and federal labor officials begin using the 1938 "hot goods law" to battle sweatshops in Southern California. The law restricts retailers from selling goods manufactured under illegal labor conditions. 1990 • The Labor Department takes legal action against six sewing contractors in a bid to shutter Los Angeles sweatshops. 1991 • Levi Strauss & Co. adopts a code of conduct to ensure that its overseas contractors maintain fair labor practices. 1992 • Nike Inc. and Sears, Roebuck & Co. establish codes of conduct for their factories. Under pressure from the Labor Department, Guess Inc. agrees to police its sewing contractors for labor violations. 1994 • State and federal labor inspectors uncover rampant labor violations throughout California.
• Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich threatens legal action against major U.S. retailers, expanding use of the "hot goods law" nationwide. • Liz Claiborne Inc. establishes a code of conduct. 1995 • Authorities raid an El Monte sweatshop and find 71 Thai nationals living in virtual slavery as garment workers. The raid raises awareness of sweatshops. 1996 • During congressional testimony, the executive director of the National Labor Committee accuses Walt Disney Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Kathie Lee Gifford clothing line of using sweatshops to make their apparel. 1997 • Nike comes under fire over conditions in its factories in China, Vietnam and Indonesia. • McDonald's Corp. is criticized for its plants in Asia that make Happy Meals toys. • Mattel Inc. establishes a code of conduct for manufacturing and an international independent monitoring system. 1998 • Duke University adopts a code of conduct governing the making of Duke-licensed merchandise. • College students form United Students Against Sweatshops. • U.S. apparel manufacturers and labor rights groups create the Fair Labor Assn., or FLA, an independent organization aimed at making sure that overseas factories meet the group's code of conduct. Founding members include Liz Claiborne, Nike, Phillips- Van Heusen Corp. and Reebok International Ltd. 1999 • College students around the country protest universities' ties to sweatshops. Seventeen colleges join the FLA, angering student activists who question the association's autonomy.	• Human rights group Global Exchange accuses Gap Inc. plants of unfair labor conditions. • Mattel releases its first audit of working conditions in its factories in Asia. 2000 • The University of Pennsylvania withdraws from the FLA after students occupy the president's office for nine days and a nationwide 36-hour hunger strike is staged in support of the protesters. • Nike founder Phil Knight announces that he will no longer make donations to the University of Oregon because of its membership in another labor rights group that had criticized Nike. • The University of California system establishes one of the toughest codes of conduct in the country. 2001 • Reports from labor rights groups accuse Mattel, Hasbro Inc., Disney and Wal-Mart of making toys in Chinese sweatshops. 2002 • The last of 26 U.S. clothing makers settles a class-action lawsuit alleging the existence of sweatshop conditions on the Pacific island of Saipan. 2003 • Nike settles a case claiming that its defense of sweatshop allegations was false advertising. 2004 • Gap Inc. finds violations in many of its overseas factories, particularly in China. Many efforts have been undertaken in recent years to end sweatshop conditions in the United States and abroad. Sources: Company reports, Associated Press, Times research. Compiled by Times librarian John Jackson Los Angeles Time

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November 23, 2004 Los Angeles Times Smoking 'em out When Philip Morris stages its annual adventure fest in southern Utah for young overseas smokers, the party is strictly private. By Charles Duhigg, Times Staff Writer Harley Bates is steaming. He pushes past the off-duty cop standing in front of his ranch and charges the reporter and photographer.    "Get the hell off my land!" he says.    "Sir, I'm a reporter "    "You're scaring people taking their pictures as they drive in!"    A quarter of a mile away, the roof of a school bus crowns a small hill. Through a telephoto lens, tiny figures mill about. The reporter and photographer take turns looking for wisps of cigarette smoke.    So begins the third day of the 2004 Adventure Team, a 12-day hiking, four-wheeling and canyoneering extravaganza on Utah's public lands and one of Philip Morris International's most secretive — and successful — Marlboro promotions.    Forty-two young men and women from Europe, Latin America and Asia, selected from more than 1 million applicants, are playing cowboy at the company's expense. (Because of legal constraints, Americans cannot participate.)	All contestants undergo a complex application process, each handing over their name, address and personal details about where they shop, what music they listen to and what they smoke. As more and more countries restrict tobacco advertising, the data allow the company to talk directly to its customers.    Marlboro marketers and outdoorsy camps — doubling as focus groups — whittled applicants down to a busload. The winners were flown in September to Moab, where Philip Morris showered them with fleece, leather and custom-made cowboy hats. By day, they crossed Utah's public lands, playing on ATVs and horseback, and by night, they retired to private ranches, like Bates'. In return, they surrendered their names and photos for future advertisements.    At the front gate, standing on public land, the reporter starts asking questions.    "Sir, the public has a right to know how Utah's public lands are used to promote cigarettes "    "Nonsense!" yells Bates.    The photographer raises his camera. The reporter stands a little straighter and sucks in his gut.    Critics have long attacked the Marlboro Adventure Team's use of public spaces, arguing that America's canyons, deserts and picturesque birthrights shouldn't help sell cigarettes.    In response, during the last five years Philip Morris has gone underground, operating on both public and private land and keeping as low a profile as possible.
Which begs the question: Why bother? Why fly halfway around the world when the Alps, the Negev and the beaches of Micronesia are closer to the contestants? Is Utah really worth the trouble? And why does Moab, a magnet for environmental activists, turn a blind eye?    The answers, as John Wayne once noted, are "land and money, the two things that drive men mad."    The reporter presses on: "We just want to speak with the team "    Bates invites the reporter to kiss a certain part of his anatomy and walks away. The rising sun begins its attack on the surrounding red rock towers. Then the cowboy stops and spits toward the interlopers.    The off-duty cop hooks a thumb in his belt and smiles. "Welcome to Marlboro Country," he says. This is not America    The tobacco invasion of Utah began in Chicago in 1962.    Just 10 years earlier, Marlboro cigarettes suffered from an image problem. The brand was smoked primarily by women and was one of Philip Morris' biggest commercial disappointments. The company asked ad wizard Leo Burnett, famous for multimedia blitzkriegs featuring characters like the Jolly Green Giant, for help.    "I said, 'What's the most masculine symbol you can think of?' " Burnett recalled in a 1972 documentary. "One of these writers spoke up and said a cowboy. And I said, 'That's for sure.' "    Eight months after the campaign began, Marlboro sales had increased 5,000%. The ads depicted real cowboys on real cattle drives. In the early 1960s, marketers shifted the focus from cowboys to the Southwest's lonely, rugged expanses, and Marlboro Country was born. Since the 1970s, the brand has been the No. 1 seller worldwide.	The 1990s, however, presented new challenges. One of the early Marlboro Men announced he was dying of lung cancer and, at a shareholders' meeting, berated the chairman of Philip Morris. Multiple companies drew fire for promoting their brands with cartoon-like advertising (think Joe Camel) that critics said enticed children to smoke. In 1998, as lawsuits filed by state attorneys general threatened to undo the tobacco industry, cigarette makers agreed to pay $246 billion over 25 years to state coffers and curtail some forms of advertising. By then, however, Philip Morris had turned its attention to Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, where more smokers and fewer regulations beckoned. Commercials showing Marlboro Country were ubiquitous overseas.    Philip Morris relies on the Marlboro Adventure Team to extend its reach. At the inaugural event in 1982, 16 Germans descended on Moab and quickly destroyed one jeep, three motorcycles and themselves. Photographers captured it for a new ad campaign, and the Marlboro Adventure Team concept took off. Moab has held the event almost every year since then with support from the local community.    Back at Bates' ranch, the school bus speeds away. The reporter and photographer, choking on dust, follow in their rental car. Twenty minutes later, the bus parks near the Colorado River and team members begin transferring bags to a canvas-enshrouded pontoon motorboat idling along the red clay banks. The reporter and photographer approach the group in the public parking lot.    "Can I ask you a few questions?" the reporter asks one of the American guides.
"Dude, you've been told to stay away! All right? I've got nothing to say!" John is a muscular young man in his 20s with big teeth who gives only his first name. "If you don't leave, I'm going to hit you!"    The reporter eyes John's threatening muscles and boulder-sized teeth. Near the boat, a gaggle of slim, attractive men and women converse in broken English and watch.    "Hey, can I ask you guys a few questions?" the reporter shouts to break the tension. They only stare back.    "Go away!" one woman yells.    Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Marlboro team changed its focus from macho burly men to more average smokers. The implied message is easy to understand: Everyone can be a Marlboro Man; all they need is to love the outdoors, love adventure and, of course, love smoking.    "Why are you bothering us?" the woman asks. "This is not American."    The reporter would like to correct her on that point. Where are Woodward and Bernstein when you need them? John steps closer, clenching his fists.    In previous years, American journalists joined the team. This year, however, team members, according to company executive Franηois Moreillon, asked that Americans not intrude on their trip. Philip Morris agreed. "We want the winners to experience the freedom of America," explains Moreillon. "And we find this is easiest when Americans are not part of the event."    Another team member points at the crouching photographer taking pictures of the boat. "This is not America," he says. It seems a common sentiment around here. "This," he points to the glowing canyon, walls of gold and ochre that, rumor has it, once hid Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, "is America. You are nothing."	The boat cuts across water shimmering with reflected sun, plunges between stone cliffs and disappears. Follow the money    That Moab — known for its buttes, meadows and air so clean it stings the lungs — is home to the Marlboro Adventure Team may seem odd. Throughout the 1990s, national antismoking groups approached Utah's state legislators, a largely antismoking, pro-Mormon group, and asked, in effect, What Would Jesus Smoke? The Legislature hedged, first by passing one of the nation's most vigorous public smoking bans and then persuading Philip Morris to keep the team in Moab.    Jesus, apparently, was no match for greed. Last year, overseas visitors spent about $174 million in Utah, and the Marlboro team alone brings $2 million to Moab's lonely coffers. In the past, city residents have protested against oil drilling, thumper trucks, road extensions, new jeep trails, dismantling wilderness protection, sound pollution and even murals, but when the team's jeeps drive through town, residents come out and wave.    "There's a lot of money at stake," says Rick Donham, supervisor of Moab's community substance abuse center. "If we protested, it would make us very unpopular."    Others agree.    "This is your typical little town that is beautiful and filled with greedy hotel owners," says Aubrey Davis, 26, an employee at an independent bookstore that holds poetry readings and sells anti-Bush stickers.    "Plus, the Mormon church is antismoking," she says, as she lifts her pack of smokes. "And if the church is against it, I'm for it."
Even so, Philip Morris tries to be invisible. The company is never mentioned in land-use applications, which are filed by International Adventure Tours, the Moab company responsible for the logistics. Philip Morris and International Adventure Tour employees refuse to speak to the press. Jeeps and motorbikes used by the team, once stamped with Marlboro logos, are now simply painted red. Auf Wiedersehen, baby    Philip Morris has heard about "complications with the press." Tipped off by weeks of intrusive phone calls and field reports from team employees, the company has flown in two representatives from Europe.    The previous evening the reporter and photographer, determined to speak to an actual team member, waited by a public campground carved into the dry cliffs overlooking Moab.    When two team employees drove up in an SUV, the reporter pulled his car across the path. They wheeled around him, sending up plumes of dust, and the reporter followed, destroying headlights and compressing vertebrae across pitted rock trails that run beside 100-foot crevasses.    Eventually, the team car stopped, and the window rolled down.    The reporter approached the vehicle.    "We just want to know " he began.    "I hate you!" a crying woman screamed at him from the passenger's seat. The car took off again.    Now Philip Morris wants to talk.    "We will make you a deal," says Moreillon. "We will let you join the team tomorrow if you stop scaring people."	Scaring people? The reporter and photographer have acted well within their rights; this is after all public land. But Moreillon is a kind man who spends his spare time promoting rock bands in Switzerland where he lives. He is hardly a merchant of death, as the rap has it with most cigarette executives. A deal is struck.    The next morning the reporter and photographer join six team members mounting horses for a daylong ride. Leading the trip is a familiar face, cowboy Harley Bates.    The team members, ranging in age from 22 to 24, are nice and goofy, like American kids but from Israel, Latvia, Spain and the Philippines. "I filled out the application in class because, you know, I like to smoke and I like free trips," says Jose Luis Garcνa, 22, from Spain. "And the class was boring."    Another team member is trying to decide whether to become a biologist or a dancer. "They seem very similar jobs to me," says Elizabete Piuse, who's also 22 but from Latvia.    The team is much less ominous than the secrecy surrounding the event. In fact, most members are unaware of the controversies and battles that brought them here. They simply feel lucky to be in America, birthplace of the most iconic cigarette imagery in the world.    The Philip Morris representatives watch protectively. Why, the reporter asks Moreillon, is it so important to be here, in Moab?    "America is Marlboro Country. There is no other place that is so free," he replies.    At the head of the pack, Bates is offering a graduate course in frontier free enterprise, explaining how foreign competition has undermined American ranching.
As if on cue, the riders pick up a trail meandering next to a private hunting preserve. Tall, waving branches of nearby pines shade the team, and Bates' dog scampers around, searching for scents under a tree where a sign warns trespassers they may be shot.    "We love this land," Moreillon continues. "But America scares everyone a little." Some of this year's winners, he says, citing security concerns and opposition to U.S. foreign policy, declined to join.    The ride continues into an aspen forest before descending into a long green valley. A colt, led by one of the guides, spooks and breaks free, charging down a steep path, kicking other horses before he's caught. The sudden explosion unsettles a few of the team members, who seem to loosen up during a cigarette-and-lunch break.    The reporter is able to ask a few more questions. Who are these people? Who actually smokes like this anymore? What do their mothers think?    "I don't actually smoke. I'm a med student," says Spanish team member Anna Mascaraque, 24.    The reporter leans forward. Now we're getting somewhere. A Marlboro representative bursts into sight. Julia Werner, a German Philip Morris employee, is built like a small tank.    "You don't smoke ?" the reporter begins to ask. Werner drowns out his words.    "OK, end of interview! You are all done! You are enticing them to admit they are not smokers and asking very rude questions! Your invitation is over!"	The reporter and the photographer exchange glances. The group goes silent.    "We don't really care if they smoke " the reporter begins.    "You can just leave!" the Philip Morris representative shouts. "You are very rude! We never ask these rude questions in Europe!"    The air is growing sharp with chill. The reporter realizes he has no idea where he is or how to find the car. Team members shuffle farther away. There is the faint but distinct howl of some far-off animal.    "We just want to understand why "    "Then why do you ask such strong questions?" Werner yells. "You try to make everyone feel bad! This is why we exclude Americans!"    The air is getting colder. The reporter and photographer turn and stare at Bates, who is watching from his horse. If they have any hope of getting out of here, it is with him. "Don't worry," he says. "We'll make sure you get a ride back to your car."    He turns his horse and begins trotting away. A guide shouts at Bates: "Ah, that's Marlboro Country, huh?"    Bates looks at the guide, and scoffs. "You know what's real Marlboro Country?" he asks. "The graveyard." He looks into the air and digs his heels into his horse, riding toward the mountains, an American cowboy to the end.    Times staff writer Charles Duhigg can be reached at charles.duhigg@latimes.com.

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November 21, 2004 Los Angeles Times Cruel but no longer unusual Torture and Truth: Book Review by Sanford Levinson, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, author of "Constitutional Faith" and "Written in Stone", and editor of "Torture: A Collection." ~~~~~~~~~~~~ America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror Mark Danner, New York Review Books: 580 pp., $19.95 paper MARK DANNER'S "Torture and Truth" is two books in one. The first is a collection of five essays originally published in the New York Review of Books. Two of the essays appeared in 2003 and are prescient about the quagmire that has since enveloped U.S. forces in Iraq. Still, only devoted Iraq junkies need to read them. Three more powerful articles written this year on the methods of interrogation used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib (and elsewhere) in the Bush administration's "global war on terrorism" express what has become almost universal dismay and outrage at the treatment revealed by the now-famous photographs (also reprinted in the book). "What happened at Abu Ghraib, whatever it was, did not depend on the sadistic ingenuity of a few bad apples," writes the prizewinning author of previous books on political violence and war in Haiti and El Salvador. "[P]rocedures that 'violated established interrogation procedures and applicable laws' in fact had their genesis not in Iraq but in interrogation rooms in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — and ultimately in decisions made by high officials in Washington."

Key to Danner's argument is his careful analysis of relevant government documents recently disclosed, often through leaks, that make up the book's second part. Because these are fuller versions of post-Abu Ghraib investigation reports that have appeared elsewhere, the book is essential reading for Americans who want to know how the United States has careened into chaos — moral, political and organizational — over its methods of interrogating detainees around the world. Some may prove particularly relevant to the nomination of White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to succeed Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft. Gonzales asked for the now-notorious memorandum from the Justice Department (also reprinted here) justifying the president's power to order torture, and he pronounced aspects of the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war "obsolete" and "quaint." One cannot understand the post-Abu Ghraib reports outside the context of the earlier memorandum, especially those prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel before the outbreak of hostilities in Iraq but after the invasion of Afghanistan. The first group of seven memoranda explores the reach of the Geneva Convention; especially interesting are significant concerns expressed by the State Department in response to the dismissive arguments by Gonzales. A second set of 14 memoranda, really the emotional heart of the book, considers the question "What is torture?" An Aug. 2, 2002, memorandum to Gonzales from the Office of Legal Counsel (signed by Jay S. Bybee, who now sits on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals) offered a hyper-legalistic definition of torture and suggested that the Constitution gives the president the power to order the use of torture even though that is barred by both international law and U.S. congressional statute.

Thus, it advised Gonzales (and therefore the president) that torture means the imposition of "excruciating" pain. And it must be "equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result." What the memorandum calls the "mere infliction of pain or suffering on another," though it may be "inhuman and degrading" (and also prohibited by the United Nations Convention, signed by the United States), is not "torture"; as the "mere" suggests, such treatment is of no concern. To be a bit more fair to the memo's authors, they point out that although Congress has defined "inhuman and degrading" as conduct that would violate the Constitution's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment," the federal courts have been unwilling to invoke the constitutional provision to protect prisoners against brutal treatment in U.S. jails. Indeed, it is noteworthy that several of the military police officers implicated in the Abu Ghraib incidents are prison guards in civilian life. An especially revealing appendix to the Abu Ghraib investigation report, by the commission headed by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, refers to a famous 30-year-old Stanford University social psychology experiment that demonstrated the propensity of students arbitrarily assigned the role of "guards" to engage in remarkably abusive behavior toward their "prisoner" classmates. (The experiment was called off six days into the planned two weeks.) Very tight command and control is necessary to prevent abuse, but that was nonexistent at Abu Ghraib. It is possible that the Justice Department arguments are legally defensible, if morally repulsive. Congress may deserve a full measure of blame: When it considered ratifying the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, congressional leaders insisted on a definition of torture that used adjectives like "severe," "prolonged" and "imminent." For example, the "threat of imminent death" is

forbidden, as is "the threat that another person [such as a member of the detainee's family] will imminently be subjected to death [or] severe physical pain or suffering . " For better and worse, the best law schools teach their students to run with such adjectives when advocating for a client. The legal counsel's memo is, in its way, a model of such advocacy. By defining torture in such an extreme way, the memo empowered President Bush (and others in his administration) to say that what they were authorizing was not really torture, even if most lay persons would define it as such. The book's last section includes the Schlesinger commission report and the highly critical findings by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, which were written before the infamous Abu Ghraib photos were leaked to the public. Danner properly criticizes the Schlesinger report for failing to hold the Pentagon's civilian leadership responsible for Abu Ghraib and other similar breaches of law and morality, but anyone who reads that report should finish with increased confidence in the professional military. The so-called Jones/Fay report, named for two army generals appointed to conduct their own independent investigation and also included here, conveys barely concealed rage over the management of the interrogation phase of the war, which was troubled by inconsistent messages from Washington, an inadequate number of trained military personnel, the vulnerability of Abu Ghraib to insurgent attack, the outsourcing of interrogation to civilian contractors and the CIA's indifference to law, among other factors. During their presidential campaigns, neither Bush nor Sen. John F. Kerry, for quite different reasons, wished to confront the awful truth contained in these materials. One can only hope that these reports are not treated as "last year's news." Even though written far less felicitously, they are every bit as important as the 9/11 Commission's report. •

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November 12, 2004 Science Magazine VOL 306 EDITORIAL What's on the Label? When you are buying food, are you one of the 30% of shoppers (an estimate in the United Kingdom) who always read the labels, or one of the 20% who rarely or never give them a glance? Do you know what to make of them if you read them? Labels are meant to inform you and to help you to choose. But when you go shopping, how much time do you have to read about the differences between 30 types of chicken soup or 300 varieties of breakfast cereal? Consumers seem to want more and more choice, and consumer pressure groups definitely want more information on food labels. Choice and information are also attractive to regulators, because these options are less likely to be viewed as restricting individual freedom or stifling food industry innovation than the alternative of regulating food content. In the United States, labeling regulations are largely about the material content. In Europe, the method and place of production may also be specified in law, even if they make no material difference to the contents. This difference in approach is evident in the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods. Whether the plant from which a food is made is GM is irrelevant in the United States, given its emphasis on overall content rather than process. But in Europe, labeling of foods containing DNA or protein from GM plants is mandatory, and legislation has now been extended to include purified derivatives such as glucose syrup and canola oil (but not products from animals fed on GM animal feed or products made with GM technology, such as cheese). Transatlantic differences in food labeling are also apparent when it comes to the biggest current challenge for food policy: obesity. Doing something about obesity is especially difficult for governments and regulators, because diet and lifestyle are in the territory of personal freedom, not state intervention. At the same time, the health care costs are potentially huge, so the pressure for action is on. The blend of action that is emerging, in both Europe and the United States, includes voluntary changes by the food industry, public education, and better labeling. Some countries and U.S. states are going even further, for instance, by restricting what can be sold in school vending machines and restricting television advertising. All of these changes are meant to make it easier for people to choose a healthy diet.

The world’s fattest nation, the United States, has what is arguably the best nutrition labeling, with a mandatory nutrition facts panel. So would better labeling help? The largest food retailer in the United Kingdom, Tesco, has said that it plans to test a “traffic light” system, using red, yellow, and green colors to give consumers simple information about the main nutrients. Some object to this because of the potential implication that there are good (green) and bad (red) foods, whereas the traditional mantra from nutritionists is that there are only good and bad diets. But the food/diet distinction has changed as many people rely increasingly on ready-made meals or snacks. Research in the United Kingdom suggests that people would actually favor a simple sign-posting system such as traffic lights. The food industry is responding to public interest in diet and health by making foods that claim to have specific health benefits. These come close to the border between food and medicine. You can buy cholesterolreducing margarine, eggs that contain long- chain omega-3 unsaturated fatty acids, and yogurts that claim to help you balance your gut flora. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a three-tiered system for such health claims, depending on the strength of the evidence for the claim. The European Union does not have specific regulations, but plans to introduce rules within the next 2 years that will require the independent evaluation of health claims by the European Food Safety Authority. The implications of science-based regulation are enormous for the worldwide food industry, both because products that claim to improve your health are generally highly profitable and because, in the science of nutrition, there is often disagreement among experts. Over the next decade, increases in our understanding of the relationship between an individual’s genetic makeup and his or her nutritional needs will open up a whole new area for debate about what goes on the label. The world of choice is not going to get any easier. John Krebs John Krebs is chairman of the Food Standards Agency, UK.

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U.S. SCIENCE POLICY: Bush Victory Leaves Scars--and Concerns About Funding Jeffrey Mervis* ... "Rightly or not, I think the science community is now perceived by this White House as the enemy, and that will make it harder to open doors," says physicist Michael Lubell, who handles government affairs for the American Physical Society. "It's one more factor in an increasingly complex situation," says David Moore of the Association of American Medical Colleges, who worries that fallout from the recent campaign could determine whether the Bush Administration "reaches out and engages [the science community] or goes in its own direction." If Marburger's analysis is correct, it's not the Administration but its scientific critics who have gone their own way, losing touch with society's concerns in the process. "Science needs patrons, and our patron is society," said the 63-year-old applied physicist, a former university More space. Bush hopes Congress will fund his plans to explore the moon and Mars, announced earlier this year. CREDIT: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP PHOTO president and head of Brookhaven National Laboratory. "But if we're not careful, the scientific community can become estranged from the rest of society and what it cares about." ...

EDITORS' CHOICE PHYSIOLOGY: Weight Control: It Takes a Village About 250 million adults worldwide are obese, a condition that puts them at great risk for diabetes, heart disease, and other serious health problems. Although remarkable progress has been made in understanding the physiological and environmental factors that regulate body weight in mammals, much remains to be learned. A new study in mice points to a surprising participant in body weight control: the community of bacteria (microbiota) that colonize the gut. Bδckhed et al. found that when they introduced the gut microbiota of normal mice into a special strain of "germ- free" mice, the recipients showed a 60% increase in total body fat within 2 weeks, even though they had eaten less and exhibited an increased metabolic rate. The microbiota appeared to promote fat storage by stimulating the synthesis of triglycerides in the liver and their deposition in adipocytes (fat cells). Based on their results, the authors hypothesize that changes in microbial ecology prompted by Western diets or differences in microbial ecology between individuals living in Western societies may affect predisposition toward obesity. -- PAK Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101, 15718 (2004).

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November 16, 2004 American Scientist Magazine Logic -Becoming a Better Reasoner -book review by Keith Devlin Logic Made Easy: How to Know When Language Deceives You. Deborah J. Bennett. 256 pp. W. W. Norton, 2004. $24.95. You enter the voting booth and there is a local measure to repeal term limits. You vote yes. Does this mean you favor term limits? A mother says to her son, "If you finish your vegetables, you can have dessert.“ Does this mean that the child must eat all of his vegetables in order to get dessert? The answer to the first question is no. If you said otherwise, then you just voted the wrong way! The answer to the second question: It all depends. Formal logic (sometimes called classical logic) says the answer is no. Strictly speaking, the sentence says nothing about what happens if the child does not finish his vegetables. Consequently, it is possible for the son to get dessert without finishing his vegetables. But every parent and child in the world knows the correct answer is yes: No vegetables, no dessert. Period. Only grandparents may follow the rules of classical logic in this situation. Everyone else must follow natural logic, the logic that underlies the normal, everyday use of language within a society. These are just two of the many examples Deborah J. Bennett discusses in her superb little book Logic Made Easy. Some of the problems she presents will challenge even experts. In particular, a very clear head is required for the well-known Wason Selection Task and for the THOG problem, both of which were devised by cognitive psychologist Peter C. Wason. Many of the other examples Bennett gives come from the Law School Admission Test (LSAT). If I were giving a university-level course on logical reasoning, this would be my textbook, and I would demand that the students read it from cover to cover. The only caution I would give them would be to ignore the

book's title. In fact, one thing Bennett makes crystal clear is that logic is anything but easy. Her subtitle, How to Know When Language Deceives You, is more to the point, and I suspect that the main title is a product of those in charge of marketing the book, rather than an attempt by the author to describe the content. An accurate, but perhaps less salesworthy, title would be "Logic explained in an entertaining and intelligent fashion,“ or perhaps "The best introduction to logic currently available." You get my drift. By and large, Bennett sticks to the classical propositional logic that we inherited from the ancient Greeks—and, or, not, implies, if and only if—barely mentioning quantification and not covering the work of Kurt Gφdel and Alfred Tarski at all. These are entirely the right choices, given that this is a book aimed at helping people from all walks of life to become better reasoners, not a textbook in logic for mathematics students. The underlying material is for the most part standard and has been covered many times by a great many authors. What Bennett brings to the table are a superb compact history of the subject and a broad view of the relationship between formal logic and everyday human reasoning (both features that are sorely lacking in many other books on logic), backed up by research results from cognitive psychology and supported by a collection of excellent examples. In the latter part of the book, Bennett touches on some extensions of classical Greek propositional logic—such as Venn diagrams, truth tables, modal logic and fuzzy logic—that bear upon everyday reasoning. But here, and throughout, for the most part she stays well clear of mathematical formalisms, and the closest she gets to mathematical logic is a brief mention of George Boole's algebra of logic. In a blurb on the front cover, veteran mathematics writer Martin Gardner calls the book "The best and the most lucid introduction to logic you will find." I can't argue with his logic. mdash;Keith Devlin, Department of Mathematics and Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University

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November 13, 2004 The Economist Magazine Book Review: Teenagers alone -Feral and furious Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll Of Day Care, Wonder Drugs, And Other Parent Substitutes. by Mary Eberstadt Sentinel 218 pages “IT WOULD be better for both children and adults if more American parents were with their kids more of the time,” insists Mary Eberstadt, at the end of a gloomy account of all that has gone wrong with youngsters' lives. She wants a new public consensus to reflect that. Can views change? Public concern about the absence of fathers from their children's lives has already begun to rise in the past decade. Indeed, the author's catalogue of childhood unhappiness sometimes conflates the effects of divorce with her main and more controversial target, namely, the decline in the amount of time that children spend with either parent. She blames the rise of day care and of empty homes for rising aggression, obesity, unhappiness and teenage sex. The average American teenager now spends about three-and-a-half hours alone each day: more time alone than with family and friends. In that loneliness, and in children's resentment of it, lie the roots of most of the ills that beset America's youngsters. The loneliness, Mrs Eberstadt argues, starts in day care. Deposited, by working mothers, too soon and too long in the care of strangers, small

children suffer more infections and develop more aggressive behaviour than they once did. At school, children whose parents are out of the home for long periods behave worse and achieve less. Violence in primary schools has grown. So has childhood obesity: the proportion of overweight youngsters tripled between the 1960s and 1990s. Why? Because, says Mrs Eberstadt, there is no longer an adult at home to tell a sedentary child to stop munching in front of the television and go out to play. She cites research showing a significant link between maternal work and overweight children. Television makes the dual-career and single-parent family possible. Children hate being parentless. But the adult response to what she calls the “furious child problem” has been pharmaceutical: prescription-drug use is now rising faster among children than among the elderly. Schools have difficulty managing “feral” children, their behaviour undisciplined by a parental presence at home. Teenagers left alone at home for too long get up to greater mischief. And she reports a rising epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers. Parents are “the ultimate prophylactic”. The figures do not always support her alarm. Teenage crime and suicide have been falling recently, and pregnancy is not rising. There is, she feels, strong “cultural pressure” to suppress what is up with kids today. But her passionate attack on the damage caused by the absence of parents suggests that we may be approaching some sort of turning point in social attitudes, where assumptions about family life and maternal employment start to change. It has happened before—it could happen again.

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November 13, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE SCIENCE FILE Overfishing Affects Land Animals From Reuters Overfishing by subsidized European fleets off the coast of West Africa is hurting local fisheries and forcing people to slaughter wildlife to get enough to eat, researchers reported in the current issue of the journal Science [below].    The researchers said the so-called bush meat trade in Ghana is strongly driven by a lack of fish, and added that the country risked even worse poverty and social unrest — as well as the loss of an irreplaceable natural resource — unless something changes.    Bush meat includes game such as antelope but also species such as monkeys and jackals.    "This study provides the strongest link yet between a local fish supply with immediate, dramatic effects on bush meat hunting and terrestrial

wildlife," said Justin Brashares, an assistant professor of ecosystem sciences at UC Berkeley who led the study.    More than half of Ghana's 20 million people live near the coast, and they rely heavily on fishing.    Brashares and colleagues said they studied census data recorded by park rangers from 1970 to 1998 for 41 species of animals such as buffalo, antelope, jackals, lions, elephants, monkeys and baboons.    Then they analyzed data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization on fish in the region.    They found a 76% decrease in mammals, with many local extinctions. The fewer fish there were year to year, the harder the impact on land animals, they found.    "If people aren't able to get their protein from fish, they'll turn elsewhere for food and economic survival. Unfortunately, the impacts on wild game resources are not sustainable, and species are literally disappearing," Brashares added.

12 November 2004 Science Magazine VOL 306 1180-1183 Bushmeat Hunting, Wildlife Declines, and Fish Supply in West Africa Justin S. Brashares et al [abstract: first and last paragraphs] The multibillion-dollar trade in bushmeat is among the most immediate threats to the persistence of tropical vertebrates, but our understanding of its underlying drivers and effects on human welfare is limited by a lack of empirical data. We used 30 years of data from Ghana to link mammal declines to the bushmeat trade and to spatial and temporal changes in the availability of fish. We show that years of poor fish supply coincided with increased hunting in nature reserves and sharp declines in biomass of 41 wildlife species. Local market data provide evidence of a direct link between fish supply and subsequent bushmeat demand in villages and show bushmeat's role as a dietary staple in the region. Our results emphasize the urgent need to develop cheap protein alternatives to bushmeat and to improve fisheries management by

foreign and domestic fleets to avert extinctions of tropical wildlife. A second route to increase the sustainability of fish and wildlife harvests could come by enhancing the protection of harvested marine and terrestrial resources. Pirate fishing vessels from foreign ports are abundant in West African waters and illegally extract fish of the highest commercial value while, like many commercial fleets, dumping 70 to 90% of their haul as by-catch (9, 18). Increased policing of exclusive fishing zones and enforcement of existing quotas and tariffs for commercial fleets should reduce exploitation and provide an immediate boost to marine resources available to local fisheries (14, 19). On land, wildlife has persisted at near historic levels in inaccessible and well-protected areas of West Africa's nature reserves (4, 17). Increasing the size, number, and protection of wildlife reserves in the region may not offer a long-term solution to concerns over human livelihoods and protein supply, but it is likely to offer the most immediate prospects for slowing the region's catastrophic wildlife decline.

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Pick between them? -is this a problem?

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November 6, 2004 The Economist Magazine Gangmasters Salad days How 21st-century-style shopping means more 19th-century-style work WHEN 19 Chinese immigrants drowned while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay in February, outrage was quickly followed by a new law. The Gangmasters Bill and a code of practice for gangmasters, launched in the House of Lords later this month, are both aimed at labour-providers, or gangmasters. The targets of the bill are those who operate outside the law, often using illegal immigrants, paying their workers little and the taxman less. But many politicians are also uncomfortable with the legal side of the business, which involves lots of immigrants working through the night, often for £4.85 ($9) an hour (the minimum wage), moving from workplace to workplace at a moment's notice, with no job security. They regard this sort of employment as belonging to the 19th century. But changes in consumer demand mean that it is flourishing in the 21st century. Much of the prepared food sold in supermarkets is washed, chopped and bagged in pack-houses by workers supplied by specialist agencies (or gangmasters). Their business is booming. “There's much more work around now,” says Gary Norman of One Call, a medium-sized agency that places 400-600 workers in temporary jobs every day. One pack-house has just invited bids for 2.7m hours of temporary work, equivalent to over 1,000 full-time jobs. That's thanks to a combination of spoilt shoppers and snappy purchasing by supermarkets. Before carrots were sold as batons and broccoli as florets, jobs in pack-houses were steadier. Most goods had longer shelf-lives, buyers for shops did not change their minds too often and the shops closed early. The work was stable enough that, in the mid-1980s, much of it was done by mothers who could be home by the time school finished. The first blow to this pattern came from Sunday opening and the fax machine. The second, final one is more recent. Shoppers have brought about the change. They have given up cooking. Work that was once done by wives in kitchens is now done by workers in factories. Bagged salads, for instance, which consist of washed and chopped leaves, often with some rustic-looking croutons and a sachet of dressing, didn't

exist a few years ago. Now Tesco sells over £150m-worth ($275m) of them a year. Shoppers also want to buy at odd hours, making the convenience-store market (dominated by the big supermarkets) the fastest-growing bit of the groceries business, according to IGD, a food and groceries think-tank. To meet these demands without holding excess stock, which is liable to rot, the supermarkets have made their supply chains shorter. Data from the check-out goes straight to buyers, who can tweak their orders, via an intermediary, throughout the day. ASDA, whose parent company, Wal-Mart, has perfected this art in America, is now moving its purchasing to an internet-based system that will speed things up further, by allowing buyers and sellers to deal directly. The pack-houses and their workers have had to become leaner. Geest, one of the largest pack-houses, says its workers typically have six hours to turn round an order. And those orders are as changeable as the weather. A warm bank-holiday weekend normally brings a run on salad, to eat with some charred sausages. A cold patch means soup is in demand. The only way to manage the peaks and troughs is to hire temporary workers, who can be bussed in by gangmasters at short notice. Jennifer Frances of Cambridge University says she has seen workers who turned up in the morning, expecting to work all day, sent off to another job at midday when a supermarket cancelled an order. The workforce has changed to cope with this hard, irregular work. Tony Davies of Provista, a labour-provider (whose workers even make pies for Harrods), says that a couple of years ago his workers were typically British nationals who drifted in and out of the labour market. They were superseded by refugees, who in turn have now been replaced. “It was amazing how fast they cottoned on to scams, to the point where they were not much more reliable than local people,” says Mr Davies. Now Provista goes to eastern Europe every month and recruits workers from there. MPs may not like these developments, but the gangmasters' business has survived both opprobrium and regulation before. An Agricultural Gangs Act was passed in 1867, prompted by concerns for the morals of women working alongside men in the fields. Reports circulated of them hitching up their skirts to pee, and shouting obscenities across the rows of turnips. At least the Poles and Czechs are better behaved.

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November 2004 Smithsonian Magazine [sidebar excerpted from] America's First Immigrants by Evan Hadingham Hunted to Extinction? At the end of the last ice age, 35 genera of big animals, or "megafauna," went extinct in the Americas, including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, giant beavers, horses, short-faced bears and saber-toothed cats. Archaeologists have argued for decades that the arrival of hunters wielding Clovis spear points at around the same time was no coincidence. Clovis hunters pursued big game -their signature stone points are found with the bones of mammoths and mastodons at 14 kill sites in North America. Experiments carried out with replica spears thrust into the corpses of circus elephants indicate that the Clovis point could have penetrated a mammoth's hide. And computer simulations suggest that large, slow-breeding animals could have easily been wiped out by hunting as the human population expanded. But humans might not be entirely to blame. The rapidly cycling climate at the end of the ice age may have changed the distribution of plants that the big herbivores grazed on, leading to a population crash among meat-eating predators too. New research on DNA fragments recovered from ice age bison bones suggests that some species were suffering a slow decline in diversity -probably caused by dwindling populations-long before any

Saber-toothed a cats prowled North America for millions of years. For some reason, they died out about 13.000 years ago. Clovis hunters showed up. Indigenous horses are now thought to have died out in Alaska about 500 years before the Clovis era. For mammoths and other beasts who did meet their demise during the Clovis times, many experts believe that a combination of factors -climate change plus pressure from human hunters- drove them into oblivion. Amid all the debate, one point is clear: the Clovis hunter wasn't as macho as people once thought. Bones at the Gault site in central Texas reveal that the hunters there were feeding on less daunting prey -frogs, birds, turtles and antelope- as well as mammoth, mastodon and bison. As the late, renowned archaeologist Richard (Scotty) MacNeish is said to have remarked, "Each Clovis generation probably killed one mammoth, then spent the rest of their lives talking about it."

October 29 Science Magazine ECOLOGY/EVOLUTION: Vulnerable Vultures Over the past decade, the populations of Gyps vulture species across the Indian subcontinent have crashed, in many areas by more than 95%. The dramatic decline and potential extinction of vultures have serious implications for a human-dominated ecosystem in which scavengers (rather than predators) play such an important role, with heightened risk of disease from decaying unconsumed carcasses and from proliferating four- footed scavengers -- dogs, cats, and rats. At first mysterious, the likely cause of the vulture decline in Pakistan was recently pinpointed as the widely-used veterinary anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac administered to cattle: Vultures fed on

carcasses of diclofenac-treated cattle develop fatal kidney failure. Green et al. now show that diclofenac is the probable cause of Gyps decline across the entire subcontinent. A simulation model of vulture demography provides a quantitative range of estimates of the proportion of cattle that would need to be treated with diclofenac in order to produce the observed levels of vulture decline. Fewer than 1% of cattle would be sufficient to produce the catastrophic declines observed. To stave off the possible imminent extinction of Gyps species, an urgent search for alternatives to diclofenac is required. Captive breeding programs may also be necessary to maintain stocks of vultures for eventual reintroduction -- AMS J. Appl. Ecol. 41, 793 (2004).

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November 4, 2004 Los Angeles Times Antarctic Food Chain in Peril, Study Finds Krill have declined by 80% since 1976, researchers say. The tiny crustaceans are vital for whales and other sea life. By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer Krill — the heart of the rich Antarctic food chain that nourishes whales, seals and penguins — have declined by more than 80% in the last 25 years in key ocean regions, according to a new study that links the loss to warming temperatures.    The new research, published in today's issue of the journal Nature, is the first comprehensive attempt to estimate numbers of the small, shrimp-like creatures that once were so abundant that their swarms colored vast patches of the southern oceans blood red.    Now, krill have largely been replaced by salp, clear, gelatinous invertebrates that provide so little nutrition to predators that they are considered ecological dead-ends, said Angus Atkinson, a marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey who led the study.    Such a steep decline in krill could decimate the region's abundant wildlife, ecologists said.    The finding may signal that a shift is underway in one of the world's most productive and pristine ecosystems.    "We're just holding our breath to see what the consequences are," said William Fraser, an Antarctic researcher who was not involved in the current study.    Antarctic krill are thumb-sized crustaceans that feast on drifting phytoplankton and in turn provide food for myriad Antarctic denizens, including the blue whale — the largest animal on the planet.    Atkinson and his colleagues pooled data from nine nations that collected krill in Antarctic waters.    Because krill are a "boom-and-bust" species that varies dramatically in number from year to year, the group looked for long-term patterns.    The international team found krill numbers had decreased by more than 80% since 1976 in the southwest Atlantic near the Antarctic Peninsula, a hugely productive marine area thought to be a krill spawning ground and home to about half of the region's adult krill.    The area has warmed in the last 50 years by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly five times the global average, the researchers said.    Some scientists link the warming to natural climate cycles; others say that the production of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, plays a role as well.

The result is a diminished ice cover in some parts of the waters surrounding Antarctica. Krill larvae require sea ice to survive the winter. Young krill eat algae that grows in cracks on the underside of the ice and hide in the cracks to evade predators.    Without sea ice, the larvae starve, said Fraser, who has studied Antarctic penguins for three decades and now heads the nonprofit Polar Oceans Research Group in Sheridan, Mont. "Sea ice is the heartbeat of Antarctica."    The Antarctic Peninsula is thought to have seen heavy ice years more often in the past. More recently, these "good" ice years have occurred only about once every five years. Since krill live six to seven years, they can still get in one good reproductive year even if ice is sporadic.    Fraser said if good ice years occurred too far apart, the krill would not be able to successfully reproduce.    "What you would see then is a literal collapse of the food web," he said. "All the predators would suffer some pretty drastic declines."    He pointed to the Adelie penguins, which eat only krill during the summer months. Their numbers in the Antarctic Peninsula have declined by 70% since 1974.    A loss of krill also could restrict the rebounding of whale populations, which are still recovering from extensive hunting that pushed them close to extinction.    Some scientists, however, are skeptical of the study's conclusions.    Krill expert Steve Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division questioned whether Antarctic krill, with a biomass once estimated at more than 1 billion tons, were really down by such enormous numbers.    "Could we really have lost 900 million tons of krill without anyone noticing? I don't think so," he said. "You would expect to see most of the predators in decline, and that doesn't appear to be happening."    He said the krill could be greatly underestimated because of the difficulty in tracking the creatures as they migrate and are tossed about through the vast seas. The krill may have moved deeper because of changes in ocean circulation or because ultraviolet light is now blasting surface waters under the Antarctic ozone hole, he said.    It is also possible that the rebounding populations of whales are gobbling krill at higher rates, and the loss of sea ice may not be to blame.    "Something's happened," Nicol said in a telephone interview from Tasmania.    "We're just not quite sure what."

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October 30, 2004 The Economist Magazine Human evolution Meet cousin Florence Oct 28th 2004 A new and diminutive species of human being has been discovered IN THE 1890s, Eugene Dubois, an anatomist working as a doctor in the Dutch army, stunned the scientific world when he found the first fossil human remains outside Europe. Java Man—Homo erectus, as it is now known—threw ideas about human evolution into chaos by suggesting that Europe was not, as most anthropologists had hitherto assumed, the cradle of human evolution. As it turned out, neither was Asia. The evidence now shows that all the important developments in human evolutionary history, from the appearance of Australopithecus (the first species generally regarded as human) to the emergence of Homo sapiens (you and me), happened in Africa. But Asia can still spring the odd surprise in the field. And few finds have been as surprising as that made last year on Java's Indonesian neighbour, Flores, and announced this week in Nature. For Homo floresiensis, as the new species has been dubbed, suggests that the ascent of man is not an evolutionary inevitability. Descent is also possible. That is because Homo floresiensis (whose skull is pictured above, alongside that of a modern human) was but a metre tall, and had a brain not much bigger than an ape's.
In a truly ancient fossil human from, say, 3m-4m years ago, those dimensions would not be surprising. But the skeleton found by Peter Brown, of the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia, and his colleagues from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, is a mere 18,000 years old. That means it was alive at a time when Homo sapiens had not only come into existence, but had already reached Australia. A little puzzle The species is not, however, a descendant of Homo sapiens. A tooth from a lower soil layer in the cave where the main skeleton was found shows it evolved before modern humans arrived in the area. It was thus one of several species of humanity, such as Neanderthal Man, that were pushed aside by the rise of Homo sapiens. That, in turn, suggests it was descended from Dubois's Homo erectus. But Homo erectus was as big as Homo sapiens—in some cases bigger. And if erectus was not in quite the same intellectual league as modern man, it was certainly no dunce. Its brain could be as big as 1,250cm3 (compared with 1,400cm3 for a modern human). That of Homo floresiensis, by contrast, was a mere 380cm3. Dr Brown knows this because he measured the volume by the delightfully low-tech technique of pouring mustard seeds into the fossil's cranium after he had cleaned the interior.	Nor is there any doubt that the skeleton is that of an adult (probably, from the pelvic anatomy, a woman). Her teeth are worn, and some telltale bones in the skull are knitted together in an adult way. On top of that, although they are not described in the paper, Dr Brown's team has now found five more specimens which confirm that she was not an abnormally small member of her species. Of course, a small animal will have a small brain. But what is noticeable about Homo floresiensis is how small the brain is, even in comparison to the diminutive body. The species had regressed, more or less, to the brain/body ratio found in Australopithecus. The question is why. And the answer to that question may shed light on the wider question of how human intelligence arose in the first place. Islands are famous for generating indigenous species from whatever biological material pitches up on them. One frequent trend observed in such island species, at least when they are large mammals, is dwarfism. Elephants seem particularly susceptible. The last mammoths, which lived on an island off the coast of Siberia, were, paradoxically, dwarfs. Similar elephantine examples are known from Malta, Sicily and, indeed, Flores itself. And the same thing has been observed in cattle, too. There seems no reason why it should not happen to hominids. Two evolutionary pressures are thought to drive this process of diminution. One is that islands are often free of large predators (on Flores, the largest were Komodo dragons, a species of large lizard). The other is that they sometimes have a restricted food supply. The result is that you do not need to be big to defend yourself; and if you are big, you may starve.
Both of those facts might drive the evolution of smaller brains, too. Brains are expensive in terms of energy consumed, and thus food needed. And an absence of predators would remove at least one reason to have a large brain. In other words, use it or lose it. Why human intelligence evolved in the first place, though, is controversial. Many researchers feel that it was not so much to deal with the non-human world (eg, predators and food-gathering) as to deal with other people. One theory, known as the “Machiavellian mind”, is that intelligence is there to analyse, and thus manipulate, the motives of others. Another, known as the “mating mind”, is that much of human intelligence is about showing off to the opposite sex, in a behavioural equivalent of the peacock's tail. Both could be true. Whether either of these purposes would disappear on an island is moot. All this is speculation, of course. And human fossils are so rare that there is a risk of over-interpreting each new find. What would help is evidence of Homo floresiensis's culture, if any.	One possible remnant of that culture is the numerous stone tools in the cave where the skeleton was found. These are small and delicate, which suggests they might have been made and wielded by tiny hands. Nor do they bear much resemblance to the tools of Homo erectus. But they do date from a period when the island could have been inhabited by Homo sapiens. So who made them is unclear. In any case, tool-making is not an exclusive badge of intellectual advancement. Australopithecus used stone tools, and modern chimpanzees make and use tools, too (though admittedly not stone ones). If tools were useful to Homo floresiensis on its island home, natural selection would have retained the ability to make and use them even if other mental faculties dwindled. Regardless of how these questions are settled, what is clear is that Dr Brown's find has changed thinking about the way humanity has evolved. If Homo floresiensis was flourishing 18,000 years ago, the chances are it did not die out until much more recently. Indeed, it is conceivable that it lasted into historical times. Much of Homo sapiens's vision of itself is built around the idea of human uniqueness. That it was not unique until so recently should give pause for thought—and will no doubt spur others to follow Dubois's lead and look for further species of fossil human in previously unexplored places.

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October 30, 2004 The Economist Magazine Brain scanning No hiding place Studies using functional brain-imaging take on sophisticated topics FEW recent innovations have transformed a field of research as much as functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI). The technique has revolutionised the study of the human brain. By making visible the invisible (the activity of different bits of the living brain on a second-by-second basis), it has revolutionised the study of that organ. But what started out as a medical instrument is now used routinely to probe complex questions about behaviour and motivation. That was the lesson of two studies presented to a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego earlier this week. In one of the studies, Jonathan Cohen, of Princeton University, and his colleagues tried to explain an anomaly that has been nagging economists for decades. If humans were fully rational (at least, rational in the way that economists define the word), they would attach the same monetary value to a week's delay in receiving a payment, regardless of when that week began. So, if someone is offered $10 at the beginning of any given week, or $11 at the end of it, he should make the same choice, whether that week starts now or a year from now. But that turns out not to be how most people judge it. In most cases, they will take the $10 today but the $11 in a year and a week. Dr Cohen reasoned that this inconsistency might reflect the influence of different neural systems in the brain. To test this, he recruited 14 students, the traditional workhorses in such studies. While lying in his brain scanner, the students were offered the choice of receiving an Amazon.com gift certificate worth somewhere between $5 and $40 immediately, or getting one worth 1% to 50% more in a couple of weeks' time. When a participant chose the earlier reward, there was an increase in the activity of his limbic system. This is a region of the brain that is involved

in emotion. In contrast, when the choice was to delay gratification in exchange for a bigger reward, brain activity was concentrated in the “thinking” regions, such as the prefrontal cortex. The inconsistency therefore seems to be the result of different sorts of calculation happening in the two cases. Of course, that does not answer the ultimate question of why evolution has equipped the brain this way. Dr Cohen speculates that it may have something to do with survival when the arrival of resources is scarce and unpredictable, rather than the subject of contracts and an efficient banking system. But it does shine a new light on issues such as drug addiction and procrastination, which are both situations where the temptation of immediate reward can lead to choices that might ultimately be detrimental. While Dr Cohen's group wrestles with how people make choices, Klaus Mathiak, of the University of Tόbingen, in Germany, and his colleagues, are using fMRI to study the effects which certain sorts of choice have on brain activity. Specifically, the team is looking at what goes on in the heads of dedicated video-games players during violent “social interactions” within a game. Dr Mathiak enlisted 13 gamers who played video games for, on average, 20 hours a week. While the gamers stalked and shot the enemy from the relative discomfort of a scanner's interior, the researchers recorded events in their brains. As a player approached a violent encounter, part of his brain called the anterior cingulate cortex became active. This area is associated with aggression in less fictional scenarios, and also with the subsequent suppression of more positive emotions, such as empathy. Dr Mathiak noted that the responses in his gamers were thus strikingly similar to the neural correlates of real aggression. As he puts it, “Contrary to what the industry says, it appears to be more than just a game.”

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October 30, 2004 The Economist Magazine The changed nature of work Pushing a different sort of button How jobs, in the rich world, have become less boring (though there's still plenty to whinge about) WORK, says a guru quoted in one of these books, is our “negotiation with death”. That's putting it a bit strong, but work is clearly something that lots of people love to hate. Yet, in the rich world, work has changed dramatically in the past two or three decades, in ways that have got rid of some of its more disagreeable sides, and made what is left more interesting. The key changes have been the fading of routine manual work and the rise of jobs that make use of networked computers. Many of the more tedious jobs that most people did a century ago—factory work, farm labouring, mining—are almost gone. Robots, not human beings, now mainly man the production line, which symbolised the more oppressive aspects of the machine age. Instead, as Frank Levy and Richard Murnane point out, jobs have bifurcated: there has been some growth in the simpler service jobs—flipping hamburgers and cleaning offices, say—but a much greater growth of sophisticated work in management, teaching, medicine, engineering and the law. Many of the jobs that have gone were routine clerical tasks, which have been either taken over by computers or outsourced abroad—or both. The networked computer allows such tasks to be structured in a way so they can be done by folk far away from the final customer.

The jobs that remain, say the two economists, are often ones that require complex communication, conveying an interpretation of information rather than just the facts, and making difficult judgments in unpredictable circumstances. Computers, which can cope with simple rule-based jobs, find it far harder to diagnose a sick patient or design a new aircraft. But, by taking over the simple part of many jobs, they improve the productivity of skilled human beings doing complicated things. Countries must therefore educate their citizens in ways that fit them for such complexities. The trend in pay points the same way: in 1979, a 30-year-old man with a bachelor's degree averaged 17% more than one with a high-school diploma; today, the gap is 50%.

Networked communications are changing the organisations that people work in too. Thomas Malone, an organisational theorist, describes the way that they allow “dramatically more decentralised ways of organising work [to] become at once possible and desirable”. He is impressed by the way Nike outsources all its manufacturing to other companies; and by the example of eBay, from whose auctions perhaps 150,000 people make a living. Both are instances of the new sort of shapes that organisational life may take. He also argues for the emergence of internal markets and of “democracies”—in which decisions are based on the collective wisdom of the many rather than the top-down instructions of a few. Companies where employees are given more control over their working conditions seem to generate better returns than those that give their people less responsibility. One of the great benefits of information technology in the workplace, says Mr Malone, is to allow workers to make more choices. That in turn will call for different managerial techniques: not so much command-and-control as “co-ordinate-and-cultivate”. Managers must learn to run loose hierarchies in which much of the decision-making power is pushed down the organisation. If they set clear standards and guidelines, then teams of people can undertake a task without centralised control.

Complex communications and loose hierarchies sound much more fun than life on the traditional production line. Russell Muirhead, searching for a new ethic of work, often seems to assume that work is inherently disagreeable and tedious. He wants it to be fulfilling—but not too fulfilling, lest it take over people's lives and squeeze out other interests. He concludes that “the dignity of work comes from the way we show, through it, a determination to endure what is difficult for the sake of discharging our responsibilities and contributing to society.” But that surely is too bleak a view. People work for money, for company and for some sense of achievement. Indeed, even in a badly run organisation, work can have a certain melancholy pleasure. Take the blistering portrait of life in a big British retail bank (NatWest, now part of the Royal Bank of Scotland, pseudonymously appearing as British Armstrong) by John Weeks, an American professor of organisational behaviour. He found that the bank's staff always described its corporate culture negatively. It was said to be too bureaucratic, too rules-driven, too introverted, too centralised. He describes various ways used to grouse without appearing too obvious, such as “deniable deprecations”, used to complain about everything from the coffee to career advancement. But the moaning was a ritual. Complaining brought no gains, but, if done in a socially acceptable way, created cohesion among groups of staff. In that respect, networked computers have changed nothing—apart from giving badly managed workers something new to whinge about.

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perryb

October 25, 2004 Los Angeles Times Eisner With Charm? Insiders see News Corp.'s Peter Chernin as an improved version of the man he could replace By Sallie Hofmeister, Times Staff Writer He's the rare Hollywood executive who's as comfortable with a balance sheet as giving notes on a script. Private, even shy, he confides mainly in one person — his wife. He can appear ruthless, showing little emotion when firing a friend.    If you guessed Michael Eisner, guess again. But you wouldn't be the first to spot a resemblance between Walt Disney Co.'s top executive and Peter Chernin, the president of News Corp.    "Peter has that rare quality of having both left-brain and right-brain strength," said Jeff Shell, who has worked at both Disney and News Corp. and is now chief executive of Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. "One of the only other people I've met like that is Michael Eisner."    As the Disney board searches for a new CEO — a process it plans to complete by June — Chernin's name is high on the short list of contenders. Though the 53-year-old executive embodies some of Eisner's best qualities, he is free of other traits that have made the Disney chief vulnerable to criticism.	Eisner can be cold, thin-skinned and autocratic. He's been accused of chasing off some of Disney's best executives.    Chernin, on the other hand, is so disarmingly charming that even some people he's ousted don't hold a grudge. Not for nothing have some within News Corp. called him the "smiling cobra."    In July, when Chernin signed up for five more years at News Corp., Wall Street analysts predicted he was staying put. With an annual compensation package of at least $20 million, Chernin could pull down more than his strong-willed boss, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch. Eisner made only $7.25 million last year.    Still, people close to Chernin say he'd jump at the chance to step out of Murdoch's shadow and into Eisner's shoes, even if it meant a pay cut.    At News Corp., Chernin has hit a ceiling. The 73-year-old Murdoch is grooming his children, now in their 30s, to take the helm of the family-controlled company. Knowing this, Chernin made sure he could accept a better offer if it came along: His employment contract lacks the standard non-compete clause that would prevent him from jumping to a rival.    Both Chernin and Murdoch declined to comment for this article.    Many Hollywood insiders say Chernin is just what Disney needs: creative, cool in a crisis and inspirational. After 15 years at the fastest-growing and most daring of the major media conglomerates, he also has the know-how to invigorate Disney.
"Peter is a great listener; he gives guidance, but he lets people do their job," said Tom Sherak, who worked under Chernin at News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox Film Corp. before becoming a partner at Revolution Studios.    Though News Corp. owns major media properties around the world, Chernin's primary role is to oversee Fox Entertainment Group, the publicly traded U.S. subsidiary of Murdoch's Australian-born company. It includes 20th Century Fox, the Fox broadcast network, a leading TV station group, a TV production arm and cable channels such as FX, Fox Sports Networks and Fox News Channel.    Since Chernin became News Corp.'s president and chief operating officer in 1996, his group's revenue has doubled. Its profit has soared. Chernin has helped Fox become a major producer of prime-time television, a consistent winner at the box office and a big beneficiary of the DVD boom.    But some question whether, based on his track record at News Corp., he has the vision to lead Disney in two of its cornerstone operations: theme parks and animation.    News Corp. made an ill-fated venture into theme parks, opening Backlot in 1999 at its Fox Studios in Australia. The park, designed to showcase the company's movie-making prowess, closed in 2001 because of poor attendance.    As for animation, film industry sources say Chernin was so nervous about the company's continuing financial losses that he considered getting out of the business altogether. In fact, he tried to find a studio partner to shoulder the risk for the 2002 computer-animated comedy "Ice Age," which cost an estimated $60 million.	Fortunately, he couldn't find one. The film was such a huge hit that Chernin reversed course and bought Blue Sky, the movie's animation production house. Blue Sky's next offering is "Robots," due out in March.    Throughout his career, Chernin has kept his own counsel, with few close friends in the industry. His confidante is his wife, Megan, who once worked as a lawyer in the Los Angeles district attorney's office; they have three children.    His professional loyalty is similarly focused. As he likes to tell subordinates, "I have a constituency of one" — referring to Murdoch, whose distaste for the rituals of Hollywood is legendary.    Fox executives say no one has played Murdoch as masterfully as Chernin. In a heated rivalry to be Murdoch's second-in-command in the mid-'90s, Chernin edged out Chase Carey, a deal maker and strategist who left Fox in 2002 and is now chairman of News Corp.'s satellite company, DirecTV Group Inc. As usual, Chernin's ambition was masked by a veneer of elegant self-deprecation.    The staunchly Republican Murdoch has even found a use for Chernin's status as a lifelong Democrat. When he needs support from Democrats on Capitol Hill, Murdoch dispatches Chernin, who donated $25,000 in June to the Democratic National Committee.    "You've got to hand it to Peter," said one former Fox executive, who requested anonymity. "Fox is a culture where everybody's dispensable. Rupert is quirky and eccentric. But who has lasted as long as Peter outside of Rupert's Australian cronies?"    Many attribute Chernin's ability to navigate Murdoch's shifting creative impulses to his stable upbringing.
He comes from a family of number crunchers — his father, brother and sister are all accountants.    Growing up in the suburbs north of New York City, he was a nerdy high schooler — the kind who hung around the audiovisual department. When he came west to UC Berkeley, he majored in English literature.    After graduating in 1974, Chernin worked as a book publicist for St. Martin's Press. He was recruited to Hollywood by David Gerber Productions Inc., where he produced hundreds of hours of television, including sitcoms and miniseries. Moving to Showtime as head of programming, Chernin created one of cable's first original programs, the critically acclaimed "It's Garry Shandling's Show."    Later, as president of Lorimar Film Entertainment, he tried his hand at movies. One of his projects was the racy period drama "Dangerous Liaisons."    With his star on the rise, he was hired in 1989 by the demanding Barry Diller, who was Murdoch's entertainment chief at News Corp. Chernin was named president of prime time at the fledgling Fox network, which back then was airing shows only two nights a week. Chernin lured young viewers with edgy programs that included "The Simpsons," "In Living Color" and "Beverly Hills 90210."	Chernin learned well from Diller, a confrontational leader known for his bullying style. "Peter took the best stuff from Barry," said television producer Sandy Grushow, who worked for Fox at the time. "He became more contrarian; he learned to challenge people's thinking."    Chernin caught Murdoch's eye just weeks after he was hired by Diller.    "It was like love at first sight," said former Fox executive Greg Nathanson, a Murdoch confidant. Nathanson said that at a Fox management retreat in Santa Barbara, Murdoch was so intrigued by the new recruit that he bummed a ride back with him to Los Angeles.    In 1992, Murdoch promoted the up-and-coming executive to head the film studio, where he went on to green-light "Independence Day," "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Speed." He rolled the dice with the expensive "Titanic," the highest-grossing movie ever. Chernin also launched Fox Searchlight, the company's art-house division, which corralled upstart talents with lower- budget films such as "The Full Monty."    The key to Chernin's success in more recent years, many agree, has been his dedication to executing Murdoch's vision — even when it has meant pushing out executives he supports and likes.    People close to Chernin say that one of the toughest periods in his career was when he repeatedly had to fend off Murdoch to protect then-studio chief Bill Mechanic. Chernin had hired him from Disney, and the two men were close.
But Murdoch disliked Mechanic and the movies he made. He thought "Fight Club," for example, was sordid. After the animated "Titan A.E." tanked, Chernin felt compelled to force out Mechanic.    "Bill had been his partner for 5 1/2 years," said one executive familiar with Mechanic's ouster, "but Peter didn't want the argument with Murdoch anymore."    Mechanic declined to comment.    Some insiders say Chernin's instincts for self-preservation have limited his ability to manage News Corp. He leaves many division heads to their own devices, unwilling to "stir up a hornet's nest with people who have a direct pipeline to Murdoch," one former executive said.    Among those whom Chernin gives a long leash: Mitch Stern, who formerly ran the TV station group and is now president of DirecTV, and Fox News chief Roger Ailes.    Some News Corp. insiders also caution that Chernin shares Eisner's penchant for immersing himself in the creative process. Former Fox executives say that Chernin's insistence on screening TV pilots sometimes created a bottleneck.	"In staff meetings, Chernin was like a cat with a ball of yarn, picking, picking, picking," said an ex-colleague. "He could unravel things late in the process."    In the search for Disney's next leader, Chernin's is not the only name on the table. Terry Semel, the former Warner Bros. chief who has turned Yahoo Inc. into an Internet powerhouse, also is considered a strong candidate, if he could be persuaded to leave. And Eisner has endorsed Disney President Robert Iger for the job.    Yet Chernin supporters say that given the revolt in March by Disney shareholders unhappy with Eisner's management and the company's long-term performance, Chernin may be just what they're looking for: an Eisner-like outsider who could offer a fresh start.    "He stands his ground and certainly has an ego," said Grushow, who oversaw the Fox television network and its production arm before resigning this year. "But he's able to subjugate it, as his years working for Murdoch demonstrate."

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22 October 2004 Science Magazine NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: Male Sweep of New Award Raises Questions of Bias Jeffrey Mervis Where are the women? That's what some scientists are asking after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) picked nine men to receive the inaugural Director's Pioneer Award for innovative research (Science, 8 October, p. 220). The 5-year, $500,000-a-year awards are part of NIH's "roadmap" for increasing the payoff from the agency's $28 billion budget, and Director Elias Zerhouni has compared the winners to famed U.S. explorers Merriweather Lewis and William Clark for their willingness "to explore uncharted territory." Within hours of the 29 September announcement, however, some researchers had begun to bristle at the gender imbalance in that first class of biomedical pioneers. "It sends a message to women researchers that they are not on an even playing field," wrote Elizabeth Ivey, president of the Association for Women in Science, in a 1 October letter to Zerhouni. "I hope that you [will] make an effort to correct such a perception." The American Society for Cell Biology, in a 15 October letter to Zerhouni, commended him for creating the prize but lamented its "demoralizing effect" on the community. Critics noted that men constituted 94% (60 of 64) of the reviewers tapped to help winnow down some 1300 applications for the award and seven of the eight outside scientists on the final review panel, which grilled applicants for an hour before settling on the winners. NIH officials estimate that women made up about 20% of the Pioneer applicants. But only about 13% of the 240 who made it through the first cut were women, and only two of the 21 finalists. (In contrast, about 25% of the applicants for NIH's bread-and-butter R01 awards to individual investigators are women, and their success rate is within a percentage point of that of their male counterparts.) "With any elite award, there are so many deserving candidates that it's easy to choose only men," says Stanford University neuroscientist Ben Barres, who says he was "outraged" by the gender imbalance. "I actually think it's more a matter of neglect than of sexism." The gender of the final applicants did not come up during the discussion, says review panel member Judith Swain, professor of medicine at Stanford. Swain, who called the exercise "the most interesting review panel I've ever been involved in," says she saw no evidence of "active discrimination." But she concurs that the demographics of the reviewers and the winners lead to "a disturbing observation."

Men at work. Nine men won the first NIH Director's Pioneer Awards, chosen by panels that included few women. NIH officials are struggling to find the best way to respond to the charges of gender insensitivity. Stephen Straus, head of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and team leader for the NIH-wide competition, told Science on the day of the awards that "we gave the gender issue a great deal of thought, but none of the women finalists came close to making the pay line." A week later, in the first of a series of e-mail exchanges with Barres, Straus remarked that the absence of women was "noted with some surprise" by senior NIH officials and that "we know we can do better" in subsequent rounds. In a later exchange, however, Straus wrote, "I don't believe that NIH can credibly discard its two-level peer review system when nine grants out of the many thousands awarded this year turn out differently than some might wish." NIH is evaluating how it ran the Pioneer program--including how the award was publicized and the demographics of the applicants--before launching the next competition in January. A thorough review is essential, says Arthur Kleinman, a medical anthropologist at Harvard University and chair of the final review panel, who believes NIH needs to do more to reach several groups--minorities and social and behavioral scientists as well as women--not represented in the first batch of winners. "I agree that they need to be more sensitive to diversity," he says. "But at the same time, I think Zerhouni deserves a lot of credit for even trying something like this."

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October 17, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD Sanctuary for the Wolf Orphans of Apartheid The animals were imported for use as guard dogs but proved untamable. Now a lone facility struggles to care for the castoffs. By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer STORMS RIVER, South Africa — It is tough being an alpha wolf — the pack leader — as Michael McDonald knows too well. It means deciding when they eat, where they live and, sometimes, which ones have to die. When he is near, the packs at Tsitsikamma Wolf Sanctuary, near the southern coast, jump up and start circling. They know he's the top wolf, but, he says, "I irritate them. I have to take all the harsh decisions. I am always the enemy."    In the apartheid era, scientists at Roodeplaat Breeding Enterprises imported the animals from North America in an attempt to create an attack dog that would have a wolf's stamina and sense of smell to track down insurgents in the harsh border regions. The secretive experiment failed because the wolf hybrids were stubborn and hard to train.    Today, these orphans of apartheid face a troubled future in a land where they will never be at home.    In crime-ridden South Africa, many people believe that no dog is a better deterrent than a hybrid or pure wolf. There's a cachet in owning one, and a brisk trade in wolf dogs advertised in newspapers and on the Internet.	"A lot of people are trying to get rich on these animals," said Colleen O'Carroll, the founder and director of the wolf sanctuary, who disputes breeders' claims that wolves and hybrids make good family pets. She said people were using an endangered species "to create something even more misunderstood than the original."    People who buy pure wolves seeking savage guard dogs are often surprised to find that they make terrible watchdogs.    "You have a supposedly ferocious wolf. But when a burglar comes, do you think it will attack? It will hide behind you, because you are the alpha in the pack. If someone rings the doorbell, they go and hide," O'Carroll said.    Breeders of wolf dogs, as the hybrids are known, publish glowing testimonials from happy clients.    But the wolf sanctuary gets hundreds of calls from wolf or wolf hybrid owners complaining about the odd behaviors of their pets: reducing the yard to a moonscape of holes, digging cavernous dens under the garage, chewing things to pieces, climbing fences and howling to the moon. One man shot his wolf dog after it ate his chickens. A woman telephoned in tears after her wolf hybrid ate her most valuable thoroughbred foal.    "You can't impose your will on it, because it's half wild animal. You can't expect it to act like a dog," O'Carroll said. "People buy them as a status symbol. It's like saying, 'I've got a Bengal tiger.' It's like a man buying a Porsche as opposed to a VW."    It's not clear how many wolves remain in South Africa, or how the original wolves survived after the projects were abandoned.
But the Tsitsikamma sanctuary cares for 35 wolves, has 23 on its waiting list and is expecting to take in a new litter of pure wolf pups next month from someone connected with one of the original breeding programs. The sanctuary estimates that there are about 200 pure wolves in South Africa and tens of thousands of hybrids.    O'Carroll opened the sanctuary in 2000 after tracing wolves left over from various state breeding projects. It accepts only pure wolves.    "I get asked every day, 'Why don't you just put the things down? They don't belong here,' " said O'Carroll, a sentimentalist with a core of steel.    She is the patron of a lost cause. Ask her or McDonald about the future of the wolves at Tsitsikamma, and both look sadly into the distance: "No future," they murmur.    "It's a very sad story," O'Carroll said. "There's nothing we can do with them. We can't send them back to North America. They're animals in exile."    Rescuing the wolves is an undertaking ruinous to one's bank balance: Conservation organizations and sponsors are not interested in helping to save animals in places where they don't belong, so the sanctuary survives on private donations.    O'Carroll emptied her bank account and sold off four apartments to keep the sanctuary going. It was built by hand: They couldn't afford power tools.	"I have to have a screw loose somewhere," she said. "But I have a passion for them."    She forgets the financial stress when she sits near her favorite enclosures in the evenings, watching her beloved wolves playing, swimming and racing around. At night, when the wolves howl, raising their eerie, beautiful music to the stars, nothing else matters.    McDonald, 42, used to work "in security" but won't be more specific. Now he cares for the wolves — with no salary or even a pension — often surviving on the same meat the wolves eat: unwanted cow and calf carcasses donated by dairy farmers. He has few belongings and no money for clothes or even a luxury as modest as a cookie. He once had to pawn a watch to pay for the sanctuary's gasoline, and other times walked to collect dead cows with a wheelbarrow.    "It's a seriously hard life," he said.    Ask him why he does it and he sidesteps the question with a flurry of self-deprecating banter: "There was no one else to do it." But he feels the wolves are his destiny, even if they don't always appreciate him.    The wolves, always ready to challenge the alpha, sometimes bite McDonald. But the day a female named Cleo nipped him on the rump, he felt a strange elation.
"It meant she had accepted me," he said. "We were equals."    Many of the sanctuary's wolves are former pets. Cleo, from a family in Durban, tore her former owner's fiberglass boat to pieces, ripped the drainpipes off his house and howled every night before her family — in her eyes, her pack — gave up on her.    Another owner handed over his pure wolf, Della — the only socialized wolf at the sanctuary — when it dawned on him what a complex, demanding animal she was and how much of his time she was going to need. Storm, one of the sanctuary's alpha males, was abandoned at the sanctuary.    O'Carroll and wolf experts in the United States, such as the Wolf Park in Battle Ground, Ind., warn that wolf dogs should not be seen as family pets, and even those socialized to humans can attack children, especially if a child falls and cries. O'Carroll's motive, apart from rescuing the wolves, is to educate the public about wolves and hybrids.	O'Carroll and McDonald feel they're on a mission, and when things get bad they keep each other going.    "At times when I absolutely despair and I cry and I say, 'There's no money, how are we going to make the payments?' he says, 'Look, woman, the spirit always provides,' " O'Carroll said. "And sure enough, someone makes a donation or something happens.' "    McDonald once led an ordinary materialistic life. He had good cars, a family, but now he does not want money or belongings. He wants only the wolves.    "If the wolves weren't here, I wouldn't be here," he said. "The wolves have literally become my life. There's nowhere to go."

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October 16, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE It's a Historic Drought As waters around the country recede, the past is revisited at sites long submerged. By Lake Mead, an entire town has reappeared. By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer OVERTON, Nev. — Early last year, fishermen searching for bass and bluegill on a northern finger of Lake Mead saw a curious cluster of concrete blocks jutting out of the water. It turned out to be the chimney of what had been, 65 years prior, an ice cream parlor.    Within months, other ruins began to emerge from the lake: The steps of a nearby schoolhouse. The foundation of the old Gentry Hotel, where President Hoover once bunked for the night.    Today, the water line of Lake Mead, once six miles to the northwest, is half a mile to the southeast. Now, there is a sun-soaked valley, along with the ruins of St. Thomas, a town that was, until very recently, under 64 feet of water.    For nearly six years, a drought has afflicted much of the United States. Some regions haven't been as dry as they are today for 1,000 years or more, scientists say, and there have been terrible consequences: crop losses, falling electricity production at dams, savage wildfires.    For historians, however, the drought has brought an intriguing diversion. Pieces of the past that had long been submerged, and often forgotten, are emerging again as lakes and rivers shrink.    St. Thomas was formed in 1865 by Mormons who were dispatched to southern Nevada to plant cotton and push the reach of their church toward the West Coast.	THE SCHOOL: Nevada state archeologist Eva Jensen stands on the foundation of St. Thomas' Schoolhouse. "Its's just incredible how much has been exposed," sh says. The remains of about 40 building are now visible, the settler's craftsmanship evident in the tan concrete blocks they made out of silt from the Muddy and Virgin rivers.
For a spell, the town was the epitome of the western frontier, a bleak outpost where devout religion clashed with liquor and miners, where dreams of a better life were shattered by debilitating heat and disease. In 1938, it was erased — flooded, intentionally, when the construction of Hoover Dam created Lake Mead.    Eva Jensen, a Nevada Department of Cultural Affairs archeologist, stood in the middle of the town's ruins recently, shaking her head in dismay and wonder.    "The circumstances of this are not good," she said. "But it is fascinating to watch it happen. It's just incredible how much has been exposed, and how fast it has happened."    Historians and archeologists have reported similar discoveries across the West and the South, drawing widespread interest from outdoors enthusiasts, sightseers and students.    Not far from St. Thomas, in a northern stretch of Lake Mead known as the Overton Arm, prehistoric salt mines have been exposed. Near Roosevelt, Ariz., in an area that was flooded a century ago to build a reservoir, relics left behind by Salado Indians, including ornate jars and pots believed to explain religious parables, have surfaced.	In Utah's Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, a prized geographic formation known as the Cathedral in the Desert — long swamped by the creation of Lake Powell — has been revealed again as water levels have dropped more than 70 feet. In northeast Georgia, a town founded by tobacco dealers in the 1700s, lost when the government created Thurmond Lake, has emerged.    Judy Bense, chairwoman of the anthropology department at the University of West Florida in Pensacola and the president-elect of the Society for Historical Archeology, said the drought had created an exciting time for academicians — and a fleeting opportunity, since the weather will eventually turn and the water will rise again.    Many of the objects that have reemerged, perhaps most, have little historical significance. A large water-clarifying tank that juts above the surface of Lake Mead, for instance, is more of a menace to pleasure boaters and fishermen than anything. Other finds are significant, however.    Archeologists, for instance, recently discovered ancient canoes embedded in a lake bank near Gainesville, Fla., Bense said. Radiocarbon dating showed that the canoes were 3,000 to 5,000 years old, causing some historians to rethink the conventional understanding of historical water transport trends and migration patterns in the region.
Near Zapata, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border, portions of a colonial town established in the 1750s — intentionally flooded when the two countries dammed the Rio Grande to create the Falcon Lake reservoir — have emerged again. They include Nuestra Senora del Refugio, a historic Spanish mission, as well as facilities where historians believe the world's finest lace was produced more than 200 years ago.    "Archeologists are used to this kind of thing," Bense said. "But even we are amazed at what we are finding."    Because historical sites are emerging so quickly, academicians and government regulators are having a hard time figuring out what to do with them — how to catalog, study and, if necessary, preserve them.    Jensen and other historians are pushing for a full-fledged archeological dig at St. Thomas, about 60 miles northeast of Las Vegas, but state and federal officials are still sorting through red tape.    Virtually all that officials have been able to do so far is trim back the tamarisk shrubs that have taken over newly dry areas, offering shade to coyotes and lizards that quickly replaced the bass. Even those efforts are lagging, making it difficult to access some of the building foundations.	Amid the ruins of colonial towns and Native American communities that have emerged around the country are tens of thousands of artifacts — some of it junk, but all of it worth a look to historians. For several reasons, the artifacts are in peril.    Many wooden structures and artifacts were protected by being underwater, largely because the pieces were shielded from corrosive oxygen. Now that they are above water, archeologists fear that the wooden relics will quickly dry out and crumble.    In the Ocala National Forest in Florida, where several small lakes have vanished, portions of a well-preserved 500-year-old fish trap were exposed recently, and federal officials feared it would be lost. At St. Thomas, Jensen said, delicate window frames on many of the houses, made of wood hauled in from the Utah hills, will soon dry out and fall apart.    The emergence of historic sites has also brought about court battles.    Late last year, for instance, U.S. District Judge Kent J. Dawson dismissed an aircraft salvage company's claim to a B-29 bomber that crashed into the Overton Arm of Lake Mead.    Local residents had known that a group of test pilots, who bailed out and survived, had crashed a bomber into the lake in 1948. The wreck's location was unknown until August 2002, when the salvage company used high-tech sonar to find it. The discovery set off a dispute over who should control the site.
Entrepreneurs had hoped to raise and restore the plane, which is seen as historically significant and potentially valuable. State and federal officials designated the wreck a "sensitive archeological resource" and restricted the public's ability to dive there so they could study the plane and preserve the site.    Finally, looters have descended upon numerous ruins.    Federal officials have banned overnight camping near St. Thomas, primarily to guard against scavengers who were coming out at night with metal detectors, some in search of old railroad ties and buggy parts, and others apparently driven, officials said, by a false rumor that a $5 gold piece was discovered there recently. It has long been illegal to take artifacts from federally protected land, and more than a dozen people have been charged with preservation law violations at Lake Mead.    In Georgia — a prime region for hunting arrowheads, burial items and other Native American relics that can fetch high dollar on the Internet — state officials have also had difficulties with looters.    Anticipating that shrinking lakes would expose historic sites, the state passed property laws three years ago to guard against artifact collectors.    Collectors rebelled: They launched petition drives and argued frequently with law enforcement officers, resulting in numerous arrests.    This year, Georgia tried to make peace through a new program that let collectors accompany state officials on archeological expeditions. They are allowed to keep the relics they find, provided that an on-site official determines that the pieces have no historic significance, said Georgia Department of Natural Resources Capt. Mike Commander.    "We're trying our best to be a good steward of these resources, and it hasn't been easy," he said. "But I think everyone is starting to understand that this is in everyone's best interest."    The Hannig Ice Cream Parlor's chimney, the highest point of the St. Thomas ruins, had popped up during a few dry spells in the past. This time it is different: The entire town is visible.	Today at the ghostly, isolated site, portions of about 40 buildings have been exposed. Most were built of tan concrete blocks that look intensely bright when illuminated by the desert sun and contrasted against the colorful mesas and hills behind them. The blocks, crafted of silt lifted from the nearby Muddy and Virgin rivers, are expertly squared off at the edges.    On the outskirts of town — "the rich neighborhood," Jensen said — are the foundations of larger estates, where settlers grew cotton, watermelons, pomegranates and cantaloupes that they sold to nearby towns and as far west as Los Angeles. Orange and cottonwood trees were planted alongside some of the streets; their stumps remain today.    In the center of town is a smattering of smaller foundations. Some of the cellars are still intact, held together by metal bow springs that were removed from buggies and fused into the concrete walls during construction for support.    Two thoroughfares slice through the settlement. One is the path of a long-defunct railroad spur. Built in 1918, the rail made regular stops at St. Thomas, introducing new goods, including blocks of ice and bottles of booze, that led to the town's brief but colorful heyday and ballooned its population from 300 to almost 500. The second was the original Highway 91, which went all the way to Los Angeles.    Remnants of the post office are here, where the last bag of mail was stamped and postmarked on June 11, 1938, then tossed in a boat for delivery as the water crept up behind Hoover Dam and through the streets of St. Thomas. So is the foundation of stubborn Hugh Lord's house. Local historians say Lord was the last holdout — refusing to believe the water would ever reach his tiny home and then, when it did, was so upset that he tried to burn it down before fleeing in a rowboat.    "All of this was under water," Jensen said. "And it was 64 feet deep. Imagine how much water that is. And how much had to go away."

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October 8, 2004 Science Magazine Losing Fast Loss of ice from Antarctica is thought to be responsible for about 10% of contemporary sea level rise, but that estimate is still uncertain. Knowing the mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is of great importance because of its tremendous size, which is large enough to cause sea level to rise more than 70 meters were it to melt completely. Thomas et al. (p. 255, published online 23 September 2004; see the 24 September news story by Kerr) report results from aircraft and satellite surveys of the ice sheet in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica and find that glacial thinning rates near the coast have doubled since the 1990s. This region of the ice sheet alone, which contains enough ice to raise sea level by more than 1 meter were it to melt, may be contributing as much to sea level rise as all of Antarctica was thought to contribute a decade ago. October 10, 2004 Los Angeles Times Floods, Landslides Kill 144 Across South Asia The toll is expected to rise as more bodies are recovered in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. NEW DELHI — Unseasonable heavy downpours have triggered landslides and submerged large areas in northeastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal in the last three days, leaving at least 144 people dead, authorities said Saturday.

In India, the death toll rose to 100 after rescue workers recovered the bodies of 61 people who had been swept away by flash floods in the remote Goalpara district in Assam state, officials said.    In the northern parts of neighboring Bangladesh, tornadoes and heavy rains have killed 39 people and injured hundreds. Five people died in landslides in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal.    The deaths brought to 2,283 this year's toll of those killed by rains, floods and flood-related diseases in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Most of the casualties occurred during the monsoon season, from June to September.     In Goalpara district, flash floods in the last three days have inundated at least 182 villages, mostly along the Himalayan foothills, said Deepak Kumar Goswami, the district's top administrator.     Water gushing down the hills has flattened hundreds of mud-and-thatch houses, sweeping away people as they were sleeping, Goswami said.     "The possibility of finding more bodies is very high," he said. "Soldiers and local people found bodies almost everywhere, inside flattened houses and in the adjoining paddy fields. It's a devastation that the locals have not seen in years."     In neighboring West Bengal state, the rains caused houses to collapse, Hafiz Alam Sairani, the state's relief minister, said Saturday.     Hundreds of huts have been flattened by rainstorms that have battered the coastal state since Thursday and more than 50,000 people were sheltering in schools and government buildings, he said.

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October 3, 2004 Los Angeles Times Label Finds Rapper's Crime Doesn't Pay Def Jam Records had focused on Shyne's prison term to build his credibility. But people haven't bought into it. By Chuck Philips, Times Staff Writer Jailhouse rap has turned out to be a bust for Def Jam Records.    The New York label last year won a multimillion-dollar bidding war to sign imprisoned rapper Shyne. Before the release of his debut CD, "Godfather Buried Alive," Def Jam made sure its new catch was everywhere — in music magazines, in videos and on live radio interviews broadcast on top-rated hip-hop stations around the country.    The night before the album hit stores, MTV News aired an hourlong special on the rapper, whose real name is Jamal Barrow. The special, partially underwritten by Def Jam, was called "Shyne On."    But rap fans apparently were turned off.    The album, released Aug. 10, flopped. In its seven weeks on sale, "Godfather" has sold 354,000 copies — less than half what most hit rap CDs sell in their premiere week. In the latest seven-day tally, it sold just 15,500 copies and plunged to No. 68 on the national pop chart, according to Nielsen SoundScan.    Def Jam spent more than $4 million to sign, record and market "Godfather," sources said. Based on sales figures compiled by Nielsen SoundScan, the company has recovered about $1.3 million of that investment. High-level sources at Def Jam said they didn't expect the record to pick up steam at this point and were prepared to abandon the project.    Barrow seems to be the only one who profited from the ill-fated Def Jam deal. He received a $3-million advance.    Def Jam's willingness to capitalize on Barrow's criminal background to promote his CD may seem crass, but it is the kind of stunt that is becoming more common as record companies strive to remain relevant to consumers. Increasingly, the music industry has sought to refashion itself as the prime purveyor of not just music, but culture and lifestyle. With the encouragement of music executives, such artists as Britney Spears and 50 Cent have teamed up with corporate advertisers to hawk shoes, soda and video games.    When it comes to rap stars, music industry executives know that they're selling menace as well as music. Criminality adds credibility, and in the case of Barrow, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y., for assault, it may have been more marketable than his talent.

"Buying into Shyne isn't like buying into the normal hip-hop artist," said Marcus Logan, a consultant who helped construct the marketing campaign for Barrow's new release. "With him, the music is almost secondary . We were selling his story, his credibility."    Last year, Def Jam executives began visiting Barrow in prison and wooing him to join the label. Months later, in April, Def Jam outbid Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music Group and Sony Corp.'s Sony Music Entertainment to sign the rapper, paying him the multimillion-dollar advance and agreeing to finance a joint venture label called Gangland Records.    Barrow, a former protege of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, had previously released only one modest-selling album, a self-titled CD put out by Combs' Bad Boy Records. Barrow's fledgling rap career was interrupted after he was implicated in a Manhattan nightclub shooting in 1999. Witnesses testified that Barrow fired a pistol into the crowd, injuring several club patrons.    Barrow, who often raps about shootings and gang warfare, is ineligible for parole until 2009.    Most of Barrow's vocals for the album were recorded several years ago, before he entered prison. Def Jam hired some of the industry's hottest producers to create new tracks supporting those vocals. However, Barrow's rap on "For the Record," one of the album's strongest tracks, was recorded this year over a prison telephone line.    Def Jam's eagerness to sign Barrow also illustrated the major shift that occurred at its corporate parent, Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group. Just five years ago, the company banned the use of sexually graphic and violent imagery.    The company's attitude toward rap began to change in 2000, after Universal bought PolyGram and took control of Def Jam, one of the raunchiest but most profitable rap labels. Gradually, music executives who had led the corporation's crusade against sexually explicit rap music began to orchestrate the mainstreaming of "gangsta" rap imagery and help land corporate endorsements for such rap stars as Jay-Z and Ludacris.    Shyne doesn't seem destined for such superstar treatment, which is OK with him. "Me, I don't think about sales," he said in a phone interview from prison on the eve of his CD's release. "Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice sold millions of records. Record sales don't capture what I want to be. This is my art. My lifestyle. What you see is my way of being."

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(*8) October 3, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE NATION As Reservoirs Recede, Fears of a Water Shortage Rise The seven states that rely on the Colorado River confront the possibility of inadequate supplies. By Bettina Boxall, Times Staff Writer PAGE, Ariz. — Behind Glen Canyon Dam spreads a vista reincarnated. One of the West's mightiest reservoirs is in steady retreat, the deep turquoise of its waters replaced by the chalky white of canyon walls submerged four decades ago. Five years of record-breaking drought in the Colorado River basin have drained Lake Powell of more than 60% of its water. Flows on the Colorado are among the lowest in 500 years. Downriver, Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in North America and supplier of water to Southern California, Arizona and Las Vegas, is little more than half full. At Mead's northern end, the foundations of St. Thomas, a little town demolished in the 1930s to make way for the reservoir, have reemerged. The 1,450-mile-long river that greens 3.5 million acres of farm and range land and helps feed the faucets of 25 million people may within a few years lack the water to quench the West's great thirst. For the first time ever, the seven states that rely on the Colorado are confronting the possibility of a shortage.

"They've never had to face a shortage of this consequence," said Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority that supplies Las Vegas, one of the most river-dependent cities in the Colorado basin. "When you're right up against it and facing the possibility of inadequate supplies to municipalities or farmers or jeopardizing recreation values, these are very tough choices." The states are meeting now to try to figure out how they will deal with a shortage if the drought continues. As with everything else on the heavily regulated Colorado, the answers will be found in a complex tangle of law and politics.

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October 2, 2004 The Economist Magazine The fishing industry Heading for the final fillet A bleak outlook for fish stocks FISH becoming ever more scarce; greed, crime, cruelty, waste, folly, destruction, hypocrisy, ignorance, pusillanimity, deception and the possibility of extinction all becoming ever more abundant. That is the theme of Charles Clover's book about the world fishing industry. The problem with fishing is as follows. Fish are a wonderful source of protein, not just for the swelling populations of poor countries but, because they are generally better for you than meat, also for health-conscious guzzlers in richer places. As man's appetite for fish has grown, so has his ability to catch them. Modern gadgets—sonars, global positioning system plotters, sea-mapping software, echo sounders, radio beacons, bathymetric generators, “fish aggregation devices” and the like—enable today's vast fishing boats to find and kill their prey as never before. Although the signs of growing scarcity are everywhere—smaller fish, smaller catches, sometimes no catch at all—most of the efforts to manage fish stocks or control overfishing have failed. When rich or big countries, whether Japan, China or various members of the European Union, exhaust their traditional fisheries, they move on to new ones. With the EU's blessing, European countries—Spain is the most rapacious—buy fishing rights from African states for trifling sums and then set about their predations. They, and others, have also moved on to deplete the stocks in the world's last waters to be exploited—round Antarctica,

The End of the Line: How Over-Fishing is Changing the World and What We Eat. by Charles Clover. Ebury Press; 320 pages in the Indian Ocean and in the South Atlantic, just as they have fished out the stocks in the North Sea, the Mediterranean and the Grand Banks off Canada. As they exhaust the big fish, they may have to go after smaller and uglier specimens that they used to throw back. They may also have to change the off-putting names of the creatures of the deep to make them more palatable: the Patagonian toothfish shows up on fancy menus as Chilean sea bass. But demand grows and grows, and with it the plunder of the seas.

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(*9) September 10, 2004 Science Magazine OCEAN ECOLOGY: Dead Zone Fix Not a Dead Issue Scientists debate how best to revive the Gulf of Mexico's oxygen-starved waters Dan Ferber Every summer, death stalks the waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico. A New Jersey-size swath of sea becomes depleted of oxygen, suffocating millions of crabs and other denizens of the sea floor. In 1999, the federal government diagnosed the cause of this seasonal dead zone: The hypoxia arises largely because of nitrogen pollution from the fertilizer-drenched farms in states along the Mississippi River. Two years later, the government released a plan to reduce nitrogen runoff and revive the gulf. Now a new government report says that because the original diagnosis was wrong, the costly prescription will fail. Released last month to little public notice, the controversial report, issued by the Atlanta office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), places increased blame for the dead zone on phosphorus pollution from factories and cities along the Mississippi River and recommends focusing the cleanup on phosphorus as well as nitrogen. Farm-industry groups seeking to delay the national plan have seized on an early draft of the report that challenged the use of any nitrogen reduction. Marine scientists have given the report, which has not yet been peer reviewed, a cooler reception. "I think it has some really serious deficiencies," says Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Enough already. Excess nutrients from the Mississippi River cause phytoplankton blooms (red and yellow) near the river's mouth. CREDIT: STEVEN LOHRENZ/UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI Scientists agree that factories, cities, and farms in the Mississippi River watershed have jacked up both phosphorus and nitrogen levels in the river. Each spring, those nutrients pour into the northern Gulf of Mexico and trigger blooms of phytoplankton, minuscule plants that float in the water. That sets off population booms in zooplankton, the tiny animals that consume them. Then sea-floor bacteria, which feed on dead zooplankton and their waste, multiply wildly and use up oxygen in the bottom waters. In 1999, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a comprehensive assessment of the causes and consequences of hypoxia in the gulf. It concluded that phytoplankton growth in the dead

zone was primarily limited by the availability of nitrogen. Relying on that report, a state-federal partnership, the Task Force on Gulf Hypoxia, developed a national action plan with a single overarching goal: reduce nitrogen coming down the Mississippi River by 30% by 2015. That prescription seemed simplistic to Howard Marshall, a veteran water-quality scientist at EPA's Atlanta regional office who was assigned to help implement the plan. By reexamining available data on dissolved nitrogen and dissolved phosphorus concentrations, Marshall and other EPA scientists determined that the lower Mississippi River contained a large excess of dissolved nitrogen relative to dissolved phosphorus. Although growing phytoplankton need more nitrogen than phosphorus--they usually accumulate the nutrients at a 16:1 ratio--the amount of nitrogen so exceeded the quantity of phosphorus that the latter nutrient had most likely limited the growth of phytoplankton there, the EPA group concluded. The same also held true for the northern gulf in the spring, when the dead zone typically forms, according to the group. "Wouldn't it be better to reduce phosphorus and starve the bastards?" Marshall asks. That's "pretty naοve," argues biogeochemist Robert Howarth of Cornell University, who chaired a National Research Council committee in 2000 that examined hypoxia in coastal oceans. Last week, Howarth, Boesch, and Donald Scavia of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, sent EPA a letter criticizing the new report. They argue, for example, that the nutrient ratios in water don't necessarily reveal what's available to phytoplankton, because phosphorus is resupplied from organic debris in the sediment. But other oceanographers who have seen the report say that the EPA team has a point. "There's been this focus on nitrogen as the major culprit, even though we knew from early on that phosphorus played a role," says biological oceanographer Steven Lohrenz of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. And oceanographer Michael Dagg of the

Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium in Cocodrie, who's worked in the gulf since the 1980s, says that Marshall "has done an extremely important service by scrutinizing these issues as intensely as he did. It should have been done 10 years ago." Indeed, several recent lines of evidence support the idea that phosphorus can control phytoplankton growth in the gulf. In results presented in January at the American Geophysical Union's Ocean Sciences meeting, James Ammerman of Rutgers University and colleagues reported that nitrogen-to-phosphorus ratios greater than 380 occurred over the entire Louisiana continental shelf in the spring and early summer of 2001, indicating that phosphorus supplies may well constrain the plants' growth. Moreover, adding phosphorus but not nitrogen stimulated phytoplankton growth in bottles containing seawater from many of those locations. And phytoplankton from much of the shelf had high levels of an enzyme that they turn on to scavenge phosphorus when supplies are tight. Overall, the data suggest that "there's this huge slug of water going into the gulf that's phosphorus-limited at its fresh end and nitrogen-limited at its salty end," says coastal ecologist Hans Paerl of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. What remains unknown, he says, is how much phytoplankton growth at the fresh end contributes to hypoxia. At last week's meeting of the gulf hypoxia task force, farm-industry interests lobbied to redo the NOAA-led science assessment and delay expensive efforts to reduce fertilizer runoff from farms. EPA's Ben Grumbles, acting assistant administrator in the Office of Water, says the task force is "committed to doing an independent peer review" of the new EPA report, and that the reviewers should include "fresh faces" who weren't involved in the 1999 NOAA assessment. But he emphasizes that the agency plans to continue its efforts to cut nitrogen pollution while exploring how to cut phosphorus. For the gulf, that may be just what the doctor ordered.

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September 2004 Natural History Magazine Blurring Wallace's Line "As a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible," Alfred Russel Wallace once wrote in a paper on the geography of the Malay Archipelago, "so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily obscure this invaluable record of the past." When Wallace recorded those thoughts in 1863, the evolutionary record of the fauna and flora of Southeast Asia was clearer than it would ever be again. That "invaluable record of the past," and Wallace's own detailed observations of it, led to Wallace's momentous insights about natural selection and biogeography. What Wallace found was that many of the organisms he studied were restricted to single islands or groups of islands, and that such idiosyncratic distributions of species often told important stories about the past. In Bali, he found "birds of the genera Copsychus, Megalaima, Tiga, Ploceus, and Sturnopastor, all characteristic of the Indian region." On a subsequent trip, to an island little more than fifteen and a half miles away, he noticed that "on crossing over to Lombock, during three months collecting there, not one [of the bird genera he had observed on Bali] was ever seen." More than a century before the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics, Wallace began to imagine the movements of continents that might lead to such distinct variety and patterning.

I crossed Wallace's line when I traveled recently from Australia to the Malay Archipelago. It should have been easy to observe the transition in organisms that Wallace recorded: kangaroos in Australia that give way to tapirs in Asia, Australian cockatoos that cede to hornbills in Southeast Asia. But when I landed in Singapore, the first thing I saw was a cockatoo. Such introduced species, dragged across Wallace's Line, have partly obscured it, and helped blot out the traces of evolutionary history that the boundary had preserved for so long. The evolutionary record has been most obscured on the island-nation of Singapore, where Wallace did most of his collecting. More than 99 percent of the mature forest that once covered the island is gone [see "Singapores Vest-Pocket Park," by Jamie James, April 2004], and 'Singapore has lost about half its animal species in the past two centuries. The last tiger -from a population so numerous in Wallace's time that they terrified him at night- was killed in 1930 [ see photograph above]. Deforestation and the loss of indigenous species have all been far more dramatic in Singapore than anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Still, Singapore is hardly unique. Recent studies by Barry W Brook of Northern Territory University in Darwin, Australia, Navjot Sodhi of National University of Singapore, and their colleagues noted that forests are disappearing in this region faster than anywhere else on the globe -at a rate of about 0.9 percent annually, compared with 0.4 percent a year in Africa and South America. Another study found that more timber has been harvested in Borneo alone in the past two decades than from Africa and South America combined. During his stay in the Malay Archipelago, from 1854 until 1862, Wallace collected 900 new species of beetles, 200 new species of ants, fifty new species of butterflies, and 212 new species of birds. If current estimates of extinction rates are correct, between 13 and 42 percent of all species that inhabited the region at the beginning of the nineteenth century could be gone by 2100. Yet, sadly, not only has the evolutionary record been blurred, but a valuable baseline for estimating the changes of the past century and a half -Wallace's own observations and collections- has also been undermined by a lack of reliable biohistorical research. Finding clear examples of individual species that Wallace observed in abundance but that today are rare or extinct is no easy task. No comprehensive list of the species Wallace collected exists, or, to my knowledge, is even in the works. The key to Wallace's particular contributions was his ability to recognize biogeographic boundaries. That ability rested on the possibility of moving among neighboring islands that clearly demonstrated differences in plant and animal species. Yet in Bali today, for instance, Wallace would be hard-pressed to find birds of the Copsychus and other bird genera he wrote about. They survive, all right, but they are hiding in ever-diminishing patches of forest. Wallace would now have to travel farther down every trail, deeper into every forest refuge, to observe what he could so plainly distinguish from boats and coastlines in the mid-nineteenth century. ROBERT R. DUNN is a postdoctoral investigator in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Tennessee. His research focuses on the biogeography of ants.

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September 26, 2004 Los Angeles Times In the flesh: maddening, captivating Bombay Maximum City: book review By Shashi Tharoor Bombay Lost and Found Suketu Mehta Alfred A. Knopf: 540 pp., $27.95 To some of us, the story of Bombay is a story of decline. I lived in Bombay from 1959 to 1969, the formative years of my childhood, and in those days everything exciting and vital in India appeared to be happening there. As late as 1979, the only Indian selection in the Time-Life Books' "Great Cities of the World" series was, inevitably, Bombay — a vibrant metropolis that saw itself as a sort of New York to New Delhi's Washington. A plaque outside the Gateway of India, a triumphal seashore arch, reminds us that it is known as the "Urbs Prima in Indis." But Bombay has been increasingly overtaken by Delhi. In the last two decades, Delhi has grown, sucking up the nation's resources and talents like a sponge — money, art, theater, publishing. Delhi is now the capital of virtually all the things that Bombayites used to pride themselves on. Gaining fast, especially on the livability index, is Bangalore, India's outsourcing capital, flourishing on the country's Silicon Plateau. So where does this leave Bombay? It is still the biggest, richest, most murderous city in India, Suketu Mehta tells us in his stunning first	book. Its population is about 17.5 million and growing. It is India's commercial capital, home of the country's main stock exchange, a city that pays 38% of India's taxes; it manufactures the grandiose dreams of Bollywood (making four times as many films annually as the United States); it boasts the country's most opulent hotels and commercial rents higher than those in Manhattan or Tokyo (while half the population is homeless); and it supports India's most innovative theaters and art galleries while millions of its residents eke out a bare subsistence in the world's largest slums. Bombay, Mehta points out, is a city of appalling contrasts — a bottle of champagne at the Oberoi Hotel sells for 1 1/2 times the national average annual income, when 40% of the city has no safe drinking water; the world's largest film industry thrives in a city where plumbing, telephones and law and order break down regularly; millions starve in filthy slums while the city supports several hundred slimming clinics. Such contrasts can be found elsewhere, but is there any other city on Earth to which immigrants continue to flock while the trains in the city alone kill 4,000 people a year? Where a thug buys chickens in the morning from Muslims whom he will butcher in the afternoon? ("Bombayites understand that business comes first.") Where a ragpicker can be hired to kill a man "for a sum of money that would not buy a cup of coffee at a good hotel in the city"? To Mehta, returning to the city to live after 21 years away, Bombay is "a way station, between paradise and hell. You came to Bombay to pass through it." His is the account — fierce, engaged, coruscating — of a curious outsider who became, for two years, an intimate insider.
Mehta's is not a history of the city, nor a portrait of the ways it has changed from the British days through the cosmopolitanism celebrated by Salman Rushdie to the glitter-and-dross of today. He makes no attempt to be comprehensive: You will find no details about Bombay's eclectic architecture, its fine museums and art galleries, its commercial life. There is little here for the would-be tourist. Mehta doesn't describe a boat trip in the choppy seas to Bombay's premier attraction, the Elephanta Caves, visit the cooperative milk colony or pay homage at Mani Bhavan, the house where Mohandas K. Gandhi lived and where many of his possessions can still be seen. Instead, he explores the underside of the city with the inquisitiveness of a voyeur, the sensibility of a poet and the zeal of a private investigator. Mehta is none of those things and yet, like the best writers, he is all of them. He talks to homicidal rioters about what a man looks like when he's on fire, and to police officers who specialize in fake "encounters" — cold-blooded executions of criminals the courts might otherwise acquit. He becomes so friendly with a gangster kingpin that he is offered a free contract killing as a reward. He works on a Bollywood film and discovers that the city's underworld and its dream world are reflections of each other. In perhaps the book's most affecting section, he tells the story of Babbanji, a 17-year-old runaway poet from the collapsing state of Bihar, working at a sidewalk bookstall and sleeping on the footpath, his only possession a tattered plastic bag containing his poems, which he composes at every opportunity on the blank spaces of used sheets of paper.	Mehta is brilliant on life in urban middle-class India: The obligations and the compromises, the erupting rage and the ready hospitality, the networking and influence peddling are depicted with insight and wit. There are asides on such matters as the hierarchies among servants, every bit as complex as in "Upstairs, Downstairs"; the argot used by Bombay's hit men to refer to their weapons and their victims; and the formula for Indianizing Coca-Cola into "masala Coke" (add lemon, pepper, rock salt and cumin). He is not squeamish about describing, in minute detail, riots, killings and wrist slashings, not to mention filth, waste, blood and feces; this is not a book to be digested at the dining table. And yet it is a powerful, arresting work, epitomized by his own image of Bombay's professional letter writers, penning love letters for illiterate migrants under a hail of pigeon droppings. However, 80 pages on the life of a "bar girl," an exotic dancer, seems self-indulgent and repetitive and reads like 50 pages too many. (He justifies his obsession by seeing the "bar-line" as "the intersection of everything that makes the city fascinating: money, sex, love, death and show business.") To me, what makes Bombay Bombay is that it is a microcosm of the best and worst of India. Its inhabitants hail from every part of the subcontinent. On its bustling streets you can hear every one of India's 18 major languages, see all its styles of dress, taste the astonishing variety of its cuisines, pray to any of its gods. In his idiosyncratic peregrinations through the city, Mehta says too little of this. Bombay is India writ small — a marvel of cosmopolitanism, pluralism and collective energy. It is thriving evidence that India's diversity, when channeled productively, is its richest asset.
Of course, Bombay — cosmopolitan yet conventional, creative but conformist — exists no longer. Literally, for a chauvinist government in Maharashtra, the state of which it is the capital, has renamed the city Mumbai. (This strikes me as the equivalent of a company jettisoning a well-known brand name in favor of an inelegant patronymic — as if McDonald's had renamed itself Kroc's in honor of its inventor. "Bombay" has entered global discourse; it conjures up associations of cosmopolitan bustle; it is attached to products such as Bombay gin, Bombay duck and the British colonial-style furniture sold by the Bombay Co.; it enjoys name recognition that many cities around the world would spend millions in publicity to acquire. "Mumbai" was the city's name in the Marathi language, but what has been gained by insisting on its adoption in English, aside from a nativist reassertion that benefits only sign painters and letterhead printers?) Mehta describes Bombay as "a city of multiple aliases, like gangsters and whores." It is a telling simile, for those are the categories through which he sees the city.	One frustration with this marvelous book (other than the hash he makes when he converts the Indian rupee to the dollar in several places) is that Mehta takes us into the lives of people whom he depicts with great sympathy but abandons in 2001. The book begs for an epilogue to tell us what has become of the aspiring poet, the fugitive gangster, the suicidal dancing girl, the amoral rioter and the millionaire renunciate-turned-mendicant. Mehta makes us care about them, but he does not take the reporter's responsibility to update their stories. Each Bombayite, Mehta observes, "inhabits his own Bombay." This book is Mehta's Bombay, maddening and captivating in turn. At one point, an aspiring actor tells him, "I love my India," in "the manner of a man confessing to adultery." That is exactly what Suketu Mehta does: He reveals his love for Bombay like an adulterer's — furtive and fascinated, aroused and ashamed, all at once. He gives us a city that "is a mass dream of the peoples of India," and although the dream includes a few nightmares, he makes you never want to wake up. Shashi Tharoor is the author of eight books about India, most recently "Nehru: The Invention of India."

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September 26, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE NEW FACE OF AL QAEDA Al Qaeda Seen as Wider Threat The network has evolved into a looser, ideological movement that may no longer report to Bin Laden. Critics say the White House focus is misdirected. This article was written by Douglas Frantz, Josh Meyer, Sebastian Rotella and Megan K. Stack. RABAT, Morocco — Authorities have made little progress worldwide in defeating Islamic extremists affiliated with Al Qaeda despite thwarting attacks and arresting high-profile figures, according to interviews with intelligence and law enforcement officials and outside experts.    On the contrary, officials warn that the Bush administration's upbeat assessment of its successes is overly optimistic and masks its strategic failure to understand and combat Al Qaeda's evolution.    Even before the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda was a loosely organized network, but core leaders exercised considerable control over its operations. Since the loss of its base in Afghanistan and many of those leaders, the organization has dispersed its operatives and reemerged as a lethal ideological movement.    Osama bin Laden may now serve more as an inspirational figure than a CEO, and the war in Iraq is helping focus militants' anger, according to dozens of interviews in recent weeks on several continents. European and moderate Islamic countries have become targets. And instead of undergoing lengthy training at camps in Afghanistan, recruits have been quickly indoctrinated at home and deployed on attacks.	The United States remains a target, but counter-terrorism officials and experts are alarmed by Al Qaeda's switch from spectacular attacks that require years of planning to smaller, more numerous strikes on softer targets that can be carried out swiftly with little money or outside help.    The impact of these smaller attacks can be enormous. Bombings in Casablanca in May 2003 shook Morocco's budding democracy, leading to mass arrests and claims of abuse. The bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid in March contributed to the ouster of Spain's government and the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq.    Officials say the terrorist movement has benefited from the rapid spread of radical Islam's message among potential recruits worldwide who are motivated by Al Qaeda's anti-Western doctrine, the continuing Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the insurgency in Iraq.    The Iraq war, which President Bush says is necessary to build a safer world, has emerged as a new front in the battle against terrorism and a rallying point for a seemingly endless supply of young extremists willing to die in a jihad, or holy war.    Intelligence and counter-terrorism officials said Iraq also was replacing Afghanistan and the Russian republic of Chechnya as the premier location for on-the-job training for the next phase of violence against the West and Arab regimes.    "In Iraq, a problem has been created that didn't exist there before," said Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere of France, dean of Europe's anti-terrorism investigators. "The events in Iraq have had a profound impact on the entirety of the jihad movement."
Officials warn that radical Islam is fanning extremism in moderate Islamic countries such as Morocco, where the threat of terrorism has escalated with unexpected speed and ferocity, and re-energizing adherents in old hot spots such as Kenya and Yemen.    In recent weeks, police thwarted an attack against a U.S. target in Morocco at the last minute, and concerns have increased sharply about the possibility of attacks in Kenya, U.S. and foreign officials say.    The Madrid bombings and arrests in Britain this summer highlight Europe's emergence as a danger zone. Long used by extremists as a haven for recruitment and planning attacks elsewhere, the continent now is believed to be a target itself, especially countries backing the Iraq war.    Al Qaeda's transformation since the destruction of its Afghan training camps nearly three years ago has been chronicled extensively. Arrests and killings of senior leaders and the shutting down of major avenues of financing further fragmented the network.    Bush said at the Republican National Convention this month that more than three-quarters of Al Qaeda's leadership had been killed or captured.    Among those arrested are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, alleged planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Abu Zubeida, who oversaw the global network and helped recruit for the training bases in Afghanistan.    Administration officials contend that information from interrogations helped prevent new attacks and unravel the network, leaving Al Qaeda too diminished to carry out a strike as complex as that of Sept. 11.	Polls indicate that voters trust Bush to handle the fight against terrorism better than his Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry.    A far less reassuring assessment of the condition of Islamic extremism emerged from the interviews with government intelligence officials, religious figures and counter-terrorism experts in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.    Although opinions are not unanimous and ambiguities remain, there is a consensus that Al Qaeda's leadership still exerts some control over attacks worldwide. However, veterans of the extremist movement have demonstrated a new autonomy in using the group's ideology and training techniques to launch attacks with little or no direct contact with the leaders.    "Any assessment that the global terror movement has been rolled back or that even one component, Al Qaeda, is on the run is optimistic and most certainly incorrect," said M.J. Gohel, head of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London think tank. "Bin Laden's doctrines are now playing themselves out all over the world. Destroying Al Qaeda will not resolve the problem."    U.S. and foreign intelligence officials said the Bush administration's focus on the "body count" of Al Qaeda leaders and its determination to stop the next attack meant comparatively few resources were devoted to understanding the threat.    Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA official, said in an interview that agents wound up "chasing our tails" to capture suspects and follow up leads at the expense of countering the rapid spread of Al Qaeda and the international jihad.
Scheuer, chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, now plays a broader role in counter-terrorism at the agency. He is the author of "Imperial Hubris," a recent book that criticized U.S. counter-terrorism policy; the interview with him occurred before the CIA restricted his conversations with reporters.    Another counter-terrorism expert who works as a consultant for the U.S. government and its allies said Scheuer's criticism had been echoed elsewhere.    "I think they're deluged with the immediate stuff and I think their horizons are also very, very short-term," said the consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "One of the biggest complaints I hear when talking to intelligence services around the world is that the Americans are so interested in the short term, preventing attacks and getting credit."    Anti-terrorism experts who fault the administration's strategy and its optimism argue that concentrating on individual plots and operatives obscures the need to address the broader dimensions of Islamic extremism and makes it impossible to mount an effective defense.    The Al Qaeda movement now appears to be more of an ideology than an organization, spreading worldwide among cells inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks.    Adherents generally share a few basic principles: an overarching belief that Muslims must take up arms in a holy war against the Judeo-Christian West, a profound sense of indignation over the deaths of Muslims in Palestinian territories and Iraq, and a conviction that secular rulers should be replaced by Islamic governments.	But beyond that, their concerns often splinter along the lines of geography, local politics and the intricacies of Islamic thought. A Moroccan is unlikely to pursue the same targets or even agree with the strategy of his Saudi counterparts. Saudis, in turn, are fighting bitterly among themselves over whether it's more important to battle the royal family at home or the Americans in Iraq.    The inadequate response to the threat is not unique to Washington.    European officials also see gaps in their policies, particularly when it comes to understanding the complexity of the situation, said Gijs de Vries, the counter-terrorism coordinator for the European Union.    "Al Qaeda is increasingly being invoked as an ideological motivation of Islamic radicals," he said. "There is a type of diffuse jihadism, which on the one hand consists of loosely structured small cells and on the other hand ideology." Shift to Smaller Strikes    A new cadre of second-generation Al Qaeda commanders has compensated for the damage to the network by stepping up the pace of attacks with smaller strikes on soft targets.    The strategy relies on a limited number of veteran operatives trained in Afghanistan who function with a high degree of autonomy. They recruit foot soldiers through mosques, local groups and the Internet, then provide on-site training in bomb-making and tactics.
Senior counter-terrorism authorities in the U.S. and Europe say they are not certain how much central control is exercised over these independent operators — or even whether they are linked to one another in a formal manner.    But officials said evidence indicated that attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Turkey during the last 16 months were part of a loosely coordinated pattern that could be traced to Bin Laden and his lieutenants.    Based primarily on intercepted communications from Iran to Saudi Arabia by U.S. listening posts, U.S. and European officials said orders for the suicide bombings in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on May 12, 2003, came from an Al Qaeda fugitive in Iran.    The officials said the most likely suspect was Saif Adel, a former Bin Laden bodyguard now believed to be Al Qaeda's military commander. But Western security officials said Adel was only one of numerous Al Qaeda figures granted haven by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iran denies that.    Extremists behind a string of attacks in Saudi Arabia since then operate with a large degree of independence, but Saudi security officials said the radicals retained links with Al Qaeda leaders in Iran and elsewhere by telephone and courier.    Authorities in Morocco and Europe said the go-ahead for the Casablanca suicide attacks on May 16, four days after the Riyadh bombings, was given at a meeting of Al Qaeda commanders in Istanbul, Turkey, in January 2003. They also said the young men who died carrying out the five nearly simultaneous bombings were recruited and trained by an Al Qaeda veteran.    Turkish extremists who bombed two synagogues, the British Consulate and the headquarters of a London-based bank in Istanbul in November 2003, killing more than 60 people, received money and advice on targets from Al Qaeda and its associates, according to testimony this month in the trial of 69 suspects.	One of the defendants, Adnan Ersoz, testified that he arranged a meeting in August 2001 in Afghanistan between Habib Akdas, the leader of the Turkish cell, and Mohammed Atef, also known as Abu Hafs Masri, a top Bin Laden lieutenant later killed in a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan.    He said that Akdas was promised money from Al Qaeda but that after Afghanistan's Taliban regime collapsed, the cell leader turned for financial help to Al Qaeda representatives in Iran and Syria, whom Ersoz did not identify. Akdas fled to Iraq immediately after the Istanbul bombings and participated in the kidnapping of several Turkish workers there, Turkish authorities said.    These smaller strikes cost relatively little, even compared with the modest $500,000 price tag for Sept. 11, indicating that the network has adapted to the clampdown on its financing methods.    Mohammed Bouzoubaa, Morocco's justice minister, said the bombings in Casablanca, which killed 45 people, cost $4,000.    Top suspects in the Madrid bombings have long-standing ties to Al Qaeda cells in Spain, Morocco and elsewhere. Still, six months after the bombings, investigators have no evidence that the planners received instructions or money from outside for the attacks that killed 191 people.    The methods used in Casablanca and Madrid illustrate what a senior European counter-terrorism official described as "the most frightening" scenario: local groups without previous experience, acting with minimal supervision from an interchangeable cast of Al Qaeda veterans.    "By now we have no evidence, not even credible intelligence, that the Madrid group was steered, financed, organized from the outside," he said. "So that might be the biggest success of Bin Laden."    In the past, Al Qaeda militants were mostly educated young men in their mid-20s and older who had strong religious convictions and middle-class backgrounds. They trained extensively at camps in Afghanistan and their missions were planned over months or years.
Recent attackers were drawn from a larger pool of alienated young men, reflecting the wider tug of Al Qaeda's doctrine, Bin Laden's status as a hero to some Muslims and fury at American foreign policy.    Some experts, like Richard Clarke, the former White House counter-terrorism chief, publicly blame the war in Iraq for strengthening the motivation of radical Islamic groups globally. Others still in governments around the world make the point privately, saying that the conflict in Iraq has broadened support for extremism.    De Vries, the EU counter-terrorism chief, acknowledged only that there were differences over the impact of Iraq. "Public opinion in many countries has not been convinced that the war in Iraq has helped the war on terror as defined by some," he said.    The bombers in Casablanca were uneducated slum dwellers between the ages of 20 and 24 with little previous involvement in extremism, religious figures and people who knew them say.    The Moroccan immigrants who spearheaded the Madrid attacks were shopkeepers and drug dealers. They embraced a theology that justified their crimes as part of their jihad.    The sense that an angry young man anywhere could become the next suicide bomber, the absence of training camps and only intermittent contact with any central command structure pose tough challenges for law enforcement.    "Terrorist culture has been disseminated," said Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, director of France's intelligence agency. "Technical knowledge has spread."    Even U.S. officials, most of whom are more optimistic than their foreign counterparts, acknowledged that there were too many blank spots for them to understand the full scope of the threat.	"From what we have seen and learned, particularly in light of the recent arrests, we have made enormous strides in knocking out Al Qaeda," a senior counter-terrorism official in the Bush administration said. "That said, we believe there are operational people who have moved up, with operational expertise, and that there remains some sort of loose command and control structure."    Among the mysteries is whether Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, still play operational roles. Another question is the extent of coordination between Al Qaeda's leadership and the attacks in Iraq.    The role that Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi plays in Iraq has been cited repeatedly by the administration as evidence of an Al Qaeda-Iraq link, but many counter-terrorism officials said he had long operated independently.    His activities in Iraq have boosted his status among Islamic extremists and led to what investigators suspect is an even greater independence from Bin Laden.    Zarqawi's reach extends beyond the carnage in Iraq and makes his offshoot of Al Qaeda an urgent threat. As the former chief of a training camp in Afghanistan, he has alliances with militant groups from Chechnya to North Africa.    European counter-terrorism officials blame him for several thwarted attacks in Europe and suspect that he helped plan the Casablanca and Istanbul bombings.    Investigators believe that there are ties between suspects in the Madrid attacks and the Zarqawi network. They have turned up evidence of an operational and ideological axis that links fighters traveling to Iraq from Europe and North Africa — and raises the threat that they will bring the mayhem home with them.
In June, Italian police arrested Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, an Egyptian suspected of playing a lead role in the Madrid attacks.    According to transcripts of electronic eavesdropping, police also learned of Ahmed's involvement in a European network sending fighters to Iraq to carry out suicide bombings.    "All my friends are dying, one after another," he said during a conversation in his Milan hide-out May 26. "I know so many who are ready. I tell you there are two groups ready for martyrdom. The first group leaves the 25th or 20th of next month for Iraq via Syria."    French authorities opened an investigation Wednesday into a network involved in recruiting extremists and helping them get to Iraq, but so far the flow of such foreigners does not approach the thousands who went to Afghanistan before 2001.    Still, European investigators are particularly concerned about the increasing movement of North Africans — some from Europe but most from their homelands — to fight in Iraq and what it means for the future.    "Our fear is that they go and become a threat to our countries," said De Bousquet de Florian, the French intelligence chief. "We pay a great deal of attention because once these guys have gone to Iraq to train, they know how to use weapons and explosives. That's the first level: Iraq as a new Afghanistan, a Chechnya."    Determining who is behind the attacks in Iraq is difficult. U.S. military and Iraqi authorities blame much of the violence on foreign fighters, and Saudis, Egyptians and other nationals have been seen saying farewell in videotapes before suicide bombings. A Saudi captured after a botched car bombing in Baghdad recently said he had been slipped across the border, given $200 and keys to a car and told to attack a military convoy.	But some say pinning most of the suicide attacks on Zarqawi's network and foreign fighters in general ignores the insurgency's home-grown aspects and overlooks growing links between Iraqis and radical Islam. Radical Islam Adapts    The new model of Islamic terrorism was born May 16, 2003, in Sidi Moumen, a shantytown of 200,000 people on the outskirts of Casablanca. That day a band of unemployed young men from the neighborhood, most of whom lived on the same narrow street, carried out five nearly simultaneous attacks.    The targets were in the heart of Casablanca: a Jewish community center, a Spanish restaurant and social club, a hotel, a Jewish cemetery and a Jewish-owned Italian restaurant. The death toll was 45, including 12 of the 14 bombers.    Morocco's role in Islamic extremism previously had been as a way station for jihadis entering and leaving Europe, and investigators said the emergence of Moroccans as front-line operatives demonstrated the ability of radical Islam to adapt.    In unraveling the Casablanca plot, Moroccan and foreign authorities discovered that the bombers had no previous ties to extremism, which meant spotting them in advance would have been almost impossible, even in a country where paid informants lurk in almost every neighborhood.    Moroccan authorities identified Karim Mejatti, a Moroccan veteran of Afghanistan, as the person who recruited them and received a green light for the attacks in the meeting in Istanbul. Unlike his recruits, Mejatti is educated and spent time in the U.S. in the late 1990s. He remains a fugitive.
On camping trips in the dusty hills outside Casablanca, Mejatti indoctrinated the men and taught them to make explosives, authorities said. Al Qaeda videos on making bombs with TATP, the group's trademark explosive, were later discovered in their homes. They rode to the attacks in taxis with homemade explosives stuffed into backpacks.    "They did not need sophisticated equipment or means," said Bouzoubaa, the justice minister. "They made their own explosives."    Mejatti recruited the men in November 2002, and authorities were struck by the speed with which he converted them into suicide bombers.    Moroccan police foiled a number of follow-up attacks in other cities by cells formed by Mejatti and a handful of other graduates of Afghan camps, investigators said.    "The thing about this kind of operation is that it could be repeated just about anywhere," said an Italian law enforcement official who investigated the European links to Casablanca.    Spanish anti-terrorism police who visited Casablanca after the attacks said they were convinced the tactic could be replicated in Europe. The prediction came true 10 months later in Madrid.    The involvement of Moroccans in the Madrid attack and evidence that it was linked to Casablanca sent shivers through the counter-terrorism community.    Spain's leading anti-terrorism judge, Baltasar Garzon, testified before a government commission investigating the bombings that Morocco was home to as many as 100 cells linked to Al Qaeda. They pose Europe's biggest terrorist threat, he said.    Other counter-terrorism officials said Garzon's figures might be too high, but they estimated that 400 to 500 Al Qaeda veterans returned to Morocco after the Taliban regime's collapse in Afghanistan.	The officials said Moroccan extremists posed a unique danger because they could slip easily in and out of Europe and blend in with the immigrant population. Moroccans are the largest immigrant group in several European countries.    Morocco prides itself on being a moderate country with virtually no history of terrorism, but the Casablanca attacks led to a massive crackdown that has drawn complaints from local and international human rights groups.    More than 100 mosques have been closed and thousands of people rounded up and jailed. Family members and lawyers complained that detainees were abused and tortured.    So far, about 1,000 people have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses; 14 have been sentenced to death, including the two surviving Casablanca bombers.    Washington has provided tens of millions of dollars in aid to Morocco and deeper cooperation in law enforcement.    In July, three FBI agents moved into the U.S. Embassy in Rabat to work with the Moroccans. A Navy officer was assigned to help monitor potential attacks on shipping in the Strait of Gibraltar.    U.S. diplomats are on high alert in Morocco. Two planned attacks in recent months, including one on an American target, were stopped only hours before their execution, authorities in Rabat said.    Police also discovered that a private security guard at the embassy was reporting diplomats' movements to an extremist group.    Morocco's leaders are defensive about their country's new profile in the campaign against Islamic extremism. Senior officials argue that outsiders are trying to destabilize a country that is striving to be a model of moderation for the Arab world.
Moroccans and officials of other Islamic countries agree that anger over U.S. policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict provides much of the motivation for the attacks.    "If the Palestinian issue were settled, if Iraq were stable, 70% of the threats would disappear," said Bouzoubaa, the justice minister.    But officials say they also recognize that not enough has been done to reach disaffected areas such as Sidi Moumen.    In July, King Mohammed VI ordered new social programs, including the construction of 100 small mosques and 20 large ones to counter the spread of hard-line Islam.    "We are very aware that we must fill the gap between what is good in Islam and the initiatives by outsiders, particularly in the poorer areas," said Ahmed Toufiq, the minister of Islamic affairs. "They were left to themselves too long." Refuge for Extremists    Even as new trouble spots emerge, eradicating known extremist sanctuaries has proved difficult, particularly in remote places out of the reach of government authority, such as parts of Yemen on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.    After Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, killing 17 American sailors, Washington helped train and equip Yemeni security forces and tried to persuade the government to do more to counter extremists.    But diplomats say the country remains primarily a lawless place where forbidding terrain and intricate tribal codes provide an ideal nest for militants.	Saudi and U.S. officials identified Yemen as the primary source of weapons and explosives for the Al Qaeda cells that have launched attacks in neighboring Saudi Arabia.    "Yemen still has to be viewed as largely ungovernable," a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said. "We sunk some money and time and effort into it, but we don't have much to show for it."    Yemeni officials acknowledged in interviews that surface-to-air missiles, grenade launchers and other weapons remain widely available despite a crackdown on open-air arms bazaars.    The mix of radicals and weapons is particularly potent along the Saudi border, which encompasses rugged mountains and remote desert where tribal leaders hold sway.    "If somebody comes, he's going to pay for tribal protection," said Faisal Aburas, a sheik from the impoverished province of Al Jawf on the Saudi border.    "Then it would look bad for a sheik to hand him in, even if he's a criminal, because it shows weakness."    Abubakr al Qerbi, Yemen's foreign minister, denied that the country still harbored Al Qaeda veterans.    "This is old information," he said, saying they were expelled in 1995 and again after the Cole bombing.    But Hamood Abdulhamid Hitar, a Yemeni government official in charge of negotiating with extremists, said he was holding theological debates with hundreds of militants, including 107 suspected Al Qaeda loyalists.    Yemen also links the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Somalia, where there is virtually no workable central government, is just an hour by boat across waterways that are essentially wide open.
Farther down the coast in Kenya, concerns focus on a group run by Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, an Al Qaeda operative with a $25-million bounty on his head. Mohammed, a native of Comoros off the southeastern coast of Africa, was indicted in the United States on charges of orchestrating the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He also is suspected of organizing the 2002 attacks on Israeli targets in Mombasa, Kenya.    Today, U.S. and other Western security officials say they believe he is planning another round of attacks, possibly on the new U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.    "Al Qaeda is preparing for another sensational attack against Western targets in Kenya," a Western security official said. "Two attacks planned for Kenya were exposed during the past year."    U.S. officials suspect that the hunt for Mohammed has driven him into a remote part of northern Kenya, but they say he remains in touch with Al Qaeda leaders through courier and computer.    "I consider him to be a high-value target and a real player in the global Al Qaeda operation," said a senior U.S. official in Washington. U.S. Still a Target    U.S. and foreign intelligence and counter-terrorism officials warned that the United States remained the prime target of radical Islam.    "They have overcome the shock of the Afghanistan war and very likely they are preparing another large-scale attack, possibly on a U.S. target," the senior European counter-terrorism official said. "There are good reasons to be on alert."    (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) [quotes from various authorities -psb] A Changing Roster    Despite the arrests of several high-profile leaders, anti-terrorism experts believe that Al Qaeda has managed to reemerge as a lethal ideological movement. Dispersed operatives — loosely organized or acting alone — recruit and quickly train local terrorist groups for small but deadly attacks.	* A Terrorist Evolution    In operations such as the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda leaders exercised considerable control over operations. Today, Al Qaeda appears to have become more ideology than network, spreading globally among cells inspired by Sept. 11.    * Marking Terror's Changes    'In Iraq, a problem has been created that didn't exist there before. The events in Iraq have had a profound impact on the entirety of the jihad movement.' Judge Jean-Louis Brugulere, French anti-terrorism investigator.    *    'Any assessment that the global terror movement has been rolled back or that even one component, Al Qaeda, is on the run is optimistic and most certainly incorrect. Bin Laden's doctrines are now playing themselves out all over the world. Destroying Al Qaeda will not resolve the problem.' M.J. Gohel, head of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London think tank.    *    'Once these guys have gone to Iraq to train, they know how to use weapons and explosives. That's the first level: Iraq as a new Afghanistan, a Chechnya.' Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, director of Frances intelligence agency.    *    'Al Qaeda is increasingly being invoked as an ideological motivation of Islamic radicals.' Gijs de Vries, counter-terrorism coordinator for the European Union.    *    'By now we have no evidence, not even credible intelligence, that the Madrid group was steered, financed, organized from the outside. So that might be the biggest success of Bin Laden.' A senior European counter-terrorism official.    * Frantz reported from Morocco and Istanbul; Meyer from Washington; Rotella from Paris; and Stack from Sana, Yemen.

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Sep 23rd 2004 The Economist Magazine Southern Africa's land Dish it out! JOHANNESBURG A new report frets about blood and soil “WHAT'S cooking in Zimbabwe is a wake-up call for South Africa,” says Peter Kagwanja, a Kenyan who runs the southern African branch of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank based in Brussels. Zimbabwe botched land reform, partly by letting whites keep the best farms for too long, thereby making them easy targets for a demagogue, Robert Mugabe. South Africa, says the ICG in a report just out, runs the same risk. A few thousand whites still own about 85% of the farmland, barely less than in 1994, when a mainly black government came to power. Such inequality is bound to lead to anger and instability, says the ICG. South Africa's government has some sensible plans for shifting land ownership but has spent little of the required money. Unless it were to resort to mass confiscation ΰ la Mugabe, it has virtually no hope of doubling black ownership of the land to 30% by 2015, as it promises. Violence against white farmers, including murder, continues apace: the commercial farmers' union says 388 of them have been killed since 2001, 54 this year. White farms are still occasionally invaded. South Africa looks stable now, says Mr Kagwanja, but for the first ten years or so after independence so did Zimbabwe. South Africa, in any case, is doing a bit better. Since 1994 some 3.2m hectares (7.9m acres) of farmland, 2% of the total, has passed into black hands. It has been a slow business: new land-ownership laws had to be passed first. But things should now speed up. The constitution guarantees full compensation for owners. The police have usually managed to chase away those who have invaded white farms.

The ICG may overdo the dangers. If frustration over land ownership did boil over, the impact on South Africa would be weaker. Its economy, unlike Zimbabwe's, long ago stopped depending on agriculture, which accounts for only 3.4% of GDP and provides only a tenth of South Africa's people with a living. The rural poor rely more on welfare or remittances. A South African demagogue would do better whipping up anger over the lack of urban jobs, not over farmland. The ICG's glum warnings are more relevant to Namibia, where a populist president, Sam Nujoma, who admires Mr Mugabe, is threatening to grab big farms from some whites—“snakes” who, he says, mistreat their black workers. Namibia's economy is dominated, as was Zimbabwe's, by white-owned farms. While promising whites compensation, Mr Nujoma wants to boost his ruling party before a general election in November, when he is due to step aside in favour of Hifikepunye Pohamba, his ageing minister for land.

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17 September 2004 Science Magazine NEURASCIENCE Signposts to the Essence of Language Michael Siegal In one of the most dramatic incidents of the French Revolution, the Abbι Sicard, director of the school for the deaf in Paris, failed to take an oath of civil allegiance. As described by Lane (1), he was imprisoned and sentenced to die. However, Sicard, who was devoted to establishing communication through sign language, was rescued through the pleas of his deaf students. They petitioned the National Assembly for his release, testifying that without him they would be like animals. Deaf people have fiercely resisted century-old attempts to prevent them from using their own sign language for communication (2). They argue that sign language is equivalent to spoken language and that users of a sign language should be accorded the same rights as users of a spoken language. The origin and core properties of sign language, however, remain to be elucidated. On page 1779 of this issue, Senghas et al. (3) address this lack of information in their landmark study of three cohorts of deaf Nicaraguan signers. Their research is based on the passion for sign language of several generations of deaf children attending a special education program set up in 1977 in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua. In the 30 years since the program opened, the children have created a completely new language--Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL)--that has continued to expand and mature and has been passed on from one group of children to the next (see the photographs). There are about 800 deaf NSL signers, ranging in age from 4 to 45 years. NSL is one of hundreds of distinctive sign languages in existence around the world (see the figure). The creation of NSL has allowed unique insights into the essence of language--both sign and spoken. Segmentation and sequencing are considered vital core properties of all languages. In their investigation, Senghas et al. explicitly analyzed the segmentation and sequencing in NSL of elements such as motion. The

Fluency among the youngest. Nicaraguan children communicate through a sign language (NSL) that they developed over a 30-year period. The opening of an education program in 1977 in Managua (the capital of Nicaragua) brought together a community of deaf children for the first time in that country. The children developed their own sign language, which evolved from nonlinguistic gestures to a full grammatical language that continues to mature. The youngest children in the NSL community are the most fluent signers, having learned the language most recently. [figures not available] Signing across the world. Examples of sign language alphabets: American, Swedish, and British. British sign language is not readily intelligible to users of ASL and, unlike ASL or Swedish sign language, uses a two-handed alphabet (13). The geographical distribution of sign as well as spoken languages reflects the input of nonnative languages introduced across cultures. In developing countries, deaf people may use the sign language of educators and missionaries from elsewhere in the world. For example, some deaf individuals in Madagascar use Norwegian sign language, whereas children in Nicaragua have created their own sign language.

authors did this by showing animated cartoon videos to three cohorts of NSL signers of different ages and to a sample of hearing Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans. In one of these videos, a cat swallows a bowling ball and wobbles (manner of movement) as it descends (path of movement) down a steep road. The first cohort of Nicaraguan signers, who were the initial builders of NSL, represented manner and path information simultaneously in a single movement of the hand, much as the Spanish speakers did in the gestures that accompanied their speech. In contrast, the second and third cohorts of NSL signers overwhelmingly produced sequential hand movements involving strings of segmented manner-only and path-only elements. Such segmentation and sequence elements can be embedded within other signs (phrases) to build a hierarchical organization of information that forms an elaborate communication system. Intriguingly, NSL has evolved from a system of nonlinguistic gestures into a full sign language with its own grammar that continues to expand and mature. Consequently, because they have learned the language most recently, the youngest children in the NSL community are the most fluent signers. Senghas et al. observe that segmenting and sequencing depend on combining elements of language within a hierarchical structure that permits the generation of an infinite number of messages. The mechanisms through which segmentation and sequencing are achieved in NSL challenge the position that language evolves through cultural transmission. These mechanisms may have evolved through learning abilities that either shape language or have been shaped by language. Clearly, deaf Nicaraguan children have created their own language independently of exposure to a preexisting language structure. Regarding the part played by learning in the shaping of language, the results of the Nicaraguan study are consistent with research that underscores the spontaneous development of language in both hearing and deaf children. Hearing infants at 2 months of age prefer speech to nonspeech sounds (4). Profoundly deaf infants of deaf parents display manual babbling using a reduced set of the phonetic units in American Sign Language (ASL) in a manner analogous to the vocal babbling of hearing infants exposed to a spoken language (5). In the first few years of development, virtually all children--whether hearing children exposed to a spoken language or deaf children exposed to the sign language of their deaf parents--acquire the grammar of their native language.

The structure of spontaneous gestural communication ("home signing") of American deaf children resembles more closely that of deaf children in Taiwan than that of their own hearing mothers (6). Language involves "language-making" skills--segmenting words into morphemes and sentences into words, setting up a system of contrasts in morphology, and constructing syntactic structures--that do not require a language model to be activated. Language is so resilient that it can be triggered by exposure to a linguistic input that is highly limited and fragmented--an indication of the fundamental innateness of grammar (7, 8). Early language exposure shapes linguistic ability, in that those who become deaf after having acquired spoken English appear to be more proficient in learning ASL than those born profoundly deaf with little linguistic experience before exposure to ASL at school. In contrast, deaf people who are exposed early to ASL are able to learn spoken English better than those who have been exposed late (9). But do such language-shaped learning mechanisms stop there? Can they be extended to allow or facilitate the acquisition of, for example, mathematics or propositions about the beliefs held by the minds of others? One question to be resolved is whether language entails a learning mechanism that instantiates mathematical reasoning, given that language and mathematics share similarities in syntactic structure (10). Another question is whether the syntactic structure of language allows us to entertain propositions--for example, "John thought that Mary knew the cookies were in the cupboard"--that permit insight into the false beliefs of others, or whether it is early access to conversations that alert children to the notion that beliefs can differ from reality (11). Also, it is not clear whether the innate structure of language allows processing of causal and counterfactual reasoning. In this light, language can be regarded as mandatory to human development with widespread, although as yet undetermined, implications for the nature of cognition. Without access to language, our communication would rely on iconic representations that are within the grasp of nonhuman primates and even pigeons (12). The Nicaraguan research highlights segmenting and sequencing as core linguistic properties that develop innately and not as a result of cultural transmission. Such innateness confers humanity on both deaf and hearing people through language creation and immersion.

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FALL 2004 National Resources Defense Council The Hunt for Red Gold by Mark Jacobson On Central America's Mosquito Coast, young men plunge into the abyss with defective equipment to capture dwindling stores of lobster. A tale of U.S. appetites, human misery, and one stubborn American's crusade to bring salvation. [Page 1 of 6] If Joseph Conrad had witnessed the scene, he might have set The Heart of Darkness in Central America rather than Central Africa. Scores of Miskito Indians, lobster divers -- buzos de langostas -- thronged against the 10-foot-high iron gate at the foot of the pier at Puerto Cabezas, a Nicaraguan fishing town 60 miles south of the Honduras border. Ratty bedrolls slung across their backs, many half-drunk or stoned, the buzos pushed ahead in the late afternoon sunlight, hoisting yard-long metal lobster- hunting spears called barillas over their heads like the weapons of an attacking medieval force. The descendants of indigenous tribes and escaped African slaves, and now attired in soiled T-shirts of global celebrity (Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive is closing in on all-time champ Air Jordan), the Miskitos were looking for a

boat. They wanted to sign on with one of the dozen or so lobster-fishing vessels tied up to the rickety quarter-mile-long pier. On the other side of the iron fence, wearing starched white shirts, holding clipboards and canvas bags filled with money, were the sacabuzos (literally, "fetch a diver"), the middlemen of the lobster trade. The sacabuzos scanned their lists and called out names. One by one, the chosen buzos were allowed to pass through the rusted gate by bored soldiers carrying AK-47s. The divers signed a sacabuzo's pad and were given 800 cσrdobas, about $50, their advance for the upcoming journey. Few buzos bothered to count the money. If they'd been shorted 20 cσrdobas or 100, it wouldn't make much difference. During their upcoming two weeks at sea, much of it to be spent with antiquated scuba tanks strapped to their backs as they breathed through half-clogged regulators 140 feet below the surface of the hauntingly blue Caribbean, there would be little opportunity to use the cash. Besides, at close quarters on a Nicaraguan lobster-diving boat, there is every chance a buzo's advance will end up in someone else's pocket. Rather than risk it, the divers handed their small grubstake back through the iron gate to their women. Some were wives or girlfriends who needed the money to keep households functioning, however minimally, until the divers' return. But just as many of the women were prostitutes, thin and bony, come to collect for the previous night's services. Lobster fishing is a $50 million industry in Nicaragua and Honduras, by far the most lucrative business (some would say the only business) on the legendarily remote Mosquito Coast. And like any industry, it has its costs. First, as with most resources packaged as products, lobster stocks are finite.

The catch has been declining since the mid-1990s as a result of overfishing, which has not only depleted the lobster population but also wrought severe damage upon seagrasses and coral reefs. The shallows, as they are called, have been fished out. Old- timers talk of days when all one had to do was wade a few feet into the water to snare a lobster. Now, three decades after the arrival of the scuba tank, divers on the Mosquito Coast typically descend to 120 feet before seeing lobsters. Every year, with more processing plants and boats in operation to meet growing demand, the divers go deeper to find the remaining lobsters.

Choose to ignore it or not, we -- the vast consumer we -- have forged a highly nuanced social contract with these men. In the case of Miskito buzos, the terms of the contract, traced in greasy streaks of drawn butter and garlic, are exercised whenever we spread a happy-face plastic bib across our chest and begin to tear into the oh-so-sweet meat of those tempting lobster tails. Panulirus argus and Panulirus guttatus, the two main species of lobster caught in the waters off Central America, cut a far less imposing figure than the three- and four-pound, big-clawed decapods (Homarus americanus) caught by hearty New England seamen and tossed live into boiling cauldrons to be eaten by Maine tourists. Clawless and smaller, the "spiny," or "rock," Carib-bean lobster rarely finds its way to a table intact. The animal's head is almost always chopped off before it gets to look its prospective eater in the eye, leaving only the tail. The humble Central American lobster is most often sliced and diced, thrown into salads and bowls of bisque. It is also a staple on the menus of corporate "casual dining" emporiums -- Red Lobster and the like -- where the public's craving for boiled and broiled crustacean is sated within a stone's throw of the freeway exit ramp.

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September 6, 2004 Los Angeles Times The Cliff Dwellers High above the Pacific, Jose de Jesus Torres and his friends live at the mercy of the sea as they wait for another opportunity to enter the U.S. By Richard Marosi, Times Staff Writer TIJUANA — A life capsized has stranded Jose de Jesus Torres atop these craggy cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Waves crash and dolphins dance as this modern-day cliff dweller waits for another opportunity to cross the U.S. border.    Torres spends his days slinging a fishing line into the frothy sea. His friend, Orlando Bernal, sits on a rock reading a dogeared Bible. Walking atop a 30-foot wall of rocks and sand on a recent day, Torres pointed to a desolate beach far below.    "This is my backyard," he said. Then Torres turned to look at the rugged coastline stretching north to the border. "And this is my frontyard."    Torres and his friends are floaters — like possibly thousands of others biding their time in Tijuana — waiting until the summer cools to arrange border crossings over the mountains or across the desert. Though a thriving lodging industry caters to Tijuana's gente de paso — people passing through — those without money usually end up living on the streets and in alleys or sometimes on the cliffs offering views of the San Diego skyline.    Earlier this summer, Torres and Bernal were deported from California, where they lived for more than a decade and had earned enough money as construction and restaurant workers for one-bedroom apartments and hamburgers, with enough left over to send to relatives in Mexico.

Now they live at the mercy of the sea along this scenic but dangerous stretch of coast just south of Tijuana, called El Vigia, which local fishermen and residents say has long provided a refuge for those with nowhere else to go. The area is cut off from the city by steep walls of wave-battered boulders and dirt streets patrolled by stray dogs.    By night, the friends lie under the stars on a rock shelf above the ocean, lulled to sleep by the lapping surf and the howls of sea lions. Some nights they string their blankets as makeshift tents. By day, they fish or scour the caverns that pock the cliffs, searching for mussels or crabs.    The men, whose beards have grown long and scruffy, leave solitary footprints in the sand. They watch the frolicking dolphins and fall asleep under pink sunsets.    But the setting is precarious. One slip on the jagged rocks could send a man tumbling to his death.    And the men are always hungry. Torres, a 29-year-old who shields his face from the sun with a blue cap, has shed 20 pounds since he started fishing for food using a line weighted with spark plugs.    When a row of fins suddenly pierces the greenish-blue waters, he knows lunch will have to wait. "The dolphins are also hungry and also have to eat," he said.    "Hopefully, they'll swim away soon and leave some fish for us."    Tijuana can be an inhospitable place for migrants unless they can afford housing or pay human smuggling rings to put them up at three-star hotels or fleabag motels in the red-light district.    Recent deportees from the U.S. are especially vulnerable. Their clothes are often dirty and frayed and police often consider them vagrants or criminals. Many don't have the Mexican identification documents necessary to qualify for jobs.

"They're strangers in their own country," said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of Tijuana's Binational Center for Human Rights. "Without ID, they can't work. They don't know anybody and, culturally, they are more familiar with the U.S."    Torres, who speaks fluent English, said he, Bernal and another cliff-dwelling friend, Felipe Gonzalez, moved to the coast in part to escape police harassment. Torres said he had lived in the U.S. for 10 years, most recently working at a construction job in San Diego, when he was arrested for drinking in public. The next thing he knew, he was deported to Tijuana, a city he barely knew.    He assumes his girlfriend took all of his belongings, which included a 1979 Cadillac. "I lost everything I had just for one beer," said Torres, whose hometown is Guadalajara.    Torres tried hiking back to California through the mountains north of Tecate, but was caught twice by U.S. Border Patrol agents.    He found a refuge on the cliffs, where he met Bernal, 30, and Gonzalez, 44. Bernal said he had been deported from San Francisco after being arrested for driving while intoxicated. Gonzalez said he had left the U.S. to visit his ailing sister in his home state of Guerrero.    Like Torres, both men had lived in America for more than five years and could not find work in Tijuana because they didn't have their Mexican identification documents. To obtain the IDs, they would have to travel to their home cities in Mexico's interior, which they could not afford to do.    They have found construction work around Tijuana, but it usually doesn't last more than a few days.    Waiting to cross, their lives now turn on the tides.    The men rise at 2 a.m. and rappel down on a thin steel cable to a seaweed-strewn beach below, a lone flashlight their only source of illumination. It's low tide, so the receding waves expose a cavern filled with boulders coated with mussels, which they pluck into pails. They reach under the rocks searching for crabs.

Most afternoons find them balancing on rocks, swinging their mussel-baited hooks into the sea. Their scarred hands have been slashed from the fishing lines and crabs that tear at their skin.    The sea is bountiful here, and many local fishermen regularly reel in large catches of grouper, sardines and rock bass. But the three friends lack nets and fishing poles. They are lucky to catch one fish.    They cook their catch on a tiny grill over a fire fueled with sagebrush, strips of wood and plastic bottles they find along the rocks. They sell some of their mussels as bait to fishermen and walk 30 minutes to a store to buy an onion or tomato, which they stir with a stick into a pot of mussels and crabs.    They rely on one another: Each man's catch is thrown into the community pot, and they share their meager water supplies.    Torres likes to whistle Mexican tunes or lie on his blanket and read about glamorous lives in People magazine. Bernal leafs through the Bible, which he says he doesn't fully comprehend.    Gonzalez never tires of fishing. A short, wiry man, he fished for 10 hours straight on a recent day, stopping only after the rocks stripped away the spark plugs on his fishing line.    That night, the men curl under their blankets without eating dinner, but Gonzalez has not lost faith in the sea.    "Tomorrow is another day," he says. "Maybe one of these days, God willing, I'll cross the border. But for now, I'm OK here. I feel good fishing with my friends."    Torres, meanwhile, gazes at the lights of downtown San Diego twinkling in the distance from his cliff-top perch. His old life was only 15 miles away, but he feels separated by an ocean.    "Es una vida pesada," he says. "It's a hard life."

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September 6, 2004 Los Angeles Times New Atrocities Reported Throughout Darfur Sudanese refugees tell of Arab militia attacks on villages. A record of victims is lost, along with lives, in a mosque set ablaze. By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer KALMA CAMP, Sudan — When the mosque at Yassin village was burned by Arab militias more than a week ago, there was no way to save four frail old men who died in the flames.    A list of 485 dead from the surrounding area, painstakingly collected by local people over two months, burned in the mosque too, village leaders said.    Some survivors of the latest atrocities in the south Darfur region have trickled into the Kalma camp for displaced persons outside Nyala in recent days. Aid officials report that about 1,000 families — more than 5,000 people — are still making their way to the camp.    The attacks mirror violence by Arab militias throughout the Darfur region, which have caused 1.2 million people to flee their villages since last year. The U.N. has described it as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, estimating that between 30,000 and 50,000 have died.    Arab militias have attacked Yassin, about 30 miles east of Nyala, four times since the beginning of July. Dozens of people took refuge in the mosque toward the end of August, but in the final attack, the militias torched it and the village. Attacks continued for three days, and 60 people were

killed, said one village leader, Mahmoud Adam Isak.    Isak, 38, had to bury his baby daughter Friday when he arrived in Kalma.    He fled Yassin with his wife and 13 children in early July, and they hid in the forest outside the village with about 70 families.    But they were attacked again. They fled to a nearby village, then to another, but week after week the Arab militias swept on, ravaging the settlements one by one, killing men and kidnapping girls, he said.    Isak's family was sheltering in Ladok village, near Yassin, eight days ago when they were attacked again.    The family fled at night and was on the road five days. His 9-month-old daughter, weak with malnutrition, died the day the family reached the camp.    Isak said the attackers were Arab tribal militias, known locally as janjaweed. He said there was a big base of about 2,000 Arab militiamen in Assalaya, east of Nyala.    "They have horses and guns, and some of them have cars," he said.    Another Yassin resident, Mikail Abdullah Hamad, 52, said: "We thought it would be safe in the mosque."    But he described havoc as the building was set ablaze. No one could rescue the four old men, who could not walk.    "I have 21 in my family. My only thought was to save them," Hamad said.    He and others had worked collecting the names of all the people killed in villages around Yassin, sending messengers by donkey or cart to collect information after each attack. The number could not be independently verified.

"There was no way to save the list when the mosque burned," he said.    Hamad listed other villages that were attacked, including Hijalij, Um Hashim, Abu Albishari and Ladok.    Yassin's population of 7,000 has scattered, many fleeing to the town of Muhajariya, east of Nyala. The French humanitarian organization Solidarites reported last week that there were 29,000 displaced people in Muhajariya and described the water and sanitation situation as dire.    After the second attack on Yassin in July, Adam Ismail, 35, packed up the goods from his small street stall onto a cart, took his two wives and seven children and fled. He did not get far.    His wife, Mohassin Mohammed, 20, watched as militiamen gave chase, shot him to death and killed her 4-year-old son.    Rauda Abdullah, 25, his other wife, saw the fighters grab Nasrine, her 3-year-old daughter. She stood in anguished silence as they carried off the screaming, crying girl. She has not seen her since.    "I didn't make a sound. There was nothing I could do. She was weeping and crying, and I felt sick inside," she said. "They saw her pale color, so they thought she was an Arab. They took her because of her color."    The conflict in Darfur has pitted Arab militias — often lighter-skinned — against black tribes including the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa people.    In south Darfur, security on the roads has deteriorated sharply in the past

week, with four incidents of vehicles of aid workers and journalists being shot at or robbed. The U.N. suspended travel in south Darfur for one day Friday.    A U.N. report Sunday said attacks in the north Darfur region had increased sharply. Up to 4,000 people fled their homes in recent days after attacks on Zam Zam village, about 100 miles north of here, said the report.    There were smaller attacks on the villages of Thur and Golol in south Darfur, with shops looted and three people killed in recent days. Another attack in Ishma, near Kalma, was reported two days ago, but there was no information on casualties.    A report to the U.N. Security Council last week said the Sudanese government had failed to stop attacks or disarm most militias and called for African Union monitors to be given a broader mandate to investigate abuses. U.S. officials strongly criticized the report's finding that there was no evidence of government involvement in recent attacks.    Human rights groups have called for U.N. sanctions against Sudan, but there is opposition from some Security Council members, including Russia and China.    In a move designed to keep pressure on Sudan, however, the European Union is drawing up sanctions, including a ban on oil trade, for possible future use. The U.S. has had sanctions against Sudan since 1997.

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September 4, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Riding on Ropes and Dreams Southern California is home to some of the top competitors in Mexican charreria, or rodeo. Its popularity is a measure of immigrant success. By Sam Quinones, Times Staff Writer Ramiro Gurrola of Hawaiian Gardens is one of the best riders, or charros, in Mexican rodeo. But when the chute opened one blistering Sunday this summer, the bull he was riding inexplicably collapsed, like a boxer taking a dive.    Midway through the regional Mexican rodeo championships in Sacramento, Gurrola was in fourth place, fighting a bad streak of charro luck.    The belief in charro luck rules the world of Mexican rodeo, known as charreria. In a distinctly Mexican view of life, talent takes a back seat to destiny. A lazy bull, a slow horse or a rainstorm can defeat even the best-trained cowboy.    Charro luck had foiled Gurrola before. Three years in a row, he'd failed to advance to the charreria world championship in Mexico. Yet each loss had pushed him to practice harder.    The next event that afternoon in Sacramento was las manganas, the most difficult in Mexican rodeo. The cowboy performs rope tricks and then tries to lasso the front legs of a galloping mare. Points are scored for elegance and creativity.
Few cowboys work harder at it than Gurrola, 25. Like a jazz musician, he spends hours a day riffing on his rope, hoping for the accidents and mistakes that lead to new tricks. He watches videos of his rivals. Lying in bed at night, he imagines new ways of making the rope dance.    "If you want to be good at charreria, you have to be good at the rope," he says.    So as he donned his sombrero, shouldered his rope and walked into the arena, Gurrola was losing badly, but he wasn't afraid.    In the last few years, Southern California has emerged as a center of traditional Mexican rodeo. Leading Mexican American businessmen are sponsoring charro teams and building rodeo arenas. Three trick-roping schools have opened. The number of officially recognized charro teams has nearly doubled, to 65.    California now ranks fourth in the world in the number of sanctioned teams, behind the Mexican states of Jalisco, Hidalgo and the state of Mexico. Most of California's riders are Mexican Americans carrying on a tradition brought here by their immigrant parents.    In 2002, the three best Mexican rodeo teams came to Los Angeles and were whipped by upstart U.S.-born charros.    One of the best of them is Gurrola, a 1996 graduate of Artesia High School. Gurrola is a shy, lanky man who becomes a general when he climbs atop a horse. Though 6 foot 3, he is known in the world of charreria as Ramirito — Little Ramiro — named for his father and his grandfather, patriarch of a charro clan in the Mexican state of Zacatecas.    Gurrola pursues charreria with a puritanical devotion. He avoids beer — rare for a man drenched in rural Mexican culture. He hasn't married because	raising a family would cut into his practice time. He can't remember a weekend when he did something unrelated to horses or charreria.    That a boy from the L.A. suburbs could grow up to be one of the charro world's budding stars illustrates how Mexican wide swaths of Southern California have become. It also shows how poor immigrants found in the U.S. the means to realize their rodeo dreams. Here, a sport that in Mexico was the preserve of the privileged has become a measure of blue-collar immigrant success, a new twist on the American Dream.    The lesson in Gurrola's story is that a working man's son can grow up in Southern California to be the great Mexican cowboy his father wanted to be. A Son's Dream    Gurrola's grandfather was one of the best trick-ropers in Zacatecas. When he had to decide whether to sell a milk cow or a good charro horse, he sold the cow. His son dreamed of being a great charro too. But poverty forced him to leave his horses and head to California in 1971.    Then 17, the son found a job in construction and rented a house in Hawaiian Gardens. Ramiro Gurrola Sr. was part of the first wave of Mexican immigrants to come directly to Los Angeles, bypassing the agricultural work that had drawn earlier generations.    These newcomers were mostly from ranching states in central Mexico, where charreria is almost a religion. It is also expensive. A charro needs a good horse, feed, a saddle and a way to get himself and his horse to the rodeo. Poor rancher youths had to compete on plow horses.    In Southern California, charreria was barely known. But the region's economy offered what Mexico could not: money to buy good horses.
Some people viewed charreria as old-fashioned, even corny, with riders wearing old-style sombreros. But over the years, a charro subculture took root in L.A. Some devotees bought horses before they bought cars. Many seemed to work solely to support their charreria habit. They made sure their children learned ropes and horses. They took them to Mexico to show them authentic charreria.    Few were as consumed by rodeo as Ramiro Gurrola Sr. He saved $5,000 and could buy either a horse or a house. He bought the horse. By the time he bought a house, he had four horses and three children.    Over the years, the elder Gurrola put his savings into saddles, tack and stables for his horses in El Monte and Compton. "If you have a horse, the horse eats first and then you feed yourself," he says.    Ramiro Jr. learned his first rope trick when he was 5. At 12, he rode a bucking mare in one of the Sunday rodeos his father and his friends organized at an arena in El Monte. The horse threw him like a pillow.    Over the next few months, the boy climbed on the horse every Sunday. Each time, the bronco tossed him.    "I knew what to do," he says, "but I couldn't do it."    After weeks of additional practice and coaching from his uncles, he mounted the bronco and stayed on. From that moment, he says, he was hooked.    The 1990s were a time of cultural change for young Mexican Americans in Southern California. Earlier generations had been ashamed of their parents' rural Mexican music, clothes and festivals.	But now they were a majority in many neighborhoods and schools. Though U.S.-born, the immigrants' children unabashedly embraced what their parents had brought from Mexico. Some suburban kids became fanatics for charreria.    At Artesia High, the younger Gurrola did his homework during lunch hour so he would have afternoons free to practice riding and roping. Half a dozen times a year, he went to Mexico to compete. He explained these absences to his teachers by referring to a "family emergency" back home.    "My friends never knew about it," he says of his rodeo obsession. "I used to tell them, but they never paid any attention."    At 15, at a competition in Zacatecas, he won second place in las manganas behind the legendary Andres "Nito" Aceves, who was then transforming Mexican rope style.    Gurrola became unflappable in the ring. Before events, he would slowly walk his horse in circles to calm it as he collected his thoughts. Under pressure during competition, he did not hear the crowd. He also blocked out the gang that controlled his neighborhood in Hawaiian Gardens.    By the time he graduated from high school in 1996, he was becoming one of the region's great charros. He took a job in his uncle's insulation factory in Azusa so he could work mornings and devote his afternoons and Sundays to charreria. He joined a charro team founded by Leonardo Lopez, an L.A. nightclub owner.    In 2002, the team went to Mexico for the National Congress of Charreria, the sport's world championship. Gurrola finished second in las manganas out of 105 competitors. No American has ever finished higher in a single event in the Mexican championships.
In appreciation, the crowd rained hats and gloves down on him.    "It felt good," he says.    His performance was one of several events in 2002 that changed California charreria.    That year, Lopez began managing the Pico Rivera Sports Arena, opening a major venue to the sport.    The rancher youths who had come to California 30 years earlier now owned businesses — the Northgate Gonzalez and La Vallarta supermarket chains, Las Palmas Nursery, Padilla Demolition — and could afford to sponsor charro teams. Some built their own rodeo arenas.    As a boy in Mexico, Juan De la Torre never had the money to compete. He came to California hoping to earn enough to buy a horse. He learned to build houses and became a contractor. Today, De la Torre has his own charro team and an enduring place in charro lore. A Zacatecas band recorded a ballad about him, "King of the Bull-tailers," referring to a charro event at which he excels.    In El Monte and Pico Rivera, in Sylmar, San Fernando, and in parts of Chino, there are communities of rodeo devotees. Mira Loma (pop. 17,000) in Riverside County is inhabited mostly by immigrants from Jalisco and Zacatecas and now has six charro teams. Riders tie up their horses and sit down to eat at Enrique's Seafood, a charro hangout.    A bidding war for the best quarter-horses erupted, doubling the prices over the last five years to as much as $15,000.    The growing popularity of charreria, and the increased political sophistication of Mexican Americans, was evident in their response to a 2002 proposal to outlaw bull-tailing, a rodeo event in which charros pull a running bull to the ground by the tail.    Years before, the state Senate had banned horse-tripping, part of another charreria event. Charros went to Sacramento, dressed in traditional riding outfits. Their representative spoke broken English. They knew no one at the state Capitol. Only two senators voted against the ban on horse-tripping, and the practice remains illegal in California.	"We never had to defend ourselves in the past," says Marcos Franco, director of the U.S. division of the Mexican Charro Federation. "They just ran us over."    But when animal rights activists pushed for the ban on bull-tailing in 2002, hundreds of charro enthusiasts wrote to legislators. They hired a Sacramento lobbyist. By this time, more immigrants had become U.S. citizens and could vote; more legislators were Latino. The bill died.    Charros believe that a ban on bull-tailing would have killed the sport in California. Instead, it was invigorated. Magic With a Rope    Under the hot sun and his wide sombrero, Ramiro Gurrola stood in the Sacramento arena in July as the manganas event began.    As the mare circled the arena, Gurrola whipped his lasso into a spinning circle, then jumped through it.    At just the right moment, he laid the rope out. It rolled like a hoop into the path of the charging quarter-horse and magically encircled the animal's front legs.    Gurrola accomplished this on four of his six chances — twice on foot and twice while mounted. None of his opponents managed it more than once.    With that, Gurrola came from behind to win the right to contend for the U.S. national Mexican rodeo championship, held today through Monday in New Cuyama, an hour's drive south of Santa Maria. If he wins there, he'll go to Mexico in October for the National Congress of Charreria.    He hopes to overcome the charro luck that in the last few years has kept him from competing in Mexico for Charro of the Year.    "I feel confident, but I don't want to say I'm going to win," he says.    "I never say that because something always goes bad."

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September 4, 2004 The Economist Magazine Genital mutilation The unkindest cut for a woman CAIRO AND EJERE Slow progress in eliminating female genital mutilation IN SUDAN, they call it tahoor or “purification”. In Sierra Leone, it is known as bondo or “initiation”. But English has a grislier term for it: female genital mutilation. In its mildest form, a girl has the skin covering her clitoris nicked or excised. In the severest variety, called infibulation, her external genitalia are cut away and her vagina is sewn up. Female mutilation is not a rare practice. Although numbers are hard to come by, an estimated 130m girls and women now alive are thought to have undergone the procedure in more than two dozen African countries, as well as in parts of Asia, the Middle East and some immigrant communities in the West. The frequency of it varies according to ethnic group and country, from

a quarter of women in Nigeria to more than 90% in Mali, recent surveys indicate. The timing and type of mutilation also differs. In Egypt, for example, girls undergo one of the milder forms, usually around puberty. In Somalia, infibulation is common, often a few weeks before marriage. There are certainly sound medical reasons for eliminating the practice. Immediate complications include heavy bleeding, infections—such as AIDS—transmitted by unsterile knives, and a nasty condition known as urinary retention. And, not only does mutilation turn sexual intercourse into a numb or painful experience for women, but the more radical forms can lead to prolonged labour and potentially lethal complications during childbirth. The International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo ten years ago, launched a big push against mutilation. Since then, 13 African countries have passed legislation banning the practice. Education also helps, but simply explaining the medical hazards is not enough. At the time of the Cairo conference, as many as 97% of Egyptian women were thought to have been circumcised, usually by a daya (a village midwife). A decade of communication on the health risks of mutilation means that figure has fallen slightly, but the big shift is that the procedure is now performed mainly by doctors, which makes medical arguments against it less convincing to those who seek it out. As Nahid Toubia, the head of Rainbo, a charity working against the practice, observes, stamping mutilation out is a slow process. Many societies believe that a woman will become agitated, overbearing, sexually voracious—and so unmarriageable—unless her clitoris is controlled. Or, as one woman in Ejere, a village in southern Ethiopia, explained, “I had my daughter circumcised so she wouldn't break the dishes.”

27 August 2004 Science Magazine BEHAVIOR: Sweet Revenge? Brian Knutson* You've been waiting in line in traffic for what seems like hours, when a red sports car whips past on the shoulder. Eventually, the sports car creeps back into view--the driver has run out of shoulder and signals to be let in. Instead of giving way, you stare ahead and accelerate, inching dangerously close to the bumper in front of you. "Go ahead, make my day." Dirty Harry succinctly informs a norm violator that he anticipates deriving satisfaction from inflicting altruistic punishment. After squeezing back the intruder, you can't help but notice a smile creep onto your face. Judges worry, whereas filmmakers delight, in the fact that revenge feels good. Evolutionary theorists argue that such an "eye-for-an-eye" strategy makes sense, preventing future damage to one's self or kin (1, 2). Yet, in cases ranging from inconsiderate drivers to Nazi war criminals, even unrelated onlookers seem highly motivated to seek revenge, often in spite of personal cost. From the standpoint of self-interest, punishing those who violate the interests of strangers--a form of revenge called altruistic punishment--seems irrational. Enter de Quervain and colleagues (3) on page 1254 of this issue, who offer an alternative explanation--instead of cold calculated reason, it is passion that may plant the seeds of revenge.

Using an elegant laboratory task designed to elicit acts of revenge among human volunteers, de Quervain and colleagues appear to have captured this complex emotional dynamic of schadenfreude with a positron emission tomography (PET) camera. During the task, subjects played games involving real money with a series of different partners. In each interaction, subjects chose to give their partners money, which was then quadrupled. Next, partners who received the money had a chance to reciprocate, or to pay back half to the subject. If partners decided not to reciprocate, or defected, subjects could choose to administer punishment. At this point, their brains were scanned. De Quervain and co-workers first asked whether choosing to punish a defector would recruit brain circuits implicated in reward processing. They found that when subjects administered a monetary punishment to defectors, a subcortical region of the brain called the striatum increased its consumption of oxygen (that is, was "activated"). The investigators interpreted this to indicate that punishing a defector activates brain regions related to feeling good about revenge rather than brain regions related to feeling bad about having been violated. Indeed, these striatal foci lie near brain areas that rats will work furiously to stimulate electrically (4). The investigators then asked whether the striatum would be activated even when administering the punishment carried a personal cost. They found that the striatum was still activated when subjects chose to administer punishment at a personal cost, as was a region in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) that has been implicated in balancing costs and benefits (5). Although these findings suggested a connection between striatal activation and the satisfaction one might derive from punishing a defector, they do not establish a directional relationship between the two. Thus, in a clever internal analysis, the investigators observed that the degree of striatal activation during no-cost punishment predicted the extent to which subjects chose to punish at a personal cost (that is, under less satisfying conditions). This finding suggested to the investigators that striatal activation indexed subjects' anticipation of satisfaction, rather than satisfaction per se.

These findings fit a fresh piece into the rapidly expanding puzzle of reward processing as revealed by brain imaging. Ironically, punishment of defectors in this study activated the same regions (that is, striatum and MPFC) that were activated when people rewarded cooperators in a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study (6). These seemingly diametrically opposite social behaviors are united by a common psychological experience--both involve the anticipation of a satisfying social outcome. As presaged by comparative research (7), humans also show increased striatal activity during anticipation of nonsocial rewards such as monetary gains (8) and pleasant tastes (9). Together, these findings imply that for certain parts of the striatum, it's the feeling that counts. As with any compelling study, the findings raise additional questions for future research. Although PET measures absolute metabolism (and can even provide neurochemical information), its spatial and temporal resolution are limited (in this case, to 15 mm3/min). Thus, although they were able to visualize activation at the head of the caudate, the investigators may not have been able to track activity in the smaller ventral part of the striatum--the part most directly implicated in motivation (10). Fortunately, event-related fMRI can resolve activity in smaller regions (~4 mm3) on a second-to-second basis (11). Techniques like this may enable future investigators to make even more specific observations regarding when and where activation occurs during altruistic punishment.

Second, while the present PET study of defectors included male subjects, the aforementioned fMRI study of cooperators included females. Future research will undoubtedly need to explore which social interactions most powerfully motivate men compared with women (as well as members of different social groups). Regardless, the findings do powerfully illustrate the importance of considering proximal emotional mechanisms in brain imaging studies of social behavior (12). The new results also suggest that, depending on social learning, some of the same emotions that bring us together can also break us apart. The findings of de Quervain et al. also chip yet another sliver from the rational model of economic man. In fact, their subjects illustrated at least two types of irrationality: reacting on the basis of emotional considerations and spending costly personal resources to ensure that defectors got their due. Beyond providing a compelling justification for adding social justice concerns to existing economic models, the findings serve as a harbinger of future "neuroeconomic" studies that strive to descriptively reconstruct these models using neurobehavioral data. One can imagine the new models accommodating both "passionate" and "rational" forces, as well as specifying when and how they come together to influence individual choice. Back in traffic, brake lights flare ahead. You realize that your smile was short-sighted. Your car skids to a halt. Fortunately, the smile didn't cost a pile-up. This time.

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27 August 2004 Science Magazine Science, Vol 305, 1230-1231 SOCIETY FOR CONSERVATION BIOLOGY MEETING: Forest Loss Makes Monkeys Sick Erik Stokstad NEW YORK CITY--Some 1500 conservation biologists gathered at Columbia University from 30 July to 2 August to discuss humanity's growing impact on the natural world. Among the findings were new twists on how fragmenting forests can hurt dung beetles, monkeys, and other creatures. It's bad news for endangered animals when their habitats are fragmented. Populations become isolated, food supplies diminish, and hunters become more of a threat. Now add to that list a higher risk of illness. Although it's known that disturbed habitat can help transmit diseases between wildlife and humans, a new study shows for the first time that fragmentation of forests by humans can hasten the decline of a primate population by making common parasites more abundant and introducing new ones. "It's a potentially devastating effect," says Peter Daszak, director of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in Palisades, New York. Deforestation threatens many populations of forest-dwelling primates in Africa. Thomas Gillespie, now a postdoc at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his Ph.D. adviser, Colin Chapman of the University of Florida, Gainesville, studied two species of leaf-eating monkeys to understand how habitat change might affect their health. They compared groups living in undisturbed forest within Kibale National Park in western Uganda with those living in surrounding forest fragments. In the park, overall populations of both the Red Colobus monkey (Piliocolobus tephrosceles) and the Black-and-White Colobus (Colobus guereza) have remained stable. But in 22 nearby patches of forest, the scientists found that the total Red Colobus population fell by 20% between 1999 and 2003. In contrast, the number of Black-and-White Colobus in the same fragments rose by 4%.

Suspecting that parasites might be to blame for the decline in the Red Colobus, Gillespie and his team first looked for evidence of them in both fragmented and intact forest. Densities of primate parasites were higher in forest fragments, they found. For example, the larvae of the nodule worm Oesophagostomum, which causes the most debilitating symptoms of all the pathogens, were more than five times more abundant in the fragments. "It's very clear that there was a higher risk of infection in disturbed forest," says Gillespie. He suspects that people and livestock are introducing pathogens; indeed, four of the five parasites found only in the fragments also infect humans and livestock. To measure the levels of infection, Gillespie examined 1151 monkey feces samples for parasites. Ten parasite species were present in the Red Colobus samples, and feces from fragmented habitat had significantly higher levels of most parasites than feces from the virgin forest. By contrast, the Black-and-White Colobus samples contained just seven parasites. For five of those parasites, there was essentially no difference in their prevalence between dung samples from fragmented and intact forest dwellers. That could help explain why the Black-and-White Colobus are doing better, although it's not clear why they would carry fewer parasites than do the Red Colobus. "This work suggests a really strong role for disease" in the decline of the Red Colobus, says Nick Isaac, an evolutionary biologist at the Zoological Society of London. Although probably not fatal, parasites can affect a population indirectly, Isaac explains, by making monkeys less able to feed or conceive. And stress makes the animals more vulnerable to infection by parasites, which makes a grim situation even grimmer.

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August 27, 2004 Newsweek magazine August 30, 2004 TRENDS Let's Hug AT LEAST TWlCE A week, Maria Baczynski and Reid Mihalko don pajamas, snack on munchies and snuggle up with stuffed animals on the floor, Sound like your typical junior-high sleepover? It isn't. Baczynski, 26, and Mihalko, 36, spend the night with as many as 20 strangers at the popular "cuddle parties" they host in their New York City apartments. Since February, more than 300 guests have paid $30 each to enjoy three hours of cuddling and, say organizers, a dose of healing. "There is recognition that we're not getting enough touch and affection:' says Baczynski, a self-described sex educator. "When you open up to people amazing things can happen." That does not mean sex. Hanky-panky is forbidden by the 16 rules listed on cuddleparty.com. Guests must wear pajamas ("more comfy than sexy"), and there is absolutely "no dry humping:' These rules are meant to create a safe space where adults can explore affection without its becoming sexualized. Each party begins with a "welcome circle" where cuddlers practice saying no to unwanted advances. According to Baczynski, "People learn to communicate what they want and don't want." Birgitte Philippides, 36, says the parties can improve life for singles. "Ever since I've been cuddling, it's been a waterfall of guys asking me out because I'm so much more approachable," she says. Baczynski and Mihalko have already taken their cuddle gospel to Hawaii, California and, last weekend, Washington, D.C. They're hosting their first single-sex cuddles in September and have parties planned for senior citizens. You're never too old to hug. -WILLIAM LEE ADAMS

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August 11, 2004 Los Angeles Times RUMBLE SEAT Gen.-X, meet your wagon It's not a precision instrument, but as a kid-friendly ride for aging rebels, the Dodge Magnum RT cuts a cool profile. By Dan Neil, Times Staff Writer

"HEY! Yo! Is that your Magnum?" I heard a voice in the front yard call out. I opened the door to find one of my Silver Lake neighbors, a young man in his early 30s. He had spotted the maroon Dodge Magnum RT test car parked on the street. Let's call him Killer.    Killer was wearing a bowling shirt and baggy shorts, several earrings and a couple of ounces of high-quality tattoo ink swirling around his calves, forearms and neck — flaming dice, crossed pistols, hearts and death's heads, Bettie Page in fishnets. You know, the illustrated psychobilly.    Killer explained that he and his wife — huh? — had been trying to find a Dodge Magnum RT in Los Angeles because they had a 2-year-old daughter — wha?! — and they needed a family car. None of the local dealers had the RT edition — with the 340-horsepower Hemi V8 — and he was thinking of driving to Las Vegas to find one.    "Aw, man," Killer said, "that thing is just so money!"    It occurred to me as I closed the door and put down my can of "Welcome Mace" that Killer was the Magnum's ideal demographic: a middle-finger-waving anti-establishmentarian, bad-beer connoisseur, breeder.    Sometime between being hip and breaking a hip, even kool kats need a family car.	Let's get right to it: What makes the Magnum work is its subversive, hot-rod styling, which to me has a distinct rockabilly vibe. In this tribal subculture, with its goth-kitsch fascination with '50s teen rebellion — reform-school girls, DA hairdos, crushed-velvet doo-wop, dead-man's curve nihilism — the cars are big and bad. Cadillac convertibles, sloe-eyed Hudsons, Lincoln roadsters, noses aglow with flame-job paint schemes: these are the cars you see barreling out of mural tattoos.    At 197.7 inches long, the Magnum isn't particularly big, about the same length as a Chevy Monte Carlo. But its massive, blocky styling lends it that look of naked bulk that characterized the great lead sleds of the '50s and '60s. The Magnum puts the "blunt" in "blunt-force trauma."    Meanwhile, the styling vernacular is right out of the California rod-and-custom playbook. One of hot-rodding's favorite tricks is to cut a few inches out of a car's roof pillars and lower the roof, giving the car a slightly desperate, James Dean squint. This is the "chop" in the phrase "chopped and channeled." The Magnum's chop-top roofline, glowering greenhouse, low stance, and road-scraping body skirts all convey a wonderful, retro delinquency.
Drop this thing 4 inches, put on a set of lakes pipes, some Coker whitewalls and disc hubcaps, and you can be the star of your own B-movie fantasy. Calling Mamie Van Doren.    It's also worth noting that there is, sure enough, something sinister about the Magnum. In some lights it looks very authoritarian, like something from the Big Brother motor pool. It could be the smoked-out rear windows, behind which all sorts of truncheon-wielding attitude adjustment might take place beyond prying eyes. Dodge began selling the RT this summer, and will begin selling the Magnum SXT (with a 3.5-liter, 250-hp V6 mated to a four-speed automatic) with a police package coming this fall and a Hemi-powered pursuit cruiser next year. Evildoers, beware.    With the Magnum RT, retro is more than skin-deep. Under the hood is an overhead-valve 5.7-liter V8 — that's 350 cubic inches to the fuzzy-dice set — mated to a rear-wheel-drive drivetrain. We haven't seen that combo in a station wagon since the dearly defunct Buick Roadmaster wagon of the late 1990s, I think.    Dodge is going to some trouble to sell the Magnum RT as a "sports tourer," i.e., a performance wagon, and its posted time from nil to 60 mph — 6.3 seconds — is nothing to toss beer bottles at. The five-speed transmission's steep first gear and the big V8's 390 pound-feet of torque give the car pretty righteous launch capabilities. Switch off the traction control and you can paint the town black with the fat 18-inch Continental all-season tires.    At highway speeds, the RT runs with quiet, effortless authority and plenty of mid-range passing punch. The exhaust sounds dark and warm and	velvety, like a vinyl LP recording of a '60s-era Hemi. The most trick feature of the car is its cylinder deactivation system: when engine loads are low, four of the eight cylinders' valve sets are deactivated, so that the car becomes, effectively, a V4. The RT returns decent — though by no means unprecedented — EPA mileage of 17/24 miles per gallon, city/highway. I tried many times to detect the cylinder deactivation system at work, but it was completely transparent.    The Magnum is a surprisingly refined piece of hardware for the money. The short-long-arm front suspension gives the front end a suppleness and nicely tuned feel through the steering wheel; the multi-link rear suspension is likewise well damped and composed. The highway ride is comfortable and body roll is reasonably well contained. Borrowed from the boys in Stuttgart, this chassis design is the same one that labors under the Mercedes-Benz E class.    As for handling, well, this is where it gets a bit sketchy. Don't expect the Magnum to hang with the Audi Avant or BMW wagons on the S's. This is a big automobile and heavy (4,142 pounds) on pretty tame all-season radials. So it slides around quite a bit — first by the nose if you plow into a corner with too much speed, and then by the tail if you lift off the throttle abruptly while cornering. The rack-and-pinion steering doesn't have a very positive self-centering feel, and it has poor "trace-ability," the quality of finding and holding a line in a corner. The Magnum does have traction and stability systems, however, and when the car senses a yawing rotation or an incipient spin, it will intervene aggressively and the car will snap back into shape. The brakes are only average.
A sport-tourer? No. A hipster-friendly SUV substitute? Absolutely. All-wheel drive will become an option on the RT package this fall, giving the Magnum surer footing in adverse conditions and raising the trailer weight capacity from 2,000 pounds to 3,800 pounds. Meanwhile, the five-seat vehicle is plenty roomy, despite the swooping roofline: The max cargo volume with the rear seats folded is 71.6 cubic feet, more than a Cadillac SRX and just shy of a Ford Explorer. The Magnum's rear hatch is hinged well forward of the break-over point, allowing the upright loading of tall items in the back.    The interior has a studied simplicity, with straightforward rotary climate and audio controls, four-gauge instrument cluster with black-on-white lettering, leather seating and a kind of indoor-outdoor, rubber-and-plastic dash and door treatment. In keeping with its young-parent audience, the car has loads of safety content, including auto-reverse power windows (to prevent hand entrapment); smart front airbags and side curtain airbags; rear parking assist and child-safety seat anchors.    I am a firm believer in sporty wagons. In most head-to-head comparisons they are lighter, faster, safer, more space efficient and less fuel intensive than SUVs. There is very little a Ford Explorer can do that a Volvo V70 R can't, and the Volvo is infinitely more versatile.	Until the Magnum, there wasn't a domestic — OK, quasi-domestic — entry in the hot wagon category. The Magnum claims this territory and tattoos it with a heart that says "Mother." As Gen-Xers yield to the imperatives of biology, the market needs more family vehicles that stand out from the hordes of bourgeois boomers. * 2005 Dodge Magnum RT Price as tested: $30,520 Powertrain: 5.7-liter, overhead-valve V8 with Multi-Displacement System; five-speed automatic transmission with adaptive learning and Autostick manual control; rear-wheel drive Curb weight: 4,142 pounds Horsepower: 340 horsepower at 5,000 rpm Torque: 390 lb.-feet at 4,000 rpm 0-60 mph: 6.3 seconds Wheelbase: 120 inches Overall length: 197.7 inches Seating capacity: 5 Maximum cargo volume: 71.6 cubic feet Competitors: Volvo V70 R, Volkswagen Passat Wagon W8    Final thoughts: Rockabye, baby Automotive critic Dan Neil can be reached at dan.neil@latimes.com.

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August 7, 2004 The Economist Magazine South Asia's floods In all the wrong places DELHI AND DHAKA Human intervention could do much to mitigate the monsoon's annual tyranny

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perryb

August 8, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE NATION Top Texas Donor's Influence Far More Visible Than He Is Robert Perry is behind an ad attacking John Kerry's war record and many GOP campaigns. By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer NASSAU BAY, Texas — Robert J. Perry, the main financier behind the effort to discredit Sen. John F. Kerry's military record, is the most prolific political donor in Texas.    A homebuilder who lives lakeside in this Houston suburb, Perry has helped bankroll the widespread success of Republican candidates here, has long-standing ties to many close associates of President Bush and has contributed to Bush's last four campaigns. According to interviews and campaign documents, he has given a total of more than $5 million to scores of political candidates.    "And the vast majority of those people have never laid eyes on him," said Court Koenning, executive director of the Republican Party in Harris County, which includes the Houston metropolitan area.	Despite the enormous influence of his money, Perry, 71, is reticent and guarded, and remains something of a mystery in Texas. But this week, his largess crept onto the national stage.    A group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched television ads Thursday accusing Kerry, a Massachusetts senator and the Democratic presidential nominee, of lying about his military record. A $100,000 check that Perry wrote to the group this year represented about two-thirds of the money in its accounts as of June 30, according to financial documents.    The Bush campaign says it has no ties to the group.    The advertisements, running in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia, are part of a multimedia campaign questioning Kerry's fitness as a leader and commander in chief. A book written by one of the group's leaders, Houston lawyer John E. O'Neill, is scheduled to be released Aug. 15.    "Bob Perry is a very generous guy with his political donations," Koenning said. "His primary interest is good government . Everybody agrees that John Kerry's service to this country is admirable. But if he lied about it, that speaks to his character."
Kerry was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for his service in Vietnam. Upon his return, he became a leader of a veterans group that declared the war a mistake. His military service is a cornerstone of his presidential campaign, one his advisors believe contrasts sharply with Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.    None of the veterans featured in the advertisements served on the river patrol boats Kerry commanded during Vietnam. Several of Kerry's crewmates have condemned the advertisements, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), once a prisoner of war in Vietnam, called them "dishonest and dishonorable."    "Bob Perry pulls the strings and never gets his hands dirty. But even by his standards, this latest deal is just over the top," said Charles Soechting, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party.    Perry declined to comment through his spokesman, Bill Miller, an Austin political consultant.    Perry has been a political donor for years, working with White House political director Karl Rove during Rove's Texas years, contributing to Texas Gov. Rick Perry's rise in politics and giving $20,000 to Bush's two campaigns for governor in the 1990s.    But Perry, no relation to the governor, began increasing his donations in 2000. Today, campaign documents and his representatives confirm that he has given more money to campaigns and political organizations in the last four years than any other Texan. A few of his donations have gone to Democratic candidates, but most have gone to Republicans and conservative causes.	He has given nearly $1 million to the Texas Republican Party. He has donated at least $200,000 to Texans for Lawsuit Reform, one of the most successful "tort reform" organizations in the nation.    In the 2002 election cycle, he also provided about $700,000 for the GOP's effort to dominate Texas politics. That included $165,000 given to Texans for a Republican Majority, an offshoot of U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority, formed to help conservatives get elected.    The election that year of a slate of DeLay-backed Republicans — all supported by Perry — gave the GOP control of the state House for the first time in 130 years. That paved the way for passage of a host of conservative measures, such as abortion restrictions and limits on medical malpractice cases. The GOP also redrew congressional maps for Texas, a move designed to shore up Republican control of Congress.    Perry is largely unknown outside of campaign finance databases and a small group of political leaders, shunning social activities often embraced by major donors. Many of the politicians who have received Perry's money say they have never met him. One who has, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs, said he wanted to know just one thing before supporting her: "Are you a straight-talking, straight-shooting person who is going to represent Texas well?"    "I just think he's an unassuming guy," Combs said.
Born in a tiny ranching community in Bosque County, Texas, Perry attended Baylor University and then taught high school for awhile, like his father before him. In 1968, he started a home-building business in Houston.    Today, Perry Homes does business across central and eastern Texas. The company's website lists 48 communities in the Houston area alone where the company is building or selling houses, which range from $110,000 to more than $400,000.    Perry and his wife, Doylene, have been married since 1961. They have four grown children.    The Perry home is less than a mile from Nassau Bay Baptist Church, where the couple attends services each weekend, said Senior Pastor David Fannin.    "Bob is the most kind, gracious and giving man you will ever meet," Fannin said. "He is a man of strong conviction."    Perry donates generously to the church, Fannin said, but never asks anything in return. His supporters also cite that trait.    "He has never asked me for a single thing," Combs said. "He is one of those rare individuals who is just interested in people being honest and ethical."	His detractors say otherwise.    Like many prominent building companies, Perry Homes has been sued dozens of times. Last year, Perry was among several developers watching as the Legislature imposed strict limits on civil lawsuits, particularly claims brought by homeowners alleging shoddy construction.    Critics called the seats where he and other builders watched the legislative debate the "owner's box," because much of their money had gone to advocacy groups fighting for limits on the civil court system, as well as politicians who supported those efforts. During that debate, the governor put a Perry Homes executive on a panel established to put in place new restrictions on claims against builders.    Perry's backers also say he works hard to reach out to Houston's Latino and African American communities. But some leaders of those communities accuse him of aggressively buying land in inner-city areas, then building expensive homes that gentrify those neighborhoods and drive out low-income families.    "I think he fancies himself as a person who can manipulate politics for his own gain," Soechting said. "Politics and money are one and the same to him."

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August 8, 2004 Los Angeles Times TURKMENISTAN An 'Illegal' Outbreak of Plague By Wendy Orent (author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease.") ATLANTA UP The new nation of Turkmenistan, one of several Central Asian republics that rose from the Soviet Union's ashes, is ruled by a 64-year-old dictator named Saparmurad A. Niyazov, a strutting, miniature Saddam Hussein who calls himself Turkmenbashi (father of the Turkmens). A man of monstrous ego and modest intellect, he has outlawed beards on men and forbidden women to wear gold teeth, a sign of status. The capital of Turkmenistan, Ashgabat, boasts an enormous golden revolving statue of the Turkmenbashi, oriented toward the sun so that its rays always shine on the statue's face. Niyazov is also building in the desert — at a cost of $6.5 billion and using water diverted from a parched countryside — what he calls "The Great Turkmen Lake." The world keeps quiet about Niyazov's eccentricities, aware that his vast wealth comes from control of one of the world's largest supplies of natural gas. All of this would be amusing, more or less, if we didn't think too hard about the effects of such policies. But over the last few months, the Turkmenbashi has taken the health of his nation's 5 million people into his own hands, with potentially devastating consequences. In March, he dismissed 15,000 licensed healthcare workers "to save money" and replaced them with conscripts. In June, the Turkmenbashi fired Turkmen doctors and other health workers with foreign degrees, saying their training was "incompatible with the Turkmen education system." Most disturbing, he has declared all infectious diseases — cholera, AIDS and other scourges — illegal and has forbidden any mention of them.

Turkmenistan's Anti-Epidemic Emergency Commission has stated that "the epidemiological situation on the territory of Turkmenistan is safe. There are no cases of dangerous diseases." If only that were true. According to both Gundogar, a Turkmen opposition group, and the Turkmenistan Helsinki Initiative, a deadly plague epidemic has broken out in the Turkmenbashi's territory. Yersinia pestis, the germ that causes plague, is widespread among rodents throughout Central Asia, and the strains they carry are among the oldest, most virulent and most dangerous in the world. In the barren deserts of Turkmenistan, the leading plague reservoir is a burrowing rat-sized animal with legs like a miniature kangaroo, Rhombomys opimus, the great gerbil. Recent years in Central Asia have been good for gerbils, producing bumper crops of the grains they eat. More grain means more gerbils, and more gerbils means more plague. These outbreaks happen periodically, and with good public health systems in place they can be managed. The Soviets in their day responded quickly, though they kept news of the outbreaks from the outside world. In 1950, according to a recent account by Russian plague expert Lev Melnikov, a large plague outbreak in Turkmenistan killed several hundred people. That outbreak originated with a nomad hunter who bedded down overnight in gerbil territory and was bitten by infected fleas. He returned to his family's encampment; the disease spread rapidly to his lungs, and soon everyone in the settlement was infected. Some relatives fled to other nomad tents before they died, spreading the disease further. Only a heavy-footed response from the Soviet government, with medical teams, military quarantines and enormous pyres to burn the infected corpses of the nomads together with their tents brought the epidemic under control.

But the Soviets and their hundreds of trained plague experts no longer run the show, and the Turkmens are at the mercy of the Turkmenbashi's policies. At least 10 people are known to have died of plague this summer, and some reports place the figure considerably higher. The Turkmen government has responded, predictably, by declaring the word "plague" illegal. It has also instituted border controls "to prevent disease from entering Turkmenistan from neighboring states." Still, reports continue to trickle out: of deaths in Merv in the southeast, in the capital city of Ashgabat, in the city of Turkmenbashi (formerly known as Krasnovodsk) on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Though some reports state that this outbreak of plague is bubonic, and thus spread only by infected fleas or by direct contact with a sick animal, others claim that the disease has become pneumonic, or lung-borne, the most feared and lethal form of the disease. The Black Death of 1347-1351, which originated among the rodents of Central Asia, seems to have been a largely pneumonic plague, augmented by human-to-human transmission via fleas carried by people. It spread across the known world, killing at least 40 million people in the deadliest pandemic in human history. Today, when people are infected by any form of plague, about 85% survive if they are treated promptly with appropriate antibiotics. Even in the absence of antibiotics, skillfully handled quarantine and isolation can break the chain of transmission. But these approaches to plague management require something that's missing in Turkmenistan: acknowledgment that the disease is a problem. How bad is plague in Turkmenistan going to get? It is possible that — unknown to the outside world — the severely crippled Turkmenistan healthcare system has somehow managed to curtail the outbreak. But we cannot ignore the possibility that the plague may continue to spread. The secrecy that characterizes the Turkmenbashi's regime prevents the outside world from knowing what is going on inside the country's borders. "Turkmenistan is a black box," said Raymond Zilinskas, an expert on biological weapons and disease in the territory of the former Soviet Union. >>>

Turkmenistan's neighbors, Uzbekistan and Russia, are understandably worried. Tests run in Uzbekistan have confirmed the presence of plague in fleas and rodents in areas near the Turkmen border; cattle breeders, oil workers and geologists, along with thousands of camels, have been vaccinated in recent weeks. Most important, Uzbekistan has tightened border controls to prevent panicked or sick people from slipping over the border. Seven mobile anti-epidemic teams have also been sent to patrol the region. Russians, for their part, have banned the import of monkeys, cats and camels from Turkmenistan out of fear these animals could carry the infection. So far as we can tell, the Turkmen government's strongest response to the outbreak has been to make its remaining health workers sign a pledge that they will not use the word "plague." But secrecy and denial can have devastating consequences. The startling eruption of a new, dangerous respiratory illness, SARS, in Guangdong, China, in the autumn of 2002 was kept a close secret by the Chinese government for months. The mainland Chinese outbreak eventually seeded nine other major outbreaks around the world; more than 8,000 people were infected and almost 800 died. Had the Chinese government asked for help from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those outbreaks need never have happened, and hundreds of lives — not to mention billions of dollars — could have been saved. It is terrible to think that because of one man's hubris, and his ironfisted control of an isolated country, the lives of unknown numbers of people may be at risk. As Central Asia expert Martha Brill Olcott puts it: "The president is wholly unpredictable and does not behave rationally . No one takes seriously that his policies can have tragic consequences for the people of Turkmenistan and those of neighboring countries." The dead of Turkmenistan are tragic enough. But we also need to remember that epidemic disease does not often respect borders.

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August 1, 2004 Los Angeles Times DISPATCH FROM BEIJING It's Time to Bring Out the Dancing Shoes Millions of older Chinese gather outdoors in summer to waltz and stamp, following a rite of generational passage. By John M. Glionna, Times Staff Writer BEIJING — Liu Ping wanted so badly to be graceful, to dance away the night under the stars like all those romantic couples she'd watched on state-run TV. She also needed to lose a little weight.    The chubby 47-year-old recently decided to study ballroom dancing, but her husband refused. To dance, he insisted, wasn't masculine.    So one Sunday evening, Liu arrived alone at a city park for her first lesson. She and a woman old enough to be her mother moved awkwardly through the steps of a waltz — like two sumo wrestlers grappling for advantage — as a drill- sergeant instructor barked out commands through a megaphone.    "It looks easy on television," Liu said during a break. "But it's hard to learn."    It's summer in China. And for millions of residents, that means it's time to dance.    Morning and evening, during the cooler hours of the day, middle-aged workers and graying retirees gather in vacant lots, neighborhood parks, elegant public squares and even under bridges for what has become a generational rite of passage.	The young may dance to a hip-hop beat in packed nightclubs, but more and more older people are taking up dance with a vengeance, seeking exercise, companionship and fun. And in an increasingly modern country, as children leave home to find their fortunes, their parents dance to stave off the loneliness of a phenomenon new to this society: empty-nest syndrome.    Many Chinese, like Liu, prefer ballroom dancing, in keeping with a revival that has recently swept across Asia. Others choose a traditional folk dance known as yangge, in which mostly older women perform a quirky combination of line dancing and ancient Chinese step patterns — all to the cacophonous beat of drums and cymbals.    More than 30 million Chinese — about the population of California — regularly perform what the government calls sports dancing, including the waltz, the jitterbug and the rumba. An equal number prefer yangge, according to statistics from the Chinese DanceSport Federation.    In Beijing, an estimated 60,000 women flock each night to popular yangge events. Dressed in bright costumes and accentuated makeup, waving fans and ribbons, they sweat and stamp their feet, often just a few feet from couples sweeping about in organized ballroom dance routines.    In Chongqing, in central China, 10,000 residents often gather in the city's mammoth public square both for yangge and ballroom dancing.    Rather than frequenting private clubs or dance halls, many Chinese prefer to shake their groove thing outdoors, where the dancing is free. Many throw impromptu open-air dance parties that have the feel of an ice rink in reverse: The more advanced take to the outside while the beginners wobble about in the middle.
Ballroom dance was introduced to China in the 1920s at the Shanghai ballroom known as Bailemen. As legend has it, even Chairman Mao Tse-tung liked to cut a rug, though he outlawed ballroom dancing for ordinary Chinese throughout the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.    Some say the structured moves of dances such as the waltz are a way to bring order to a chaotic world, comparing it with the calm brought by the fluid movements of tai chi. For many Chinese, the dance moves of yangge hark back to the regimented exercises they were required to perform as schoolchildren.    For whatever reason, ballroom dance coach Guo Haizha said, business is booming.    "Ever since the SARS scare, people pay more attention to exercise as a way to stay healthy," he said. Guo charges a one-time fee of 60 yuan, or $7, and students can keep coming back until they learn to dance. His outdoor classes are packed.    In 10 years, Guo said, he has been tempted to refund a student's money only once, to a short, middle-aged man who came each night for four months and still could not master the steps to the waltz. He stepped on toes. Tempers flared.    Then one night, almost inexplicably, the man got it. "Now he can dance," Guo said, "but he can't always remember the steps."	Still, many Chinese men consider ballroom dancing too feminine. "So we have many all-female pairs," said Yin Guochen, general secretary of the Chinese DanceSport Federation. "People are traditional. Many think that having an unmarried man and women as dance partners might cause problems, like an affair."    At Guo's class near Beijing's Behai Park, conducted at the end of a large open space along a lake where hundreds of residents milled about — walking with their babies, doing qigong exercises or just taking in the night air — a dozen couples moved in unison to the tinny sound of an old Communist revolutionary song that goes, "Fish can't live without water, flowers can't live without stems, and China can't live without Chairman Mao."    In the packed park, a bicyclist riding through the clutch of students was almost socked in the face as a dancer thrust out a hand in an exaggerated move.    Retired book publisher Fan Houyun is a class regular. With his sweat-ringed muscle T-shirt and round glasses, the 73-year-old looks more like a lumbering Marlon Brando than a fluid Fred Astaire. As in the bird kingdom, where males are more colorful than females, men are just more vivid on the dance floor, he contended.    "A good male dancer can make a female look better," he said.
Several miles away, beneath a busy freeway bridge in working-class south Beijing, Wan Xiuyin didn't need a male partner to make her dancing come alive.    Most nights, she and her two best friends don bright red blouses, put their makeup on thick and head out for a few hours of yangge dancing. In a generational twist, their daughters sometimes get embarrassed about the way they dress.    But Wan doesn't care. In a male-dominated culture, yangge is all about freedom: "We want to look good as a unit," she said. "And that means lots of red and lots of eye makeup."    Yangge dates back more than 1,000 years to the Tang Dynasty but gained a modern following in the 1940s when the Communist armies fighting against Japan choreographed new movements of the folk dance.    To the deafening drum and cymbal beat that echoed under the bridge, Wan and her crew moved in step, fluttering bamboo umbrellas that resembled larger versions of those little parasols that come in exotic drinks.    "We pretend we're in the countryside harvesting wheat or riding horses," the 48-year-old seamstress said.	Yangge has its critics. Many complain that such rural entertainment doesn't fit a sophisticated city such as Beijing. Many ballroom dancers look down their noses at the hordes of yangge enthusiasts.    And yangge's accompanying drumbeat disturbs people nearby. Many yangge events are held beneath overpasses, where the noise can be more contained.    Still, the government is looking to regulate the dance form by simplifying the steps and replacing musicians with tape players.    But Wan's recent yangge fest had the let-loose feel of a Grateful Dead concert. One woman in a blue dress shook her head and pranced about under the bridge as though in some hallucinogenic stupor.    Yang Guohua, a 40-year-old ballroom dance fan wearing a Kurt Cobain T-shirt, shook his head in disgust. Stopping to watch the woman dance, the businessman — whose cellphone ringer plays waltz music — had seen enough.    "If she were my wife," he said, "I'd kill myself."

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-cartoon from the Los Angeles Times

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July 24, 2004 The Economist Magazine Anti-social behaviour The war on incivility Britain's latest crime worry is anti-social behaviour. It's hard to define—and even harder to police ARE those uncouth teenagers hanging around on the street corner just going through a difficult phase, or are they chipping away at the foundations of decent society? The tendency these days is to think the worst. “Our country faces two major threats”, says Frank Field, a Labour MP and a veteran crusader against anti-social behaviour. “One comes from international terrorism, the other from neighbourhood terrorists.” A decade ago, people worried about tangible crimes like burglary and car theft. As figures released on July 22nd showed, those are now in remission. But the overall level of anxiety appears not to have diminished at all. In the kind of psychological shift that unnerves governments, public worries now focus sharply on petty incivilities like vandalism, loud music and public loutishness. The need to crack down on such annoyances was the main theme of two speeches this week by Tony Blair, the prime minister, and David Blunkett, the home secretary. It was also the chief spur to plans to put 12,000 more police on the streets in the next four years, along with 20,000 extra community-support officers. > > >

The war against anti-social behaviour may have been formally declared this week, but it has been heating up for the past few years. The state's arsenal starts, softly, with “acceptable behaviour contracts”, first introduced in 1999, in which tearaways promise to calm down.

Should they fail to do so, they are liable to be slapped with an “anti-social behaviour order” (ASBO)—a list of prohibitions, issued by a magistrate, which may prevent them doing uncivil things, hanging out with known troublemakers, or even visiting their favourite stomping grounds. A petty tyrant who steps out of line is liable to spend up to six months in prison. Such remedies are draconian, particularly given that vandalism—the most measurable kind of anti-social behaviour—has been declining since 1995 (see chart). Even coppers are surprised. “I never thought I would live in a country where the police would have these powers,” says Stuart Chapman, a chief superintendent from the South Yorkshire force. The powers are also virtually unique. Other countries fret about youthful misdeeds, but mostly because they are thought to lead on to more serious stuff. In America, the fear about teenagers hanging around the streets is that they will get sucked into gangs. There, as in much of continental Europe, a distinction is drawn between minor indiscretions, which are dealt with through informal negotiation or community sanctions, and criminal offences, which lead to custodial sentences. Britain's innovation is to have criminalised behaviour that is not necessarily an offence in law. To obtain an ASBO, local authorities and the police do not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an offence has been committed. They only have to establish, on the balance of probabilities, that the local lout is making other people's lives difficult. That is fairly easy, which explains why, of the 2,497 orders sought before the end of March 2004, only 42 were refused. But while civil standards of proof apply to the issuing of ASBOs, criminal sanctions can be applied to those who break them. And they can be handed out for anything, from egging houses to dealing in drugs. Kate Hammond, a specialist prosecutor in Manchester, says, mildly: “It's quite a large stick.”

For local authorities, the new laws are a blessing. They now have a weapon against troublesome tenants—even the ones who live in private accommodation, who were formerly difficult to reach. They can disperse groups of youths and drunks from traditional trouble-spots, some of which now proudly display signs declaring them areas free of anti-social behaviour. Some authorities have made more use of ASBOs than others—about a third of the national total comes from Greater Manchester, for example. But pressure from voters and the government means that local authorities are likely to level up, not down. Oddly, though, not everyone is happy. Some point out that ASBOs are likely to put more young people in prison, or into the care of the already struggling probation service. The number of under-21s in the slammer rose by 69% between 1992 and 2003; the trend reversed last year, but a few breached ASBOs would soon change that. And even those in the front line worry that they have unleashed a monster. Council staff report an increasing number of calls about crying babies and children playing football in the street—petty annoyances that used to be dealt with by a quiet word, but which they are now expected to do something about. As Jan Wilson, the leader of Sheffield City Council, says, “this thing seems to be gaining a momentum of its own.”

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July 24 2004 The Economist Magazine The Brazilian Amazon Asphalt and the jungle ALONG THE BR-163 A road project in the Amazon may be the world's boldest attempt to reconcile growth and conservation

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July 18, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ 'Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, Kill 'em'. U.S. troops are trained to respond instinctively during combat. But the lessons do not prepare them for the emotional distress that may arise. By Charles Duhigg, Times Staff Writer NAJAF, Iraq — Tucked behind a gleaming machine gun, Sgt. Joseph Hall grins at his two companions in the Humvee.    "I want to know if I killed that guy yesterday," Hall says. "I saw blood spurt from his leg, but I want to be sure I killed him."    The vehicle goes silent as the driver, Spc. Joshua Dubois, swerves around asphalt previously uprooted by a blast.    "I'm confused about how I should feel about killing," says Dubois, who has a toddler back home. "The first time I shot someone, it was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever felt."    Dubois turns back to the road. "We talk about killing all the time," he says. "I never used to talk this way. I'm not proud of it, but it's like I can't stop. I'm worried what I will be like when I get home."    The men aren't Special Forces soldiers. They're just ordinary troops with the Army's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment serving their 14th month in Iraq, much of it in daily battles. In 20 minutes, they will come under attack.	Many GIs and Army psychiatrists say these constant conversations about death help troops come to grips with the trauma of combat. But mental health professionals within and outside the military point to the chatter as evidence of preventable anguish.    Soldiers are untrained, experts say, for the trauma of killing. Forty years after lessons learned about combat stress in Vietnam, experts charge that avoidable psychological damage goes unchecked because military officials don't include emotional preparation in basic training.    Troops, returning home with untreated and little-understood mental health issues, put themselves and their families at risk for suicide and domestic violence, experts say. Twenty-three U.S. troops in Iraq took their lives last year, according to the Defense Department — an unusually high number, one official acknowledged.    On patrol, however, all that is available is talk.    "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill," Hall says. "It's like it pounds at my brain. I'll figure out how to deal with it when I get home."    Home is the wrong place for soldiers to deal with combat experiences, some experts say.    "It's complete negligence," says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired psychology instructor at West Point who trains law enforcement officers and special operations soldiers.    "The military could train soldiers to talk about killing as easily as they train them to pull the trigger. But commanders are in denial. Nobody wants to accept the blame for a soldier who comes home a wreck for doing what his country asked him to do," he said.
The emotional and psychological ramifications of killing are mostly unstudied by the military, defense officials acknowledge.    "The idea and experience of killing another person is not addressed in military training," says Col. Thomas Burke, director of mental health policy for the Defense Department. "Training's intent is to re-create battle, to make it an automatic behavior among soldiers."    He defends the approach, saying that if troops think too much about emotional issues in combat situations, it could undermine their effectiveness in battle.    Other military representatives, including officers overseeing combat stress control programs, did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.    Much of the military's research on killing and battle stress began after World War II, when studies revealed that only a small number of troops — as few as 15% — fired at their adversaries on the battlefield.    Military studies suggested that troops were unexpectedly reluctant to kill. Military training methods changed, Grossman and others say, to make killing a more automatic behavior.    Bull's-eye targets used in basic training were replaced with human-shaped objects. Battlefield conditions were reproduced more accurately, Burke says. The goal of these and other modifications was to help soldiers react more automatically.    The changes were effective. In the Vietnam War, 95% of combat troops shot at hostile fighters, according to military studies.	Veterans of the Vietnam War also suffered some of the highest levels of psychological damage — possibly as many as 50% of combat forces suffered mental injury, says Rachel MacNair, an expert on veteran psychology. Most notable among the injuries was post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition contributing to violent outbursts years after soldiers leave battlefields.    "The more soldiers ignore their emotions and behave like trained machines rather than thinking people, the more you invite PTSD," says Dr. David Spiegel with the Stanford School of Medicine.    Military officials say there have been changes in treating psychological trauma since Vietnam.    Foremost among them is the creation of combat stress-control teams — mental health professionals in Iraq who speak with troops immediately after traumatic events, such as a U.S. casualty.    Military psychologists say immediate intervention is important in avoiding mental distress.    "We get them to voice what they are feeling, to realize they're not the odd man out, not to blame themselves," says Capt. Robert Cardona, a psychiatrist with a combat stress-control team based in southern Iraq.    But the demands of the military's mission and a soldier's mental health are sometimes at odds.    "Our primary goal is to keep soldiers functional, so they can continue to fight," Cardona says. "Everything else, including feeling well, is second to that."
Mental health technicians are available for troops who request help, Cardona says, but stress teams aren't deployed to bases just because U.S. forces kill hostile fighters. He says about half of the soldiers seeking help are traumatized because they killed someone.    "Killing unleashes emotions few people are prepared to deal with," Cardona says. "We help soldiers put those emotions and experiences away, so they can go into battle the next day. We set the expectation that shock is temporary, and that they will return to duty."    He's familiar with the death fixation in the soldiers' conversations.    "When they talk, they're trying to prove to themselves and each other that what happens doesn't matter," he says. "There's a posturing going on, and sometimes soldiers themselves don't know how much they are affected by what they see. They start to believe what they tell each other." Talk Turns to Killing The men of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment's Alpha and Charlie companies are resting and playing cards in the shade of a staircase here, and the talk turns to killing.    "I enjoy killing Iraqis," says Staff Sgt. William Deaton, 30, who killed a hostile fighter the night before. Deaton has lost a good friend in Iraq. "I just feel rage, hate when I'm out there. I feel like I carry it all the time. We talk about it. We all feel the same way."    Sgt. Cleveland T. Rogers, 25, avoids dwelling on his actions.	"The other day an Iraqi guy was hit real bad, he was gonna die within an hour, but he was still alive and he started saying, 'Baby, baby,' telling me he has a kid," Rogers says. "I mentioned it to my guys after the mission. It doesn't bother me. It can't bother me. If it was the other way around, I'm sure it wouldn't bother him."    Spc. Nathan Borlee tries to keep a lid on what he's feeling.    "I feel like I'd lose control if I think about it too much, so I don't," the 23-year-old says. "Usually everybody comes back and just gives everybody a hug. You kind of get overwhelmed by the feelings."    Without the proper training, experts say, these conversations may contribute to mental injuries.    Grossman says training troops to have therapeutic discussions about killing is "not that hard." His curriculum, used by law enforcement officers and in the wake of traumas such as school shootings, focuses on mental and physical techniques to consciously manage anxiety and other emotional reactions to killing.    "To make killing instinctual, rather than conscious, is inviting pathological, destructive behavior," Grossman says. "We have to give soldiers a vocabulary to talk through emotions and teach them not to be embarrassed by troubling feelings."    Grossman says his suggestions have been overlooked by military commanders who are uncomfortable with the emotionally destructive aspects of military service.
"The military goes for long periods without having to kill anyone," he says. "Generals don't spend a lot of time dealing with the parts that come after battle."    Others say today's soldiers are fundamentally different from previous generations.    "These guys grew up with video games," says Maj. John Hamilton, 50, an Army chaplain stationed in southern Iraq, where he counsels troops. "They've seen thousands of people die on TV. They're already numb. It scares me that some take delight in combat.    "Others just become immediately scared, have nightmares. But that reaction is more frowned upon." Duty vs. Ethics Back in the Humvee, Hall and Dubois approach an abandoned elementary school that commanders say is hiding mortars and hostile fighters. Suddenly, the ground is punctuated by the yellow bursts of improvised explosive devices.    Hall begins firing his .50-caliber machine gun, the phosphorus on each fifth bullet trailing long, red streaks.    The constantly squawking radio pauses briefly and a calm, transmitted voice fills the truck.    "Enemy contact," the radio broadcasts. "Kill 'em, kill 'em."	Ahead, a tank pushes a hole through the school's wall. Staff Sgt. Robert McBride, 35, enters a classroom and sees a group of six Iraqis with guns, he later recounts. He throws a grenade. The blast cuts one Iraqi in half, and the rest lie dying from abrasions and burns on their bodies. The soldiers collect dozens of mortar rounds and return to their vehicles. McBride looks at the hostile fighters once more.    "It did not bother me at all to see those bodies up close," McBride says later. "I'm a warrior. You're either born to this or you're not.    "My soldiers, they are all warriors. They have no problems. I don't let them have problems. There is no place in this Army for men who aren't warriors."    The men's commander, however, worries about them.    "During the heat of the battle the adrenaline is such you don't really think about it," says Capt. Brandon Payne, 28. "Once that adrenaline wears off, though, it gets tough. Some kids, it rolls right off their backs. Some, it's like they break down a little more each day."    Payne is as conflicted as his troops about making sense of war. Reconciling duty with ethics, he says, seems more complicated in Iraq.    "I'm a Christian. I feel I'm saving my soldiers' lives by destroying as many enemy as I can. But at the end of each day, I pray to God. I worry about my soul," he says.    "Every time a door slams, I flinch. I'm hoping it will just go away when I get home.

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July 12 2004 The Economist July 10 2004 Lexington The Cosby Show A comedian with a message that is worth listening to    BILL COSBY has had it up to here with black street culture. “Your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2.30pm every day, it's cursing and calling each other nigger,” he recently told a group of black leaders. “They think they're hip. They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere.” The man who is arguably America's most admired black entertainer has turned from the long-suffering dad in “The Cosby Show” into a searing social critic. He dislikes entertainers who play to black stereotypes. He dislikes black street slang (“You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth”). And he dislikes parents who blanch at spending $200 on reading programmes but give their children $500 sneakers.
Good on Mr Cosby. There is something of a conspiracy of silence about blacks' dismal performance in school: silence from black leaders who don't want to be accused of “blaming the victim”, silence from teachers who don't want to draw attention to the biggest failure of American education. But the achievement gap between blacks and whites is a disgrace.    Black high-school students graduate an average of four years behind white students in basic academic skills. Most black students perform “below basic” in five of the seven key subjects measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. These dismal results are putting a ceiling on blacks' upward mobility—a ceiling that is getting ever lower as routine jobs are exported abroad or mechanised out of existence.    The teachers and black politicians blame three standard villains: poverty, prejudice and school funding. A third of black children are brought up in poverty compared with just 13% of white children. Seven in ten black children attend predominantly minority schools, up from 63% in 1980; more than a third attend schools with a minority enrolment of 90-100%. But these villains nevertheless leave a lot unexplained.    Take poverty. American history is full of examples of impoverished immigrants (Jews a century ago, Asians today) who have made it from the inner city to the Ivy League. More worrying still, the achievement gap is just as marked for affluent black children as it is for poorer ones. Or take school funding. There is no simple correlation between education spending and school quality. In “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning”,	perhaps the best book on this subject, Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom point out that Cambridge, Massachusetts, was left with a huge gap between black and white students despite spending $17,000 for each and every pupil.    Or take prejudice. The percentage of people who tell pollsters that they have nothing in common with people of other races has declined from 25% in 1988 to just 13% in 2003. This is partly because the difference of income between blacks and whites with the same skills in maths and literacy has almost disappeared. Yet, over the same period, the gap in academic achievement has actually widened.    All this suggests that Mr Cosby is on the right track. Researchers routinely explain Asian children's success in terms of Asian cultural values. So why not admit that black children are failing because their culture undervalues success at school—because so many black children dream of becoming sports stars rather than professors, because bookish black children are stigmatised for “acting white”, and because almost half of black ten-year-olds spend five hours or more each day watching television?    Mr Cosby's diagnosis of black failure has another great merit. It comes with a remedy attached. Black America once had a flourishing tradition of self-help: the tradition of Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery but became one of the great orators of his age, and of the army of self-educated blacks who came after him. This tradition was obscured during the civil-rights era as black leaders concentrated on dismantling the machinery of discrimination. But blacks desperately need to revive Douglass's belief in “self-cultivation” if the civil-rights revolution is to amount to something more than a hollow legal shell.
A broadside too narrow    Mr Cosby is well qualified to encourage this revival. He grew up in a poor area of Philadelphia and dropped out of school to join the navy. But he returned to university to take a doctorate in education, and continues to devote his energies to black improvement, writing books for pre-school readers and pouring money into black colleges.    He has drawn flak, of course. But the real problem with his broadside is that it is too narrow. It is not just black leaders who are failing to hold young blacks to higher standards. It is America in general—and, above all, the educational establishment. Teachers are far too willing to make excuses for black failure, and universities have institutionalised low expectations through affirmative action. Why should black children try as hard as their white peers if they can get into college with lower marks?    There are some signs that America is trying to tackle what George Bush once described as “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. The Thernstroms produce plenty of examples of minority schools that are raising academic performance through discipline and accountability. The No Child Left Behind Act—perhaps Mr Bush's most underestimated achievement—is explicitly designed to close the racial achievement gap through a combination of testing and penalties for poor schools.	Changing the attitudes of young blacks will not be easy. It is always tempting to idolise celebrities who get paid millions of dollars while misbehaving. And it is always tempting to blame your problems on “society” when “society” has enslaved and disenfranchised your ancestors. But one thing is certain: black America's future will remain dim unless it begins to take Mr Cosby's jeremiads to heart. (separate ariticle, same issue) Danish immigration laws Love bridge to Sweden Jul 8th 2004 COPENHAGEN AND MALMO One consequence of Europe's toughest immigration laws    LAST week marked the second anniversary of what the Danish government boasts are the European Union's strictest immigration laws. But Christina Reves, a 23-year-old estate agent, was not celebrating. For the laws have driven Ms Reves and many other Danes with spouses from non-EU countries into involuntary exile in Sweden.
Danes may tie the knot with anyone (same-sex marriages included), but getting a foreign spouse into the country is harder. To get a residence permit, both partners must be 24 or over. They must pass a solvency test, showing the Dane has not drawn welfare benefits for the previous 12 months, can lodge a bond of DKr53,000 ($8,700), and can earn enough to support his or her spouse. The pair must have a permanent home (no staying with family) and—the crunch for many brown-skinned Danes—be judged to have ties to Denmark exceeding those to any other country.    In 2001, before the new rules came into force, some 13,000 family “reunification residence permits” were granted. In 2003 fewer than 5,000 were. Many who failed have found refuge in Sweden. EU laws on the free movement of workers let Danes, with their foreign spouses, take up residence in Sweden. Many keep jobs in Copenhagen. The new bridge across the Oresund makes cross-border commuting easy—if expensive. Sweden's more relaxed regime offers another loophole: Danes can qualify for Swedish passports after only two years' residence. Armed with a Swedish passport, former Danes can use EU laws to return home—with their spouses.    Yet even if it can be surmounted, the web of complications and barriers has made the exiles angry. A group of Danes recently gathered on Malmo's main square to protest, saying they felt hurt and betrayed. They also expressed deep gratitude to their Swedish neighbours. “I'm very grateful to Sweden. I know they had to take me but they were extremely welcoming,” says Ms Reves, who now lives in a Malmo apartment with her Egyptian husband.	As many as 1,000 couples have now crossed the love bridge. The Swedish migration board reckons that Danes are arriving at a rate of 60 couples a month. The exodus could one day even exceed the country's previous migration record, set in 1943, when more than 7,000 Danish Jews were spirited across the Oresund to escape the Nazis. Then, as now, Danes found welcome refuge in Sweden. (separate ariticle, same issue) Women travellers Running away from home SOMETIMES they played the part, like Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839) with her Turkish pipe and turban, or Amy Johnson (1903-41), posed in pilot's goggles and leather headgear. But more often—at least in the 19th century, when women took to the deserts and forests in some numbers—the travellers who feature in an exhibition which opened on July 7th at London's National Portrait Gallery dressed themselves like maiden aunts, in perfect imitation of the conventions they defied. There is stern- looking Constance Gordon Cumming (1837-1924), ruched, trimmed and upholstered in Victorian silk; and there is Isabella Bird (1831-1904) with her umbrella, face grimly tied up in hat ribbons, looking like the old Queen Victoria.
Nothing could have been more deceptive. The lives of these women were not at all like those of their Victorian sisters. The dour Constance, for example, describes herself naked in a Fijian stream, hair undone and eating oranges plucked straight from the trees. Mary Kingsley (1862-1900)—another pursed face in hat strings—fell into West African swamps, and exchanged fetishes and fish for hairpins and alcohol. Most of them ostentatiously shunned feminist causes. For women like these, it was home life that was the real hardship.    Home meant confinement—“walls and gardens”, as Gertrude Bell put it. It meant years of looking after ageing parents and feckless brothers while “fighting a burning desire in my own heart”, as one of them wrote, “that craved for the whole world”. Home made Isabella Bird physically ill. Abroad, she could spend eight hours in the saddle and sleep soundly out of doors. But in England she suffered insomnia, depression and mysterious spinal complaints. “I find the society of English people fatiguing”, she once wrote after some months in the Far East. “My soul hankers for solitude and Freedom.”    Dea Birkett's lively and informative book, published to coincide with the exhibition, resounds with this word, often written thus, with a capital letter. The author dashes through the centuries, from the early fourth to the late 20th, dividing her subject into categories: adventurers; companions; scholars; and writers and artists.	Among these there is some overlap, for the scholars were also writers, and the companions were sometimes adventurers, and so on. But with all of them, there is a palpable sense of exhilaration.    Women travelled primarily for the joy of it. They had no theoretical axes to grind. As botany, geology, anthropology and other once amateur pursuits were gradually fenced off into all-male professions, so women struggled for education, funds and recognition. It was frustrating. But it meant that they were forced to travel simply, with little parade, either conceptual or actual. (Henry Morton Stanley, we learn, took eight tonnes of equipment on his first African expedition, carried by 300 porters.)    The charge against women—that they were good only for facts and particulars—turned out to be their strength. More dependent upon local help, they came closer to the worlds they were observing. Less learned, they were more open to impressions, more susceptible to the unexpected. In the foreword to the book, Jan Morris, a travel writer who was James Morris before she changed her sex, concludes that the vulnerability of women, and everything that goes with that, has made travelling easier for them than for men. And she, after all, should know. “Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers” is showing at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until October 31st

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-reading the next two articles should (if you haven't already done it :-) be followed by a visit to The State of the Planet or The Ecological Footprint Quiz

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-free-enterprise, capitalist democracy (wild)westernizes afghanistan-

July 11, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD A Sin City Sprouts in Kabul The good times may not last if Afghan conservatives manage to make alcohol an election issue for President Karzai. By Hamida Ghafour, Special to The Times KABUL, Afghanistan — In the Afghan capital, Westerners buy caviar from the supermarket while Afghans struggle to buy bread. Foreign women suntan in Chanel swimming suits while their Afghan counterparts are afraid to take off their burkas. Alcohol is banned under the new constitution, yet beer and wine parties are in full swing.    But the good times enjoyed by thousands of aid workers, security contractors, consultants and even a few liberal-minded Afghans may be coming to an end. Mullahs and conservative politicians across Kabul are trying to turn rampant alcohol drinking into an election issue for President Hamid Karzai.    One presidential candidate, Latif Pedram, recently told a political rally that Karzai was turning a blind eye to partying and prostitution and called for his resignation.

Many believe that there are hundreds of prostitutes who have been brought from China to ply their trade at Chinese restaurants that they say double as brothels in the affluent neighborhoods of Wazir Akbar Khan and Shahr-i-Now.    At one popular venue, guests are escorted to the main dining area, but behind the bar, a curtain barely hides a few dozen Afghan men sitting with Chinese women wearing tight dresses slit to the thigh — scandalous in a country where female citizens must wear loose garments.    It is offensive to the Muslim culture, especially in a nation that is not used to the freedom of Western societies, said Obaidullah Rahman, imam of the Pul-i-Kishti central mosque in Kabul.    "We have a constitution made up by representatives of Afghans from all sections of society," he said. "People will rise and grab Karzai's neck and say alcohol is against the constitution. The people will rise against him."    At least a dozen bars, restaurants and clubs have sprung up to serve foreigners who earn anywhere from $4,000 to $20,000 a month and are happy to pay $25 for a pitcher of margaritas.    The heady mix of money and a bit of boredom has created a sort of sin city where Westerners and some rich Afghans have turned to expensive cigars, caviar, Ecstasy and champagne as a form of release.

"Kabul parties are like student union parties," said Dominic Medley, co-author of a survival guide to Kabul. "A mix of nationalities, music tastes, and they are done purely to burn off steam because there is nothing else to do.    "But the Afghans are partying as well," he added. "I've been to wedding parties for returning Afghans with alcohol. Maybe alcohol is more accessible than it used to be because of the foreign influence."    Fazal Ahmad Manawi, the deputy chief justice of the Supreme Court, said he was concerned that the lifestyle of Westerners was affecting young Afghans.    "It has a negative impact on youth," he said. "If you are in a place and everyone is drinking and you are in a country where everyone else is deprived, you will use alcohol to the extreme. It is causing fights, thefts, car accidents and destroying relations in families.    "This kind of freedom in developed countries is not something the people of our country can digest easily."    Karzai, a devout Muslim, recently approved a resolution put forward by religious leaders emphasizing the ban on alcohol.    The message appears to be lost on the Westerners chauffeured to restaurants and bars in air-conditioned vehicles. A recent issue of an expatriate magazine ran an advertisement for a German restaurant where "after an exciting day in Kabul" one could relax in a "traditional German beer garden."    A map showing the location was drawn for the reader and published the same week the British and American embassies sent a warning that terrorists were in the final stages of planning an attack on a place frequented by foreigners.

Not even fear of a bomb attack has slowed the party scene, said one regular.    "As long as there aren't any unnecessary risks, why not go? I need to unwind," said the woman, a public health worker who asked not to be named. (separate article) -ain't seen nothing yet; wait until global warming raises sea level- July 11, 2004 Los Angeles Times IN BRIEF BANGLADESH Floods Claim 11 Lives, Leave 2 Million Stranded From Times Wire Reports Floods caused by a month of heavy rain engulfed vast areas in Bangladesh, killing at least 11 people and leaving 2 million marooned on hundreds of islands created by the deluge.    Three of the victims died when mudslides buried their house in the Chittagong area in the south.    Two children were swept into a river near the city of Cox's Bazar, local officials said.    Much of Bangladesh is made up of the deltas of a series of large rivers, and floods kill hundreds every year.

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July 3, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Rejecting a Ritual of Pain In Kenya, 23 girls fled their village to avoid genital mutilation. But the tradition's powerful role in their culture makes escape difficult. By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer ARROR, Kenya — She is so shy that she can only whisper her story, hiding her mouth behind a clenched fist, never meeting anyone's eye.    Dorcas Chelagat, at 13, is one of the most powerless members of her tribe, a child whose value is equal to the dowry price of a few goats and blankets. But shyness sometimes conceals a well of strength.	She tells of her journey with 22 other children who defied their elders and parents, who ignored the risk of ridicule, curses and beatings and turned their backs on their homes. The girls, ages 12 to 16, trekked six hours across snake- infested hills in the darkness, hiding whenever anyone approached, keeping silent all the way. They were determined to escape the ritual of female genital mutilation still practiced almost universally in their Kenyan valley.    Their action in December was so bold that it frightened the grown-ups. Some parents feared dark repercussions. Would they be cursed? To the tribal elders, it was the greatest threat to unity and tradition they had ever seen.    But the Kenyan government, which has outlawed female genital mutilation, quickly sent the girls home to face the certainty of the ritual, forcing those who dared to run away again.    The village of Arror, 110 miles from Eldoret in western Kenya, is nestled in a lush green valley beneath a spectacular mountain. Echoing with bird calls and burbling brooks, the hamlet of 1,200 people seems a world of idyllic tranquillity. Circular mud huts are scattered along narrow trails where women of the Marakwet tribe, wearing cheerful scarves and pretty glass beads and carrying machetes in straw bags, loiter to chat.    Beneath the surface, however, is a world of brutal conformity, oaths of secrecy, dark curses and a suffocating fear so powerful that many mothers feel unable to protect their daughters from the agonizing ritual they suffered as girls.
In the Marakwet community and many other tribes, there is no route to maturity for girls except through genital mutilation.    Some mothers push their daughters into it, promising them gifts. But the most avid supporters are fathers and the tribe's elderly men and women.    "My mother said it was good for me to do it," Dorcas recalled. "She said, 'You'll be a mature person. You'll have a chance to feast with other women.' She said the family goats would be slaughtered for the feast. She said once I was initiated I'd be free to be married, because an uncircumcised girl could not marry."    The first cut, made during an annual public ceremony, is small and symbolic, said Jacob Kibor, a Marakwet pastor who has campaigned long against the practice. Then the girls are taken to a seclusion hut where the major operation takes place, using a knife or blade and no anesthetic to remove the external sexual organs, including all or part of the clitoris and labia.    "Girls are supposed to remain stoic," Kibor said. "But there's only so much a person can take." If a girl does shame her family and scream, the women in the seclusion hut sing loudly to cover it up.    The girls are sworn to an oath of secrecy. Joseph Chebii, who sent his daughter to face the ritual long ago, is still convinced it is a worthy tradition that causes no pain.    "It's not painful. It's nothing," he said scornfully as he hoed a rocky patch of ground.	A World Health Organization paper in 2000 estimated that 2 million girls were at risk of genital mutilation annually, most of them in 28 African countries. It estimated the prevalence at 38% in Kenya, with the highest numbers in rural areas.    The paper said that the initial bleeding and shock could kill and that women often suffered severe lifelong complications in silence.    Ask villagers the reasons for the ritual, beyond initiation into adulthood, and they reply simply that it's always been done.    The ritual is practiced in various forms by other tribes in Kenya and other African countries. In some cultures it is seen as a way of preventing female promiscuity; in others it is seen as aesthetically pleasing.    All the Marakwet elders look forward to the ritual. Each December, goats are killed, there is feasting, a celebration and traditionally brewed beer. When the girls ran off, the whole tribal sense of unity and meaning was threatened. There was shock and anger. A group of villagers went to district officials, claiming they had no plans to make the girls undergo the ritual.    "The elders really like it because there's celebration and feasting. How can they feast, if there's no girls to be circumcised?" said Susana Cheboi, 45, the mother of Belinda, one of the runaways. "I was circumcised when I was a very little girl. I experienced a lot of pain, and I vowed I would not let my daughters go through it."
In 1992, Cheboi tried to save her daughters from it.    "I went and told the elders I did not want my daughters to be circumcised. But they came in the night and took my eldest daughter and my second daughter away and had both of them circumcised," she said.    "I cried a lot."    Cheboi's husband has always been strongly in favor of the ritual. She broached the subject with him a few times, explaining how much pain she suffered during the ceremony, and during the birth of every child, when she had to be cut again. But he brushed aside her complaints.    "He said, 'That's impossible, because it's our culture.' He dismissed me and said everyone had to go through it, so why complain?"    Tina Kamaina, 36, the mother of another runaway, said her husband simply informed her that their daughter Patropa would undergo the ritual.    "When they plan a circumcision, the elders of this area circumcise every girl. You can't say anything," Kamaina said.    "I was afraid of what might happen if my daughter wasn't circumcised. Around this place, if you speak out when girls are being circumcised, you can be chased away or something terrible can be done to you.    "They can put a curse on you. The Marakwets have their culture, and they mean what they say."    She was shocked and afraid when Patropa ran away a few days before the ceremony. But she said later she felt secretly glad her daughter had escaped.	Asked whether she suffered because of her own operation, she murmured, "Too much."    Girls whose parents wait too long to have them undergo the ritual are ridiculed and ostracized. Songs are made up about their plight as eternal children, which ring out whenever they pass.    A few girls have fled from the procedure for years. Here in the Kerio Valley, 17 girls ran away together in 2002 from a village about 45 miles from Arror and sought the support of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Eldoret, which won a court order protecting them from the procedure.    The center's director, Ken Wafula, set up a network of community monitors, who stage seminars in villages at the beginning of the ritual's season to warn girls of possible complications, inform them of their rights and offer encouragement and protection to runaways.    Encouraged by the monitors, 40 girls from villages in this valley district ran away to Eldoret in December, including the 23 from Arror.    When the Arror girls saw preparations for the ritual — the brewing of beer and the appearance in their homes of goat skins that the girls must wear after the initiation — they fled, accompanied by one of Wafula's community monitors.    Darkness was falling. They had traveled only a short distance. A group of suspicious villagers met them on the road and demanded to know what they were doing.
Their hearts racing, the girls pretended they were on their way to a school camp. The villagers returned to Arror, where they ran into one girl's father and alerted him. He gave chase, but his daughter saw him coming and ran into the scrub to hide.    Furious, the man demanded that the other runaways hand over his daughter, but she was nowhere to be seen and eventually he gave up. Then the girls left the road, walking through steep, snake-filled terrain.    "The last thing anyone was thinking about was getting bitten by a snake. We were thinking about getting away from the circumcision," Dorcas whispered. "We were afraid, because it was dark and scary."    After six hours, they arrived at a minibus stop and waited there for four hours. By morning, they were in Eldoret. The next day, an elder of the African Inland Church, Edward Limo, took all 40 girls into his home.    "If you are running from danger, I cannot turn you out," said Limo, 78, a fervent Christian. "I'll take care of them as long as they [wish] to remain here."    As a Marakwet boy, he did not know what school was until he ran away from his village at 13 and joined a mission school. The first Marakwet girl he saved from the ritual was his own sister, helping her to run away in 1943.    But his efforts to rescue the 40 girls in December were not as successful. A few days after the girls fled, Linah Kilimo, a government minister from the Marakwet community, intervened and insisted that they be sent home. Two government vehicles took them away.	Limo said Kilimo, a woman, angrily reprimanded him for harboring the girls. "She said, 'You can't change the Marakwet culture overnight.' "    When forced to go home, "we all cried," Dorcas said. "The feeling was the minister did not want us to stay here, because of politics."    Gladys Chelakat, another runaway, said that when the girls returned, some parents vowed to go ahead with the rituals: "My parents were really angry. They were ready to circumcise me because they said if I didn't go through it, I'd always be a child. But I decided that I'd stand firm whatever happened, so that I could become an example in the community."    Shortly afterward, 33 of the 40 runaways fled again to Limo's house, traveling in groups of two, three or four. He doesn't know the fate of the seven who did not return. This time the government did not intervene.    He kept four girls at his home and sent others to Christian boarding schools. Eleven later went back to their families, either because they were young and missed their mothers or because they could not cope with school. One was pregnant.    The biggest problem the remaining girls and Limo face is what to do about the thousands of shillings in unpaid school fees, mounting term by term.    "By July, I may not be able to hold the girls. I may have to discontinue them," said John Cherviyot, the principal of Kaptagat Prep School, which some of them attend. It's unclear what will happen to them if no one picks up the tab.
The U.N. has opposed female genital mutilation since the early 1950s, but half a century later, millions are still at risk every year. Activists such as Kibor are perplexed as to why decades of campaigning against the practice have failed to quash it.    "One reason is there hasn't been a viable substitute for this custom," he said, adding there must be a way to pass on the good tribal teachings and traditions without mutilation.    Traditionally, girls faced the procedure at about 17, but elders have responded to the campaign against the ritual by targeting girls as young as 8, when they're less likely to resist.    But the recent desertions of dozens of girls at one time pose an unheard of challenge to elders, and their numbers could grow if Wafula has his way.    "If girls keep running away, the tradition will die out," said Chebii, the villager who sent his daughter to undergo the procedure. But privately, some women feel otherwise, saying the community would lose nothing by abandoning the ritual.	Kamaina, whose daughter Patropa is at one of the schools, also wants her other daughters to escape genital mutilation, but asked how, she fell silent.    "I don't know," she finally whispered.    When Belinda ran away, Cheboi once more told her husband about the agonies of the ritual. This time, he did not dismiss her.    "He said, 'I'm listening and I'm learning slowly.' "    Cheboi is determined to send the youngest of her four daughters, Jepkoech, 9, to an uncle's to avoid mutilation.    A hundred miles away in Eldoret, in a quaint sitting room with biblical quotations hanging on every wall, Limo leafed proudly through several dozen school reports, sharing his hopes that his girls could go to college.    Dorcas wants to be a lawyer and help other girls. Limo says she is strong, under the shyness. "She'll do it," he said, smiling.    Later, as the visitors left, Dorcas looked up and met their eyes.

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June 30, 2004 Science Magazine VOL 304 25 JUNE 2004 Documenting the Bushmeat Trade's Toll Many conservationists consider rampant commercial hunting for bushmeat one of the biggest threats to Africa's apes, forest antelope, and other species (Science, 11 Apri12003, p. 232). This site from the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force pushes an agenda, but it also offers abundant background information for researchers interested in the problem. Bibliographies list more than 300 technical books and papers, nearly 150 reports, and 800-plus news articles, many available online. For example, you can read a recent report on measures some logging and mining companies have taken to reduce bush meat trade on their land. You'll also find synopses of bush meat research projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

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Audubon Magazine July-August 2004 Drunk on Ethanol Our addiction to corn-derived alcohol is not only costing us a lot of money, it's also wiping out fish and wildlife habitat, and polluting our air, soil, and water. By Ted Williams The answer is the American public. The question was: Who would spend 10 cents to 20 cents more per gallon for gasoline that reduces mileage, degrades your car, destroys fish and wildlife, increases air pollution, and makes the United States more dependent on foreign oil? [Click on photo for complete story.]

One-tenth of all corn grown in the United States is used to produce ethanol. Photography by Richard Hamilton Smith

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June 27, 2004 Yesterday's seeds, today's harvest Richard Steven Street’s remarkable history of California’s farmworkers. By Mark Arax 'Beasts of the Field A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913' Richard Steven Street Stanford University Press: 904 pp., $75; $29.95 paper 'Photographing Farmworkers in California' Richard Steven Street Stanford University Press: 330 pp., $39.95 My grandfather, Aram, took the long road to California in the spring of 1920. His migration covered 7,000 miles by ship and train. There was no turning back. Everything along the way seemed so farfetched to him — the Statue of Liberty, the nation's capital, the budding factories of Detroit. It wasn't until the tracks reached Fresno that America came true. Outside his window, at the foot of the Sierra, the San Joaquin Valley shimmered. Vineyards and orchards and vegetable fields, row after perfect row. As his train chugged into town, my grandfather kept muttering the same words in Armenian. "Just like the old land."	The old land was a lazy village beneath the Mountain of Mist in Bursa, Turkey. Every month the Anatolian sun ripened another fruit, but it was the silk from the mulberry that gave the village its wealth. "We had a very easy life," he told me. "Our village was too prosperous to do its own work. The poor Turkish workers did it all. We used to have a name for them — 'almost like slaves.' " My grandfather survived the 1915 genocide at the hands of the Turks by hiding in an attic with Maupassant and Baudelaire. He came down after a year with plans to attend the Sorbonne University and write for a living. Then the letters from his Uncle Yervant in Fresno — "watermelons as big as small boats" — arrived. My grandfather was 19 when he took the bait.
He might have been forgiven for assuming the best when his uncle drove up to the depot that day in a shiny Model T Ford. It wasn't a week later that they headed three hours south on a country road and landed in Weedpatch. There, long before the Okies and Steinbeck arrived, my grandfather dropped to his hands and knees and began picking potatoes. Up and down the valley he trailed the harvest. Watermelons, peaches, grapes, oranges and olives. This new land wasn't like the old land. My grandfather had become one of the beasts of the field. He was far luckier, it turned out, than the legions of migrant farmhands who came before him, men whose American rebirths and brutal journeys are vividly captured by Richard Steven Street in "Beasts of the Field," a stunning narrative history of California farmworkers from 1769 to 1913. It took my grandfather four seasons working alongside his widowed mother, sister and brother to go from fruit tramp to farmer. He would watch his brother, Harry, become a cop killer in 1934 and his son, Ara, become a murder victim in 1972 after both strayed from the farm. My grandfather taught me, the oldest child of that murdered son, that our drama was part of a larger drama that played out in California agriculture long before his arrival. Because I spent years gathering his story, I thought I understood why the dreams of so many immigrants are swallowed up by the fields. Because I live in the San Joaquin Valley, the most productive farm belt in the world, a place built on the backs of fieldworkers, I thought I understood their lives. For the last six years, I've collected and written the narratives of the black sharecroppers, Mexicans and Okies who came here to pick the cotton for such giants as J.G. Boswell.	But "Beasts of the Field" is a history book that reaches into the present and changes the way we see things. I now understand why the lives of farmworkers so often end in the same broken place. Because it has always been this way — as far back as the native Chumash and Gabrielinos who plowed the first fields in the shadow of the missions and the Chinese who erected the levees to drain the waters of the great Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the white Europeans who threshed the wheat as the giant metal harvester, the farm's first breathing machine, snorted and clawed at the earth. For the first time, thanks to Street's 25-year labor of love, the whole extraordinary tapestry of that early era is before us. A photographer, journalist and scholar, Street hails from no academy and works for no publication. Logging thousands of miles from field to library to newspaper morgue, he has produced a work of monumental scholarship. One might ask if the subject hadn't been thoroughly mined. Countless academics and journalists, after all, have documented in articles and books the peculiar institution that is California agriculture. But although readers may believe that Carey McWilliams' seminal 1939 work, "Factories in the Field," offered the definitive word on the feudal empires of the soil, Street provides a far more exhaustive, layered and satisfying portrait. Simply put, Street's remarkable book belongs on the short shelf of such indispensable works of American history as Oscar Handlin's "The Uprooted" and Bernard Bailyn's "Voyagers to the West."
He steers clear of the polemics and dry scholarly treatments that have undermined less ambitious books on the subject. Instead of shouting his moral indignation at the lot of farmworkers, Street builds his case pound for pound with an assiduous weighing of the facts. He does so with language that may not be lyrical but serves his chronological narrative well, giving a voice to those who have always appeared to us hidden under hats, muffled in bandanas, backs to the sun, hands in the earth. Notably, Street, who is the Ansel Adams fellow at the Center for Creative Photography and a onetime Guggenheim fellow, has accomplished this while putting together a companion volume, "Photographing Farmworkers in California," that stands out as a comprehensive visual record of farm labor from 1850 to the early 1990s. In the more than 270 images, we see workers picking, striking, fighting, dancing, resting, praying and dying in photographs shot through the lens of the famous (Dorothea Lange) and the obscure (Ernest Lowe). His third volume, set for publication in fall 2005, will complete the massive history, focusing on the period 1913 to 2000 and the farmworkers' struggle to unionize. "Beasts of the Field" follows the migrant field hands dawn to dark through the early evolutions of a California agriculture destined for industrial greatness. First, the missions sought a blend of salvation and self-sufficiency. Then the bonanza wheat farms chased the numbing notion that bigger is better. Finally, the vineyard and orchard growers recognized that the Golden State offered a one-of-a-kind union of soil and climate. Why waste it on mere wheat? TD>	Street gives the reader the look, smell and taste not only of those fields but also of the Chinatown opium dens and the skid rows crackling with liquor, prostitution and murder where the workers' long day ended. Nowhere in the 625 pages of text (and more than 200 pages of notes) does he shy away from his singular focus, and why should he? The story of agriculture is the story of California from Junípero Serra, the Franciscan friar who brought the first field hands north, to Japanese immigrant Kinji Ushijima, the Potato King who harvested 28,000 acres of spuds in the early 1900s on reclaimed delta land. Every epic migration that transformed the state was a migration rooted in the fields. "Adrift in a landscape of ordered beauty," he writes, "the [farmworkers] illustrate the human costs required to produce a geography of abundance, telling us not only about irony, suffering, misery, acrimony, disorientation, resentment, cynicism and violence but also about hope, tenacity, sacrifice and generosity." Who, precisely, were the first campesinos in California? That they were brown-skinned peoples native to the land down south should come as no surprise. By early 1769, Spain had kicked the Jesuits out of Baja California and installed the Franciscans as missionaries who would claim the Pacific Coast. The Franciscans dragged a group of Cochimi Indians north for the "Sacred Expedition." By summer's end, more than half the Cochimi — 180 in all — had died of disease and starvation.
Street deals head-on with a question that has long divided scholars of the mission period. Were the padres taskmasters or slave drivers? Were the Indians ennobled or exploited? What was so bad about Catholicism, hard work and an adobe roof over the head, even if they came with the dreaded disciplina, the rawhide whip? The padres weren't monsters, Street agrees. They fed the newly baptized California natives well, sweated alongside them and rarely demanded more than a 40-hour workweek. And for their part, the natives could be exasperating. By the droves, they feigned illness and ran away from the missions and hid in the tules of California's interior, where they became addicted to booze and games of chance. But Street ultimately comes down on the side of mission critics, concluding that the system reduced natives to "childish dependence, prepared them for nothing, exposed them to diseases." Measuring the agricultural legacy of the missions is easier. The California natives who joined the Cochimi planted the first vineyards and wheat fields, erected the first brush dams and dug the first irrigation canals. A peek into the state's future grape and wine industry could be glimpsed at the San Gabriel mission where the 170-acre La Viña Madre, "the mother vineyard" had taken root. Likewise, the practice of labor contractors acting as go-betweens in the California fields began with the mayordomo, boss men selected from the ranks of mission guards.	For the better part of a century, the male natives bent, stooped, squatted and crawled with their poles, clippers, sacks and buckets. The women, who weren't allowed in the fields, had their own quotas to meet grinding wheat and corn. Their positions hardly changed after Mexican rule replaced Spanish rule and the natives were supposedly free to pursue a life of small-scale farming. Instead, cast adrift, they huddled in dusty camps like the one on the outskirts of El Pueblo de Los Angeles, where they led "vicious and irrational lives." Growers in the 1850s were still so reliant on native field hands that they pushed the newly minted U.S. state of California to enact a law that controlled the natives and forced them to work. The Indian Indenture Act, in the words of McWilliams, "competed favorably with slavery." Only when the native population dwindled to a band of old and crippled field hands did the farmer begin his eternal search for a new group of desperate and poor. The late 1860s and 1870s brought fresh laborers to the fields: hard-luck Americans of European stock who had come West with gold fever but who now found themselves threshing and bagging California's booming wheat crop. Street brings to life the grinding toil of the men who wandered farm to farm, their worldly possessions packed tight in a bindle. He does his best writing describing how they mounted the first leviathan wheat harvesters and bounced all day over rough ground, jolting themselves silly. They could not escape the Central Valley sun.
"The heat had an almost metallic characteristic," he writes. "It was a weight that men carried on their backs, a fiery warmth that cracked their leather boots, heated equipment to the point where it could not be touched without gloves and baked straw so crisp that it snapped like glass filaments underfoot." He lingers on the wholesome meals served to the wheat threshers and on the songs they sang, always swearing off another harvest season: "Don't go, I say, if you've got any brains. You'll stay far away from the San Joaquin plains." As the crops grew more diverse, the call for more dependable farmworkers grew louder. It was answered by peasant Chinese farmers from the Guangdong province who poured off ships in the 1850s and fanned out to Stockton, Sacramento, Fresno, Sonoma County and Los Angeles. Among the myths Street debunks is the notion that the Chinese constituted a significant minority of farm laborers at any one time. Of the 50,000 Chinese in California in 1861, only about 1,500 had moved onto farms. Nowhere was their imprint more lasting than in the delta, where they drained hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands with an incredible latticework of levees. The Chinese boasted their own system of mayordomo: "China bosses" who made good on the promise that each field hand would pick 1,500 to 2,000 pounds of grapes a day. The bosses won many jobs by agreeing to a pay scale of $1 a day — cheaper than the wage for Mexicans, $1.25, and for whites, $1.50.	"Beasts of the Field" makes clear that the issue of wages has long pitted field hand against field hand, striker against grower and reformer against politician. The debate always seems to start and end in the same place. The farmer believes he isn't exploiting the field hand because what he offers is so much better than what the worker had back home. The reformer shouts back that the farmer is engaging in the cheapest form of moral inoculation. It is the ideals of this country — not the Third World exigencies of their old land — that judge morality. A dime a day in Guangdong doesn't excuse a dollar a day in Weedpatch. The picker does hold certain leverage. Crops left too long in the field perish. A two-week delay in picking might bring a grower to his knees. This math drove the Chinese to strike again and again in the 1880s, shutting down the fruit harvest in Santa Clara and the raisin pick in Fresno until they got their way, the same wages as the white man. That the "coolies" had the cheek to strike only played into the anti-Chinese sentiment sweeping across the land. Farmers didn't know what side of the fence to stand on, with their white neighbors or with their ethnic field hands. Some tried appealing to logic: "Americans can not go out in the hot sun and stoop over the vines all day when the thermometer is probably 115 degrees in the shade," one grower asserted. "Our American sons won't do that."
For all its breadth, "Beasts of the Field" never quite makes the case that agriculture's exploitation differed from the brutality imposed by industrial America. Was farm work worse because it took place under the searing sun? Were the white farmers greedier as a class than white factory owners? Were the bottom-line impulses of agriculture different from the quotas that industry imposed on their beasts of the steel mill? Occasionally Street tips the scale of judgment in error. He quotes a 1913 editorial by Chester H. Rowell, a longtime editor of the Fresno Republican, likening the perfect field hand to a manifold beast. Rowell, it turns out, wasn't expressing his view but what he regarded as the unfortunate view of the farm lobby. The sarcasm is not noted by Street. Back on firm ground, Street details how the racist views of the Yellow Peril culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that, over time, dried up Chinese labor. The Japanese then staged their own rising. At the height of their influence in 1909, about 30,000 Japanese worked on California farms, accounting for nearly 42% of the labor force.	More than any other ethnic group, the Japanese saw fieldwork not as an end but as a means to buy their own farms. Toward that goal, they became tough negotiators. They confronted and boycotted growers, withheld labor at key times and walked out during harvests. By 1910, many Japanese had realized the dream of becoming farmers; they had bought 17,000 acres and leased 89,000 more, dominating the strawberry, melon and sugar beet crops. The Yellow Peril soon raised its ugly head again. The so-called Gentlemen's Agreement in 1907 halted Japanese immigration. As always, Big Ag didn't know where to turn. Into this vacuum, miraculously, came the Greeks, the Sikhs, the Portuguese and the Armenians. My grandfather didn't have the benefit of those hobo songs to steer him clear of the San Joaquin plains. The only song he heard was his Uncle Yervant's naively sweet one. For that second harvest, he returned to Weedpatch with his mother, sister and brother, this time to work for Villa Kerkorian, a grape grower with a ferocious mustache resembling Pancho Villa's.
My grandfather and his family slept in the Kerkorian barn on a bed of raisin crates and hay until one night when they began feuding. Grandpa's 17-year-old brother, Harry, had the gall to question the arrangement by which Uncle Yervant picked very little and played pinochle a lot. Challenged for the first time, Yervant stormed out of the barn. "That boat that brought you over," he shouted. "I would have been better off had it brought a sack of potatoes instead." They didn't speak again for years. By that time, Harry was well on his way to killing a cop in Long Beach and serving a life sentence in San Quentin. My grandfather was married and farming raisins outside Fresno. In his 80s, as he grew blind, he gave me a stack of poems he had written to the memory of the grape and cotton pickers: "To my white, brown, yellow and black brothers and sisters who toiled under the hellish sun." A few weeks ago, as another harvest neared, I drove to Weedpatch and tried to find the old Kerkorian ranch. Villa Kerkorian had lost all his land during the raisin bust of 1920-28. Not long after, they found an ocean of oil beneath his old grapes. Kerkorian didn't live to see his get-even: His youngest son, Kirk, came to rule MGM and rank as one of the world's wealthiest men.	At the edge of town, a few miles down the road from where John Steinbeck encountered the Okies, I met a young Mixteca who had arrived the week before from deep in Mexico, her land turning to dust. She had been smuggled across the border in the back of a Suburban and was using her wages from the bell pepper fields to pay off a $1,900 debt to the coyote. I asked her why she had come and she began to tear up. She had left behind two young children with her mother. "For their future," she explained. In another few days, she will stop harvesting peppers and begin picking grapes. In the powdery loam, she will trace the footsteps of my grandfather and the other "beasts" whose imprint Street has so faithfully recorded. They still walk through these fields. Mark Arax, a Times staff writer, is the author of "In My Father's Name" and co-author of "The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire," written with Times business business editor Rick Wartzman.

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Scientific American Magazine July 2004 GENE DOPING Gene therapy for restoring muscle lost to age or disease is poised to enter the clinic, but elite athletes are eyeing it to enhance performance. Can it be long before gene doping changes the nature of sport? by H. Lee Sweeney (photo and caption only)

BELGIAN BLUE BULL demonstrates the effect of blocking the antigrowth factor myostatin. A natural genetic mutation in this breed produces a truncated, ineffective form of myostatin, which allows muscle growth to go unchecked. The absence of myostatin also interferes with fat deposition, making these "double-muscled" cattle exceptionally lean.

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June 22, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Judaism's Thriving Concern Chabad-Lubavitch is a successful, inviting branch of the faith with worldwide reach. But the issue of a Messiah is no small matter. By William Lobdell, Times Staff Writer If the non-Jewish public is even vaguely aware of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, it's probably because its annual telethon draws celebrities including Adam Sandler, Michael Douglas, James Caan, Whoopi Goldberg and Anthony Hopkins. But within the Jewish world, this small branch of Judaism is generating outsized levels of interest — and concern. On the one hand, Chabad — with its rigorous observance of Jewish law and rabbis in long beards and wide-brimmed black hats — has become an island of growth, innovation and success at a time of aging synagogue memberships and stagnant population elsewhere among American Jews. On the other hand, there's the matter of the Messiah.	Today thousands of Chabad faithful are expected to gather in Queens, N.Y., at the grave of Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson to mark the 10th anniversary of his death. Among them will be a fair number who believe Schneerson is soon to be resurrected. Such passion might be ignored by mainstream Jewish leaders if it were not for the remarkable efforts of the Brooklyn-based Lubavitchers to foster Judaism worldwide. Last spring, they held Passover seders for travelers and locals in Katmandu, Nepal (1,800 guests); Cuzco, Peru (800 guests); and more than 200 cities in the former Soviet Union, Chabad officials say. About 4,000 rabbis and their families now serve lifetime assignments in 2,700 posts in 61 countries. The number has roughly doubled in 10 years, Chabad statistics show. Chabad's fundraisers, including the widely publicized West Coast telethons, bring in about $800 million annually. Around the world, $100 million worth of projects are under construction, with a new Chabad center opening somewhere every 10 days, movement officials say. The projects include 45 Chabad centers on American college campuses by 2005; a $19-million, 27-acre campus with a school and synagogue in Scripps Ranch in San Diego County; and a recently opened $15-million, 77,000-square-foot facility on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that houses a girls' preschool, elementary school and junior high.
"I disagree with Chabad about practically everything," Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, leader of the liberal Reform Jewish movement, said in a speech last year. "But I envy the selflessness of their young men and women who fan out across the world to serve Jewish communities in distress. We must foster among our members the same sense of mission and spirit of service to the Jewish people." Others rue the spread of Lubavitch influence. "The Jewish community is becoming deeply dependent on them for religious services and ceremonies, education and social services," said David Berger, an Orthodox rabbi and a history professor at Brooklyn College who has written a book on Chabad. "It's a clear and present danger to Judaism." The prime issue for Berger and Chabad's other critics is the belief by some Lubavitchers that Schneerson — the movement's last leader, who died in 1994 at age 92 — is the Messiah long foretold in Hebrew Scriptures. Chabad's leaders officially reject that doctrine and insist it is fading in their ranks. Still, within the movement others fervently embrace it. And outside Chabad, some Jews fear that the organization's growth and vibrancy are merely cover for a sect they see as undermining traditional Jewish beliefs.	Chabad, a Hebrew acronym for wisdom, understanding and knowledge, took root in the late 18th century in the then-Russian city of Lubavitch. It's a form of Hasidic Judaism, which is characterized by its embrace of uneducated Jews, mystical and often ecstatic piety and devotion to a single leader, the rebbe. Schneerson's father-in-law, who preceded him as rebbe, fled the Nazis and moved Chabad headquarters to Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, in 1940. Shortly after, Chabad began to emphasize reaching out to nonreligious Jews — a striking difference from other Hasidic groups, which often advise members to isolate themselves from the temptations of the world. The idea was to patiently and nonjudgmentally lead Jews back to Orthodoxy one small step at a time — attending a Sabbath service, lighting candles Friday night, listening to a lecture from a Jewish speaker. "When a Jew alienates himself from his people, God forbid, it is only because he is thirsty," Schneerson once said. "His soul thirsts for meaning in life, but the waters of Torah have eluded him. So he wanders about in foreign domains, seeking to quench his thirst. "Only a shepherd who hastens not to judge the runaway kid, who is sensitive to the causes of its desertion, can mercifully lift it into his arms and bring it back home." The charisma of Schneerson's leadership was such that in the final years of his four decades of leadership, increasing numbers of Lubavitchers believed the rebbe had the potential to be moshiach, the Messiah.
Messianism — the belief that God will choose a person to redeem the world — has been a central element of Jewish belief for 2,500 years. Among many liberal Jews today, the idea has become muted or transformed into the belief that Jews collectively should work to repair the world's ills. But among traditional believers, the imminent coming of the Messiah remains a powerful hope. From time to time through the centuries, groups of Jews have fastened those hopes on an individual. Two millenniums ago, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth founded the Christian church based on that belief. When Schneerson died, many expected the whispers that he was "the one" would dissipate: Traditional Judaism holds that the Messiah would be a living person. Though the belief has waned since the rebbe's death, some believers in Schneerson adopted an idea associated with Jesus: resurrection. On the streets around Chabad's headquarters, signs of belief in Schneerson's resurrection are highly visible — to the chagrin of many Lubavitch leaders. Signs on storefronts proclaim Schneerson as moshiach. A small blimp flying above a Sunday neighborhood parade recently featured a picture of Schneerson with the words "Moshiach is ready, are you?"	Lubavitchers ride New York subways with posters under their arms proclaiming the rebbe as king. Some attribute miracles to him. The messianists believe Jews can prepare the way for Schneerson's return by observing the Bible's commands and performing good deeds that will lift the state of the world. In the synagogue in the basement of Chabad's headquarters, a group of students, mostly from Israel, pray for and await the rebbe's return. Other Lubavitchers have nicknamed the students "the Taliban" for their rigid belief. "It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out the rebbe is the Messiah," said a 22-year-old student who asked not to be named. He said the belief is held by nearly all in the movement, whether publicly or privately. Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, a key Chabad administrator and former Schneerson secretary, said talk of the rebbe as the Messiah is "nonsense." He won't attend services at the basement synagogue because of the messianic contingent, he said. Another rabbi said he tried to take down a messianic banner in the synagogue one morning but was hit by one of the students. Leaders find it difficult to explain to outsiders why, if they reject the messianic belief, they have not taken aggressive action to root it out. Some say they don't want to trigger a bitter civil war. Others say they want to follow the rebbe's teachings and not stand in judgment of another Jew. Many Chabad leaders who worked with Schneerson acknowledge that they once believed he had the potential to be a Messiah, but that hope ended with his death.
The leaders said they did not name a new rebbe because no candidate appeared to match Schneerson's magnetism and depth. The movement is now headed by a council. Critics see another possibility: A new rebbe would undermine the messianic attachment to Schneerson. "This is the dominant aspiration," said Jacob Neusner, a professor and senior fellow at Bard College's Institute of Advanced Theology in New York. Some critics say the movement's success has caused thousands of Jews who support Chabad or attend its programs to unwittingly donate money and energy to an effort that is akin to a dangerous cult. The belief in a resurrected Messiah could distort Judaism "profoundly and perhaps permanently," said Berger, the Orthodox rabbi and history professor. Supporters of Chabad dismiss such talk. "In our area, it's a nonexistent issue," said Jeffrey Lee Cohen, a 48-year-old real estate investor who has attended the Chabad Shul Potomac in Maryland for 16 years. Rabbi Mark Miller, who runs a Reform synagogue in Newport Beach, has enrolled two of his children in a Chabad day school. He said guilt animates Chabad's critics. They "see Chabad and Orthodoxy in general as fidelity to ways of the past that many people had broken with. And that weighs upon them."	Those who support Chabad without joining the organization praise its success in touching people's lives. George Rohr, a New York investment manager, gives an estimated $12 million a year to Chabad projects around the world. "Where were we going to get the biggest bang for the buck?" Rohr asked. "The track record of Chabad in terms of bringing the light of Judaism and the warmth of Torah around the world is unparalleled." In keeping with Schneerson's ideas, Jews exploring their faith in Chabad centers don't have to accept all — or any — of the group's Orthodox practices. They need not join a synagogue or pay dues. "I was adamantly against going" to Chabad, said Melissa Breiter, a 39-year-old mother of three who attends Congregation Beth Meir HaCohen-Chabad Center of Yorba Linda. Her parents were Reform Jews whom she describes as anti-Orthodox. But Chabad, she said, is "Judaism at its heart — what it should be." In Aspen, Colo., Rabbi Mendel Mintz, a Chabad emissary, said his center attracts 30 to 50 worshippers in peak seasons. But Chabad recently bought an entire block on the town's Main Street for $6.3 million with contributions from Jews — mostly neither Orthodox nor Lubavitchers — who live full time or part time in Aspen. The idea is to create a 16,000-square-foot center for the town's Jews to attend services, enroll their children in the preschool or take Mommy and Me classes. "I feel very honored and blessed that I'm part of the rebbe's army to reach out to every Jew no matter their level of observance," said Mintz, who began Chabad in Aspen five years ago. "It's been really miraculous.

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June 20, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE STATE Ailing Inmate Was Free but Never Made It Home By Sue Fox, Times Staff Writer When Gustavo Ortega was released from the downtown Los Angeles County Jail in the middle of the night, he did not go far.    An insulin-dependent diabetic, he had just had part of his right foot amputated. Walking was a struggle, so he apparently sank onto a bench in a jailhouse lobby and waited.    A few miles away on the Eastside, his family had no idea that the 50-year-old Ortega — whose memory was so spotty he sometimes forgot his own phone number — was free. When his brother Mike went to visit him the next day, he was shocked to learn that his frail brother had been released.    "Released to whom?" Mike Ortega asked.    "To the streets," he said the guard replied.    "I said, 'To the streets? How is that possible?' He was sick. He just had an amputation."    The Ortegas, a close-knit family of seven children and their elderly mother, spent the next two days combing downtown for Gustavo, who had been serving time for several misdemeanors. They checked Chinatown and Olvera Street, the hills of Echo Park and homeless shelters on skid row.	They canvassed the grounds of the Twin Towers jail but did not think to look inside the nearby Inmate Reception Center, where prisoners are admitted and released.    Three days after Ortega's release, sheriff's deputies found him there, where it appears he may have been the whole time. He was so weak he could barely move. He asked, "Can you please give me a ride home?" deputies later told his family.    Instead, paramedics rushed him to the hospital, where he died of coronary artery disease, with diabetes, chronic renal failure and hypertension as contributing factors.    Ortega's death April 5 came at a difficult time for the county's jail system, which is run by the Sheriff's Department. Budget cuts have stretched jailers thin, and security lapses have become so common that five inmates have been killed in jail since October.    The department said it followed procedure in releasing Ortega, but officials expressed regret that he seemed to have slipped through the cracks of a huge, often impersonal system that takes in and releases up to 800 inmates a day.    "It's a tragedy if we didn't observe him and the public saw him and didn't do anything," said Sheriff's Capt. Anthony Argott, who oversees the reception center. "This poor guy needed help."
Argott said deputies could have overlooked Ortega because the center is often crowded and some people linger there for many hours.    "We're not trying to get people out and make the lobby pristine. Deputies change shifts, and they may have never noticed this guy," Argott said. "Nobody's listening, but I must say we have a severe, and I must say again, a severe shortage of personnel."    Ortega's family recently asked the Board of Supervisors to investigate his death, triggering an inquiry by the Office of Independent Review, a civilian oversight agency that monitors the Sheriff's Department."We need to see what, if anything, the Sheriff's Department did," said Michael Gennaco, the former federal prosecutor who heads the oversight agency. "Certainly there are issues of standards of care, everything from the way he was assessed with regard to any mental health issues to classification and treatment while he was in custody.    "Once he's released, that is something of a gray area," Gennaco added.    Ortega's sad sojourn through the county's courts, jails and hospitals began March 1, when he was arrested for drinking at Whittier Boulevard and Spence Street, about three blocks from the house he shared with his siblings and their mother.    He pleaded no contest and was convicted two days later. Ortega, a father of two who loved to sing and play guitar, would remain in jail for a month until his release just before he died.    The county is required to conduct mental health screenings of all new inmates. Despite what his family called a history of disorientation and memory problems that kept him from working, Ortega was not classified as a mental-observation inmate.	"There's no indication that he complained of any mental health problems during his incarceration, nor was he referred to mental health by medical services," said Dr. Thomas Klotz, the jail's chief psychiatrist.    In jail, Ortega's diabetes caused his feet to swell. His brothers and sisters think he may have forgotten to take off his shoes to relieve the pressure. Diabetics can be at risk of amputation when circulation to their extremities fails.    Ortega was sent to the jail ward at County-USC Medical Center, where members of his family said they tried to visit him nearly every day. Sometimes they were allowed to see him — resting calmly in a wheelchair — in the visiting area, they said, but other days they were told he was bedridden and could not come out.    They weren't allowed into his hospital room and could not speak to his doctor, they said, even when Ortega told them that part of his foot, including his toes, would be amputated.    "They would always tell us the same thing, that he was an adult and it was between the doctor and the patient," Mike Ortega said. "They said the doctors wouldn't make phone calls to the family."    A month after his arrest, Ortega was taken from the jail ward back to court. He had two outstanding misdemeanor charges from 2001: driving with a suspended license and having no proof of car insurance. He was convicted April 1 of driving without a license and sentenced to one day in jail but given credit for time served.
Just before 2 a.m. the next day, he was released.    Sheriff's Capt. Rod Penner, who oversees the jail's medical services bureau, said the medical staff followed the proper protocol.    "He was medically cleared by a physician prior to his release," Penner said. "He indicated that he had family coming to pick him up and that he had a doctor out in the community."    Penner says that if inmates are ambulatory, they are permitted to leave. Only rarely does the jail transfer an inmate directly to a hospital upon release.    After receiving his medical clearance, Ortega was processed by custody staff at the reception center. Jailers gave him a pair of crutches, Penner said.    Once Ortega was released, he was on his own.    He did not call his family, and no one else did either.    The lobby where Ortega was found is a grimy, busy way station, open 24 hours a day and often filled with dozens of people waiting to pick up an inmate's property or deposit money so they can buy snacks at the jail canteen.    There are rows of cashiers behind glass partitions, and a sheriff's deputy keeps an eye on things from an information booth.    The air is thick with cellphone chatter, the clink of change in soda machines and the drone of two television sets.	While his family searched the streets, Ortega apparently languished in the center on a rock-hard bench. It is not known whether he ever left the second-floor lobby, but his family suspects that he stayed put.    Without medicine or steady meals he grew weaker.    On April 5, two deputies appeared at the family home to tell them that Ortega had been found and taken back to County-USC.    Ortega's sister Rosalinda recalled one deputy telling them that when they discovered her brother in the jailhouse lobby, someone said: "This guy's been lying here for three days."    She got to see him briefly before he died. He was rail-thin, his eyes sunken. "Ay, hermano," she asked, "where have you been?"    He shrugged slightly, she said, whispering that he was cold.    She watched through tears as doctors tried to revive him. Later, after he died, she looked through the possessions he had when deputies found him. There was no insulin, just some clothes, a dollar bill and two slices of bread.    Ortega's family buried him two months ago at a Montebello cemetery.    Now they want some answers.    "The one thing I just cannot understand is: How can they just let somebody stay in their facility, in plain view, for three days?" Mike Ortega said. "It was total negligence."

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-everyone in the world a 'wannabe' -three great articles on the seduction of China (why should they be different?) with 'American free-enterprise, capitalist democracy and the right to make as much money as you can and spend it any way you choose - as long as there's no law against it' June 19, 2004 The Economist Magazine Conspicuous consumption in china Luxury's new empire HONG KONG AND SHANGHAI Are the Chinese replacing the Japanese as the world's most fanatical shoppers?

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MARK S BOTH
LOS ANGELES
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June 10, 2004
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC JUNE 2004
THE END OF CHEAP Oil

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June 6, 2004 Los Angeles Times WESTWORDS Clark, beyond the expedition Book Review By Jonathan Kirsch William Clark and the Shaping of the West Landon Y. Jones Hill & Wang: 394 pp., $25 Like other great pairings in American history, ranging from Mason and Dixon to Simon and Garfunkel, the names of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are welded together as a single phrase. But some of the most vivid and resonant episodes in Clark's life took place long before and long after the vaunted Lewis and Clark expedition. William Clark's remarkable life story is told with color, panache and authority by veteran journalist and historian Landon Y. Jones in "William Clark and the Shaping of the West." As it was understood in Clark's lifetime, "the West" was a boundary in motion that started along the western stretches of the original 13 colonies and moved steadily across the continent. When the Clark family decamped from Virginia, for example, the western wilderness was to be found in the Ohio River Valley, and the family seat was established in "a bustling hamlet of about a hundred log cabins" called Louisville. In describing the world in which Clark was born and raised, Jones presents us with a rich and often strange glimpse of "America's First West," as he calls it. Native Americans, for example, came to know when white settlers were approaching their tribal grounds by the appearance of what they

called "white man's fly" — that is, the honeybees that were driven westward as the newcomers cleared the old-growth forests to make room for farms and towns. "The honeybees were thought to keep about a hundred miles in advance of white migration all the way across North America," explains Jones. The Native Americans too were driven out. Much of the narrative, in fact, focuses on the bitter, sustained conflict between native dwellers and the practitioners of what would soon be known as Manifest Destiny. And it is here that Clark makes his first appearance in the annals of American history. Among the earliest entries in the journals that Clark kept is an account of a firefight with a party of Indians that left four men and four "squaws" dead, and "2 children 16 horses and 100£ worth of plund'r" in the hands of the frontiersmen. "There was no room for Indians in Jefferson's empire of liberty," writes Jones. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson himself spoke frankly of what we would today call genocide. "We must leave it to yourself to decide [whether] the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal," Jefferson once wrote to Clark's older brother, the storied Indian fighter George Rogers Clark. "The same world would scarcely do for them and us." Clark first met Meriwether Lewis when they were both serving in the long war that was waged against the Native Americans, an encounter that prefigured their famous expedition. Jones invites us to see the Voyage of Discovery on which they embarked at the invitation of Jefferson in 1804 as an expression of Jefferson's geopolitical ambitions — a water route "from sea to sea" would allow the United States to dominate the continent of North America to the exclusion of Britain, France and Spain.

Lewis committed suicide a few years after the end of the expedition, and Clark struggled to turn his celebrity into cash. His dubious reward was a job as the superintendent of the Indian Office, a government agency charged with keeping the conquered nations and peoples of Native America under control and supervising their "removal" from the path of white settlement; significantly, he reported to both the secretary of State and the secretary of War. Later, as governor of the Missouri Territory — "the most powerful American in the West," as Jones puts it — he directed a series of punitive expeditions against the "Hostile Indians" who refused to submit to his authority. At the same time, Jones credits him with "struggling to find a balance between his conflicting constituencies," including "the land-hungry citizens of his territory, and the Indians he was supposed to protect." Some of the most charming moments come when Clark sits down with Nicholas Biddle, the highborn Philadelphia attorney who would edit his journals. Biddle interrogated Clark on every detail of the expedition: "Did both Indian men and women have the venereal? Are there oysters on the Pacific coast? How do Indian mothers flatten the heads of their babies? Does [Clark's slave] York have a wife?" The touchiest question focused on what Biddle delicately called "the point of rank and command" between Lewis and Clark. "Equal in every point of view," insisted Clark, still bitter that he had been denied the rank of captain that Lewis enjoyed. Jones is a resourceful researcher. He found his way to "Billy" Clark's childhood lesson book, where the marginalia includes some handwritten doggerel ("William Clark is a spark / And he loves to shoot a gun ") that ends with a bit of coarse schoolboy humor on the subject of flatulence and a ribald story about a farmer's wife.

More chilling is a note from Billy's father, a few months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, serving as a safe-conduct pass to permit a house slave called Cupid to attend church services. Clark himself was a slave owner, as Jones points out. One of Clark's journal entries recorded the deaths of "Nan[c]y's Child, and Bens horse," thus "pairing the loss of a slave child and a domestic animal in a single sentence." And he boasted that his cook had become "a very good wench since she had about fifty" — 50 lashes of the whip, that is. "Indeed, I have been obliged [to] whip almost all my people. And they are now beginning to think that it best to do better and not Cry hard when I am compelled to use the whip." This is a very different figure from the man we met in Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage." Clark was famously accompanied on the Voyage of Discovery by York, who was regarded as "the bravest of the party" by the Native Americans whom they encountered along the way. After their return to civilization, however, Clark complained that York was "insolent and Sulky" — "I gave him a Severe trouncing," he wrote, threatening to sell him off, although he confided to his journal that "I cant sell negrows here for money." Jones has given us a life of William Clark that rescues him from the dusty pages of high school textbooks and more hagiographic biographies. His vocabulary and point of view are thoroughly modern: He refers to the widowed Clark as "an active single father" and he uses the fashionable term "borderlands" to describe what we used to call the "frontier." Above all, Jones allows us to see a familiar and even fusty figure in a wholly new if sometimes troubling light. •

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(*b) May 30, 2004 May 30, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD In South India, the Way Out Is Often Suicide The region has the world's highest recorded rate of people who kill themselves. Many of them had little to live for and no one to turn to. By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer PALATHUVANAM, India — Ganesan Babajee was a child of India's promise, a boy who wanted to sit at a computer, not climb palm trees and cut coconuts for his father. Babajee was growing faster, it seemed, than life would let him. The 15-year-old chafed to break free of the drowsy rural monotony, to ride his dream somewhere else. He was going to be a doctor. He studied hard, and as his confidence grew, so did the confrontations with his father, a strict former soldier who demanded that things be done his way. Babajee's father wanted the boy doing farm chores, not rushing off to computer class during school break. And he didn't like some of the lessons that Babajee's tutors were teaching. The tutors were evangelical Christians who said Babajee should pray to Jesus Christ instead of the family's Hindu god.	Somewhere else, Babajee's conflicts might have passed with time, like any growing pains. But the pressures are intense on a teenager in this drought-stricken region of southern India, a suicide hot zone where young people are killing themselves at the highest recorded rate in the world. Farmers are losing their crops, and then their land, in a downward spiral that has driven several to kill themselves. Young men have trouble finding jobs. And as they have for generations here, teenage girls marry middle-aged uncles and live like servants. For solace, many villagers turn to a local drink called sarayam, a witch's brew of fermented bananas, rice or sugar cane, various tree barks and, for an added kick, acid drained from old car batteries. Babajee escaped his demons by drinking from a can of Demacron pesticide. He died here, alone in a cave, on a sweltering spring day two years ago. In the Kaniyambadi district of southern India where Babajee lived, which is made up of 62 villages with 108,000 people, suicides account for about a quarter of all deaths in young men, and from 50% to 75% of all deaths in young women, a research team reported in the British medical journal the Lancet last month. But statistics cannot say why so many young people take their lives. Those who would know are dead, and few left suicide notes. Many of the victims were illiterate. Jayaprakash Muliyil, the principal of the medical college that compiled the statistics, thinks that the answer to the mystery lies in the local culture.
"It is very difficult to prove these things," said Muliyil, who is also a community health professor. "Our own feeling is that people tend to enact what their culture demands them to do. And there is something in our culture that suicide turns out to be an option when conflict arises." Most villagers in the district are Tamils, 98% of them Hindus, with a minority of Muslims and Christians. Muliyil stressed that he didn't see any link between Hinduism and higher suicide rates, and his college's researchers say they haven't begun to figure out whether anything in Tamil culture might be the cause. Record-keeping is often haphazard in India, and police routinely report suicides as accidents to cut their paperwork or spare families any stigma. Kaniyambadi district offers researchers a uniquely clear and accurate look at the problem. Meticulous records of every birth and death in the district are kept at Muliyil's Christian Medical College and Hospital, which was founded by an American missionary in 1900. It is one of India's most respected medical institutions. Staff members at the college, in the nearby city of Vellore, have trained health workers who live in every village in Kaniyambadi and form the foundation of a comprehensive reporting system that allows doctors and nurses to build an accurate database of births and deaths.	Researchers from the college studied computerized death records from the 1992-2001 period, for people 10 to 19 years old. They discovered suicide rates "several-fold higher than those reported anywhere in the world, especially in young women," the team reported in the Lancet. Suicide is the No. 1 cause of death in that age group, with a rate of 148 suicides per 100,000 girls and young women and 58 per 100,000 boys and young men. That's many times higher than the youth suicide rate in the United States. In 2001, the rate in the U.S. was 7.9 suicides per 100,000 people ages 15 to 19, the National Center for Health Statistics reported. The Indian statistics shocked experts at the Vellore college. "Like any other person, at first you don't believe it," Muliyil said. "Then you double-check it. And it is confirmed." Anuradha Bose, a pediatrician on the suicide study team, suspects that if such meticulous records were kept elsewhere in Tamil Nadu state, they might show equally high suicide rates. "There is nothing unique, socially or environmentally, about this part of Tamil Nadu for us to believe that something unique is happening here," she said. In India, there are few places to turn for help outside the family when people consider killing themselves. Tamil Nadu has only one suicide hotline, operated by 40 volunteers, for a state of more than 62 million people.
Suicide kills more than 108,000 Indians a year, making it the third-leading cause of death, said Pallasena V. Sankaranarayanan, director of a suicide intervention agency in Madras, Tamil Nadu's capital. Governments do little to help prevent suicide, he said. "People think it is a personal problem and ask, 'Why should I get involved?' " he said. "But it is a social problem. The government has to recognize it as a national problem." Young women are more likely to kill themselves than young men in Kaniyambadi district. That's the opposite of the norm in most of the world. Bose thinks that Indian society's persistent bias against girls and young women is largely to blame. Parents are likely to send boys on to higher grades no matter how poorly they do, but girls usually get pulled out early if they don't excel, the pediatrician added. "It's an end of opportunity. The next step is she will get married," Bose said. "Nearly all the ones I've asked don't want to get married at that young age. It's quite sad. I think, to some extent, they realize that once you've had a child, your life as you know it — for yourself — is more or less over." The list of life's options is shrinking for Devan Punitha and Selvaraj Satya, who cling tightly to each other as they describe how their neighbor, Chinnadurai Kantha, killed herself March 16, 2003.	As 16-year-old girls in Kaniyambadi, they run a high risk of falling into the same fatal trap. Chinnadurai, 35, walked two miles from her village to the forest where she used to gather firewood and plucked leaves from an adanthalai tree. She took them home, mixed a poison and collapsed in writhing agony in front of her house after drinking it. Punitha was one of the neighbors who fought to save the woman's life. They tried to make her vomit by forcing tamarind and water down her throat. It didn't work. Neither did a raw egg. The poison killed her within half an hour. There were many possible reasons why she chose to end it all — her life was a long unraveling. Her only child died when he was 3. Her husband left her. Her mother went mad 10 years ago and now sits alone, slouched and mumbling in the shadows of her mud- brick house. She chases off visitors with a stick. Chinnadurai's only brother died after drinking bootleg liquor. The village mailman, repository of local gossip, says she also had an unhealthy taste for the sarayam, brewed by her brother-in-law. In the police report, the cause of death was listed as "poisoning: prolonged illness." To the teenage girls who watched her die, the reason means nothing.
"Whatever it was, she should have tried to solve it by speaking to someone," Punitha said. Babajee, who lived just up the road, also kept his problems to himself. Friends and relatives say he was always quiet, and they didn't see any hint of the storm roiling his mind. Early on the day he died, Babajee was rushing to harvest coconuts on his father's small plantation, said his mother, Indirani. He didn't want to miss any of his morning computer class. So he didn't cut the coconuts right, at least not the way his father had ordered. They argued, and for the first time in his life, Babajee's father hit him. When the boy reached his house, he was as quiet as usual, his mother said. "He just came home from the farm, had a nice bath, then ate his food and said: 'Mama, I am going to class and then I will come back,' " she said. Instead, he rode his bicycle about a mile to the gateway of Siluvai Hill, where a statue of Jesus greets visitors, his hands raised in blessing. Babajee climbed a third of a mile up the rocky hill, toward a big white cross. He stopped at a cave and drank from the can of pesticide. The boy's body was discovered two days later, by men searching with flashlights, following the sickly sweet smell of death. Babajee's conflict with life had been building on different fronts. There were the problems with his father. Exam pressure weighed heavily on his mind. Competing religions complicated things.	He and his father had moved 100 miles away to the village of Minjur, just north of Madras, so Babajee could attend a private high school and get a better education. They lived in a rented house, and his father worked at a truck factory, next to a small evangelical Christian church. Both returned to Palathuvanam after Babajee took his exams. In Minjur, the pastor, the Rev. Anand Mithiran, invited Babajee for after-school tutoring, which the preacher and a parishioner offered each night. Babajee also attended Sunday services. But his father saw Jesus as just another god, who should not unseat Kali, the black, four-armed goddess with a necklace of skulls. "His father used to tell him, 'If you want, you can believe in that god [Jesus], but you must believe in our god too,' " Babajee's mother said. Every time the family passed the statue of Jesus next to Siluvai Hill, Babajee would bow his head and cross himself. That only angered his father more. "We never used to bow," Babajee's mother said, and then wondered aloud: "Maybe that is why all this happened." Not long after Babajee killed himself, his results from the Grade 10 state exams arrived in the mail. He received 420 out of a possible 500. Top of his class.

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Infidelities MOYRA DONALDSON After he'd gone, she found money in the sheets, fallen when he pulled his trousers off. Gathering the coins into a small pile she set them on the window ledge. They sat, gathering dust, guilt, until one day her husband scooped them into his pocket. Small change for a call he couldn't make from the house. From "Essential Poems (to fall in love with), " edited by Daisy Goodwin (HarperCollins: 196 pp., $15.95)

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May 29, 2004 Scientific American May 2004 ECOLOGY The Oil and the Otter SEA OTTERS CLEAN UP AFTER THE EXXON VALDEZ SPILL -AND GET SICK DOING SO BY SONYA SENKOWSKY It has been IS years since the Exxon Valdez oiled Alaska's Prince William Sound, and more than 12 since the last of the official restoration workers took off their orange slickers and headed home. But at least one cleanup crew never left the Sound: sea otters. The creatures, which were hit especially hard by the first effects of the spill, continue to feed on clams and other food in areas that still contain pockets of oil. Their diligent digging is helping release trapped petroleum -which appears to be sickening them. Ecologists are left with a dilemma: remove the oil (and , possibly cause more harm to the Sound) or let the animals continue to do the dirty work and pay the price. Scientists had originally predicted that any remaining oil would have been carried by waves to shorelines by now. There exposure to air would transform the oil into a hardened asphalt residue lacking the more volatile and toxic components. "The assumption was that the oil wasn't subsurface, it wasn't low, it was up there in that 'bathtub ring,' and that's where the cleaning effort was focused," explains Stanley .D. Rice, a laboratory program manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Juneau.

GREASY EATS: By digging for food, sea otters in Prince William Sound are cleaning up what remains of the mess left by the Exxon Valdez. The oil components are poisoning the otters. But in 2001, with some animals continuing to show indications of oil exposure, NOAA researchers dug into those beaches and found far more Exxon Valdez oil than expected-much of it still liquid in about 70 percent of the sites. The remaining residue "still has a pretty high complement of the toxic components of oil," remarks team leader Jeffrey W. Short.

Sea otters, which feed on clams, mussels and other invertebrates, reach their prey by diving and digging underwater pits. One otter can create thousands of pits in a year, moving five to seven cubic yards of sediment a day. These excavations release oil from surrounding sediment, helping it disperse, explains U.S. Geological Survey research wildlife biologist James L. Bodkin. He has been studying a group of about 70 sea otters from northern Knight Island, a region that lost 90 percent of its sea otter population after the spill. The otters are no longer becoming coated in oil and dying from hypothermia, but there is evidence that they are ingesting the contaminants. Researchers have recorded life spans reduced by between 10 and 40 percent compared with before the spill and noted swollen and discolored livers in some dead otters. The sacrifices of today's sea otters, however, should have their benefits, Rice observes: "The [otters ] that are new and coming along, they're going to be entering a habitat that's cleaner." Decreasing levels of an enzyme called cytochrome P450-1A in the animals' blood, produced in response to toxic chemicals, indicate that an end to the prolonged oil exposure is near, according to USGS physiologist Brenda E. Ballachey and Purdue University pathologist Paul W. Snyder. "While they're still being exposed, there is less and less oil there every year, " Rice notes.

With the possibility of seeking further restoration funds from Exxon on the horizon, scientists are debating whether a cleanup makes sense. "I think that if we had asked this question and had the data we have now several years ago, we probably would be out there cleaning up," Rice states. The effort generally involves mechanical tilling-essentially, plowing the affected area with heavy machinery. The method turns the ground and releases trapped oil, which is then broken down by microorganisms. But the time may be fast approaching, Rice adds, when such intervention may not be wise. Although human cleanup efforts would more quickly make feeding safer for sea otters and other foragers, such as harlequin ducks, they would physically disrupt the environment and would not be beneficial to all organisms. "Maybe on some marginal beaches, you would do more harm than good," Rice surmises. "What might be a good idea for otters may not be a good idea for a clam or a mussel. There is no obvious choice." Sonya Senkowsky, based in Anchorage, Alaska, may be reached at sonya@alaskawriter.com

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May 28, 2004 Science, Vol 304, Issue 5674, 1109-1111 , 21 May 2004 Deforestation in Amazonia In recent years, we and others have identified critical threats posed to the forests of Amazonia by the Brazilian government's plans to dramatically expand highways and other major infrastructure projects in the region (1-6). Our conclusions have been disputed by elements of the Brazilian government (7-10), which assert that a key assumption of our spatial models--that new roads and highways will continue to promote large-scale Amazonian deforestation, as they have done in the past--no longer applies. This is so, they argue, because of improvements in frontier governance and environmental-law enforcement, as well as changes in Brazilian public attitudes toward forests (7-10). As a consequence, the Brazilian government is proceeding with the largest expansion of highways, roads, power lines, gas lines, hydroelectric reservoirs, railroads, and river-channelization projects in the history of the Amazon (1-6). In 2002 and 2003, the rate of deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia climbed to nearly 2.4 million hectares per year (see figure)--equivalent to 11 football fields a minute. This increase mostly resulted from rapid destruction of seasonal forest types in the southern and eastern parts of the basin; relative to preceding years (1990-2001), forest loss shot up by 48% in the states of Parα, Rondτnia, Mato Grosso, and Acre (11). The increase was evidently driven by rising deforestation and land speculation along new highways and planned highway routes (12), and the dramatic growth of Amazonian cattle ranching (13) and industrial soybean farming (6, 14). Soybean farms promote some forest clearing directly, but have a much greater impact on deforestation by consuming cleared land, savanna, and ecotonal forests, thereby pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers ever deeper into the forest frontier. Equally important, soybean farming provides a key economic and political impetus for massive infrastructure projects, which accelerate deforestation by other actors (6, 14).

Anticipating public alarm about the new deforestation figures, the Brazilian government recently announced new measures designed to slow Amazon forest loss. These measures include increased satellite monitoring of deforestation and the involvement of additional ministries--not just the Ministry of Environment--in efforts to reduce illegal deforestation and forest burning (12). These measures, in concert with the establishment of new protected or multiple-use areas in Amapa, Amazonas, and Acre, are a move in the right direction. The new measures do not go far enough, however. They fail to address one of the most critical drivers of forest destruction: the rapid proliferation of new highways and other infrastructure, which greatly increases physical access to the Amazonian frontier. The Brazilian government plans to create interministerial working groups to recommend ways to reduce or mitigate project impacts, but is not considering the cancellation or significant delay of any major project. Indeed, just days after announcing the new anti-deforestation package, Brazilian President Lula demanded that his federal ministers find ways to circumvent environmental and other impediments to stalled infrastructure projects throughout the country, including 18 hydroelectric dams and 10,000 km of highways (15). In the Amazon, new transportation projects frequently lead to a dramatic rise in illegal deforestation, logging, mining, and hunting activities (1-6). If Brazil criss-crosses the basin with thousands of kilometers of such projects, the net result, our models suggest, will be not only further increases in forest destruction, but fragmentation of surviving forests on an unprecedented spatial scale (1, 5). Many of the government's recently announced measures to slow forest loss are positive steps, but if it does not curtail its aggressive plans for infrastructure expansion, Brazil will fail to address one of the most critical root causes of Amazonian deforestation. William F. Laurance laurancew@tivoli.si.edu, Ana K. M. Albernaz, Philip M. Fearnside, Heraldo L. Vasconcelos, Leandro V. Ferreira

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May 25, 2004 The Economist Magazine May 22, 2004 Central America Bringing it all back home SAN PEDRO SULA AND MANAGUA A prison holocaust reveals the scale of the gang culture carried home by Central Americans returning from the United States THERE was one distinguishing feature common to many of the 103 charred bodies of the victims of a fire that swept through a wing of an overcrowded prison in San Pedro Sula, in northern Honduras, on May 17th. Most of the bodies were heavily tattooed. The dead were all members of youth gangs, most imprisoned for the mere act of belonging. Youth gangs and the crime and violence they engender have become one of the most serious problems facing the five small and mainly poor countries of Central America. The prison at San Pedro Sula, Honduras's second city, was designed to hold 800 inmates but was crammed with 2,200. That is partly because President Ricardo Maduro's government, like several of its neighbours, is trying to crack down on the gangs. Last August, it amended the penal code to make mere membership of a gang a criminal offence. El Salvador has done the same; Nicaragua is poised to follow. In Honduras, the police were ordered to haul youngsters off the street and straight to prison just for having the distinctive gang tattoos. Since August, more than 1,000 have been jailed. Many Hondurans applaud this tough stance. But the fire shows the fatal weakness of the policy. Though its cause may have been an electrical fault, survivors claimed that prison warders added to the death toll by refusing to open cells for up to two hours after it started. A year ago, 68 prisoners, most of them gang members, were killed during a riot at another Honduran prison; many were shot by guards.

Critics argue that governments should look at what lies behind the rise of the gangs rather than criminalise them. The gangs' origins lie in the wars that engulfed Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. To escape these, many Central Americans migrated to the United States, and particularly to Los Angeles. Their children imitated that city's gang culture. In 1992, as the wars were dying down, the United States decided to start deporting jailed gang members when their sentences were over. The notorious Salvatrucha Back in countries that were almost foreign to them, with no jobs, the deportees set up their own gangs. According to government estimates, 36,000 people are said to belong to gangs in Honduras, 14,000 in Guatemala, 10,500 in El Salvador, 1,100 in Nicaragua and 2,600 in Costa Rica. The true figure is almost certainly much higher. The most notorious of hundreds of gangs, or maras, is the Mara Salvatrucha, named for its Salvadorean founders who claimed to be as wise as a trout. Its initials appear in graffiti across the region. Many of the prison dead were MS members.

To see why young men—and women—flock to the gangs, just go to one of the poorer neighbourhoods of a city such as Managua, Nicaragua's capital. Each barrio has its own gang. In Ilario Sαnchez, for example, one youth in three belongs to El Cartel, the local gang, according to “Jean Paul”, one of its members (who says he takes his nom de guerre from a rap singer). Most have their own weapons, usually machetes; some even make their own pistols. With jobs scarce, he argues that there is little else to do than join a gang. Crime becomes the only route to respect, power and money. Some of the money goes on drugs, which are dealt and consumed openly on the streets. Most of the gangs, like El Cartel, are strictly local affairs. They engage in petty crime and low-grade extortion of local shopkeepers. It is the bigger gangs, such as the Mara Salvatrucha, that have governments worried. The MS spans Central America, Mexico and the United States; its leaders probably still live in Los Angeles, and it even has adherents in places like the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. In southern Mexico, it has killed scores of Central American migrants trying to reach the United States, often for nothing more than a pair of trainers.

The MS lacks the rigid hierarchy and deep pockets of the Italian Mafia. But there is evidence that its graduates are running kidnap gangs in places like San Pedro Sula, which prey on foreign businessmen. It is this move from street-fighting to organised crime that has prompted governments to crack down. Armando Calidonio, Honduras's deputy minister of public security, argues that his government's hard line, which includes a stiff gun-control law, is working. Kidnapping and bank robberies fell last year, but murders increased. Some commentators question whether crime is in fact falling. They criticise a policy that lumps together hardened gangsters and naοve teenagers who might acquire a tattoo just to impress a girlfriend. Once in prison, the two merge. In San Pedro Sula's jail, the staff had little control over the gangs, according to Wim Savenije of Flacso, a graduate school in San Salvador, who has visited it. He argues that better enforcement of existing penal codes and community policing are preferable to draconian new codes which provide short-term relief but worsen the underlying problem. Others argue for investment in rehabilitation schemes and sports facilities to keep young men occupied. In one such scheme, El Cartel and other gangs from Managua's barrios will compete this weekend in a football tournament organised by the city council. At least they will be kicking a ball rather than each other's heads.

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May 23, 2004 Science Magazine vol 304 14 May 2004 EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY: The Wide Spectrum of Sex and Gender A review by Alison Jolly (profile below) Evolution's Rainbow Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004. 480 pp. $27.50. ISBN 0-520-24073-1. Evolution's Rainbow is written for professional biologists; pre-med and medical students; lesbians; gays; bi-, trans-, and intersexuals; and any other people who enjoy either sex or gender. The readership should, but undoubtedly won't, include the religious orthodox, who probably would not appreciate a transsexual professor of evolutionary biology quoting the Bible and the Koran. Roughgarden begins with a review of sex and gender in animals and plants, structured to challenge current theories of sexual selection. She then describes the development of the embryo, the psychology of sex and gender diversity, and the treatment of sexually diverse people in ancient and modern cultures. She ends with policy recommendations for modern American society. The book is held together by her demand that we rethink our attitudes toward human diversity. In the calculus of reproductive success, homosexuals who divert mating energy to nonreproductive partners have always posed a problem to evolutionary theory, and people who choose to be celibate or sterile even more so. On the book's first page, Roughgarden suggests, "When scientific theory says something's wrong with so many people, perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people."	Sex-changed male. Though most rainbow wrasse (Thalassoma lucasanum) engage in mass spawning, terminal males (which began as females) guard groups of females with which they mate individually. CREDIT: ROB SIMPSON SIMPSON'S NATURE PHOTOGRAPHY She describes the rainbow of sexuality in other species: hermaphrodites, sex changers, homosexual matings (known from more than 300 vertebrate species), species with three or more "genders," pairs of male swans who fledge more young than male-female pairs, and trios of bluegill sunfish (in which big territorial males court smaller male partners as well as females, and then the threesome spawns together). Roughgarden discards the idea that all these animals are "deceived" by mimicry of the other sex or "cuckolded" by sneaks. Often, she argues, they are cooperating in a wider social context than the simple reproductive pair.
She proposes that the theory of sexual selection should be replaced by one of "social selection," in which all the bonds between members of a society are recognized--including mating relationships that promote kin selection in the widest sense rather than individual reproduction. I agree that far too much of sexual selection theory has concentrated on species that mate at a lek (what Roughgarden calls a male red-light district), where females choose between posturing males who give them nothing but genes. Fascination with showy, competitive males and coy females has continued from Darwin down to present-day popularizers. However, biologists already study the trade-offs among strategies such as showiness, aggression, mate-guarding, parental investment, queuing for reproductive opportunities, and helping at the nest. If we consider homosexual behavior as a possible benefit, not a cost, we only extend what is in effect already a theory of social selection. We will still continue to see evolution as fundamentally about which genes make it into the next generation. Even Roughgarden does not go as far as the activist who asks, "Why is biology so hung up on reproduction? This does not reflect the reality of my life or what I see around me." I think we don't have to choose one version or the other. For a less emotive example, walking evolved to get from place to place. Although it matters immensely whether we prance, dance, swagger, swish, scoot, shamble, stumble, or march in step, we still move from X to Y. Roughgarden's treatment of embryonic development emphasizes its complexity, but she comes out on the side of biological bases for much homosexual and transgendered behavior as well as physical intersexes. This view can provide a kind of freedom that would be denied by those who think such behavior is wholly learned--and therefore that it can be unlearned or "cured."	(Of course, in a more tolerant society, learned behavior could also be granted such freedom.) If a bias toward minority sexual patterns does start with the genes, such patterns are far more frequent than could be continued if such genes were deleterious. Therefore, the conclusion must be that there is positive selection for some proportion of those genes in the population. Roughgarden raises the specter of genetic engineering being used to tamper with the genes supposed to underlie these behaviors, and she counsels how ill-advised it would be to let current prejudices interfere with processes that human evolution seems to have found beneficial. The book moves on to narratives of lives of transsexual people, from ancient eunuchs to modern Indian hijras. Roughgarden notes that Jesus recognized multiple types of eunuchs: "there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:12, Revised Standard Version). In all cultures, a few males have made themselves eunuchs out of a wish to be women. Most of those who talk about it claim that they knew they were born into the wrong sex long before their own puberty. Similarly, in all cultures there are a few females who live and act as men, from Indonesian tomboi to Joan of Arc. Following the arguments of Leslie Feinberg, Roughgarden describes Joan of Arc as "a male-identified trans person" who chose to be burned alive rather than wear women's clothing--and who was so convincingly masculine that her executioners raked away the coals to display her naked body and remove people's doubts that she was a woman.
In the last chapter, Roughgarden summarizes her position: I believe the rainbow always has more colors than society has categories, and that society is always trying to cram humanity's rainbow into the few categories it does have. Social scientists have the opposite perspective; they think diversity results from society producing difference among people who are biologically the same. I don't agree. The biology I know tells of endless variation, not of a few universals. She ends her text with an agenda, a list of what she believes transgendered people want. It includes the desires "to be cherished as a normal part of human diversity"; "to be treated with courtesy and dignity"; and "to be respected as people, not bodies."	How successful is Roughgarden in her ambition to revolutionize current biological theories of sexual selection, and to use revised theory to explain and embrace human sexual diversity? Oddly, I think she fails in the first quest yet succeeds in the second. As I noted above, what Darwinian theory needs is not so much radical revision as a simple expansion to take sexual diversity much more seriously. This more encompassing emphasis must address the high frequency and the biological bases of life choices that do not lead to personal reproduction as well as the malleability of both sex and gender among other species. Evolution's Rainbow makes it clear that such a change, even if not revolutionary, would illuminate aspects of long-term evolution. But even more important, Roughgarden's heartfelt account shows how much a changed agenda is needed in the contemporary culture where each of us lives our own short life. The reviewer is in the Department of Biology and Environmental Sciences, University of Sussex, Mail 32 Southover High Street, Lewes BN7 1HX, UK. E-mail: ajolly@sussex.ac.uk

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good reading on the article below:
1 - A number of the 'abuse' principals have backgrounds as (or are still) patrolmen, prison guards et cetera -long a problem in those professions -California a current case.
2 - An aside: what role, if any, do Mossad (sp?) principals or does their 'technology' have in these interrogations?

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May 23, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ Documents Provide New Details of Abuse Army investigators heard accounts from inmates of Abu Ghraib and intelligence officers. By Richard A. Serrano and Greg Miller, Times Staff Writers WASHINGTON — Military investigators who combed through the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq this year were told that one detainee was slammed head-first into a wall and later died, and that another was dunked in urine. They also encountered intelligence officers who said they never saw the abuse and humiliation that was occurring. Only one intelligence team member acknowledged seeing any of the thousands of photographs and videos that were floating through the complex — images of naked detainees so accessible that some were visible on computers at an Internet cafe in the prison. Six military prison guards are awaiting courts-martial on charges of abusing prisoners and a seventh has pleaded guilty. As they seek to determine how far up the chain of command responsibility lies, agents of the Army's Criminal Investigative Command are turning their attention to intelligence officers, civilian contractors and linguists who routinely had contact with detainees.	But their insistence that they were in the dark about prisoner abuse could make it difficult for investigators to seek criminal charges against intelligence unit members who the guards claim encouraged them to get rough with detainees in the first place. Revelations about the intelligence squads and new forms of abuse are found in more than 100 pages of case files compiled by Army investigators. The material includes questionnaires, agents' handwritten notes, victim statements and prison flow charts. It is not clear how much of the material was seen by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who investigated the abuse and issued a highly critical report that became public this month. The documents obtained by The Times also provide new details of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Detainees were forced to participate in contests in which military police tried to see how many detainees they could make cry or urinate on themselves. Happy faces were drawn across the bare chest of one detainee, who was nicknamed "Happy Nipples." Some of the documents are notes taken by an investigator as he worked his way down the cellblocks interviewing detainees. One prisoner told him he smelled alcohol on guards "many times." Another said he was whipped, beaten and held for 40 days in isolation. A third said "they beat me with a broom and stepped on my head with their feet."
Both victims and guards cited by Army investigators tended to confirm characterizations of Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. as the most violent on Tier 1A in what was known as the prison's "hard site," where inmates considered high risk were kept. A guard said Graner would beat prisoners and then encourage his colleagues to "come get some of this." At one point Graner, who worked in a state prison in Pennsylvania before being deployed to Iraq, allegedly told another guard: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.' " Another guard described in the investigative reports as particularly vicious was Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, who previously worked in a Virginia prison. After the investigation into the abuse was launched, he allegedly told a fellow soldier that this would ruin his civilian career. "Nineteen and a half years down the drain," he lamented. The investigation began Jan. 13 when Spc. Joseph Darby, another member of the military police unit, slipped an anonymous, typewritten note under the door of the Army investigation command's office at the prison, along with a photo disc that Graner had given him. "To Whom It May Concern," the note began. "I am writing this letter as a matter of moral ethics."	Darby said he recently had seen "some very disturbing photos of inmates in the hard site prison, Tier 1A to be specific. I had heard stories in the company about the incidents that were taking place but I did not believe them till I was given these photos." He identified Graner, Frederick, Pfc. Lynndie England, Spc. Sabrina Harman and Spc. Megan Ambuhl, all charged in the investigation, as key figures in the abuse, as well as Spc. Jeremy Sivits, who pleaded guilty last week to abusing prisoners and was sentenced to a year in prison. Sivits is expected to testify against the others. "I am writing this to try to right the wrongs that I have seen in these photos and video clips," Darby wrote. "Since no one will come forward I feel something must be done. So I am giving this disc to you. Do with it as you wish." He signed the note, "Concerned MP." Much of the alleged abuse began last October, when the military was under mounting pressure to collect information regarding the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and other potential threats to U.S. forces. After being tipped off by Darby, agents first interviewed guards, then gave intelligence team members a one-page sheet with 11 questions. Twenty-five members filled them out.
Only seven acknowledged witnessing any mistreatment, and most of that consisted of minor incidents outside the prison. Only one said he saw a photograph of abuse. And while 15 said they had heard about abuse, only one reported it to a superior. Of those who said they knew of mistreatment, Staff Sgt. Russell Henderson said he was told of two occasions in which "several" soldiers "used undue force with host nationals at the front gate" of the prison. Capt. Tyler Craner said he had heard that three soldiers from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., were disciplined for having "a female detainee strip." Torin Nelson, a civilian working with interrogators, said that an angry guard shoved a prisoner and that an interrogator "picked up [an elderly] detainee by the cuffs and dragged him to the interrogation booth, yelling at him because he had fallen to the ground." Spc. Paul Son answered "yes" to whether he had witnessed abuse at Abu Ghraib, then used the back half of the questionnaire to lash out at his command for forcing interrogators to work in open areas while the compound was under nearly daily mortar attack. Two soldiers died and 13 others were injured in an attack Sept. 20 "as a direct result of obeying the orders given by the chain of command to continue with night operations in tents rather than hardened facilities," Son wrote. "Hardened facilities were available, and efforts were made to convince the chain of command to allow soldiers to work in the bunkered buildings or to discontinue night interrogation operations."	Other interrogators acknowledged that they suggested that guards use tactics such as sleep deprivation and playing loud music to keep prisoners awake. The interrogators denied telling guards to hit detainees, strip them naked, pile them on the floor or force them to masturbate. They also denied requesting photographs of the humiliations to scare other detainees into talking, as has been reported. The investigation documents include wrenching accounts from prisoners. In one case, a detainee said he was severely punished after guards accused him of planning to use a broken toothbrush to attack them. The prisoner, identified as Abdoul Wahab Younes Ahmed, denied that the toothbrush was his. He said he was stripped, deprived of his mattress and cuffed to the cell floor. "After that they took me to a closed room and more than five of the guards poured cold water on me and ordered me to put my head in someone's urine that was already in that room," he said. "They beat me with a broom and stepped on my head with their feet while it was still in the urine. They pressed my [rear end] with a broom and spit on it" while a female soldier stood on his legs. He said a leader of the day shift crew would give him his clothes back, but that "at night Graner took them away." The treatment went on for three days, the prisoner said.
Another prisoner, identified as Solaiman Saadi Solaiman, said his hands were cuffed to a prison wall merely for asking a guard, Sgt. Hydrue S. Joyner, what time it was. When Graner came on duty that evening, the prisoner said, "he hit me hard on my chest and he cuffed me to the window of the room about five hours and did not give me any food that day." During 67 days in the cellblock, the prisoner said he "saw lots of people getting naked." During the first days of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, guards came in "with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Graner was beating them." "Other guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom" of the prison tier, he said. England told investigators that it was Graner's idea to stack naked prisoners in a pyramid, and that Frederick forced them to masturbate. Sgt. Javal S. Davis, another accused guard, said Graner "handled" the unidentified prisoner who was plowed into a wall, suffering cuts that required stitches. That prisoner is "deceased now," Davis said. It was not clear which prisoner Davis was referring to, although the Pentagon is investigating as possible homicides two cases involving blunt force injuries at the prison. Lawyers for the six guards awaiting trial maintain that intelligence officers pressured their clients to abuse prisoners to extract more information. Graner's lawyer, Guy Womack of Houston, said recently published photos of the abuse prove it was engineered by military intelligence officers. He said guards did not know enough about Iraqi society to humiliate prisoners in such ways.	Womack said they would not have known that licking the bottom of a shoe — which some prisoners were allegedly ordered to do — is seen as a particularly offensive act. "Only the intelligence officers who study the psyche of the prisoners know that there are certain poses and ways to stage them," Womack said. "They know what type of humiliation will be the most effective. The MPs would have had no way to understand the significance of that. It's a cultural thing." Womack said intelligence officers ordered the construction of a plywood wall inside Abu Ghraib so there would be fewer witnesses to abuse, and he said they orchestrated the mistreatment so that almost all of it took place at night. The Army investigators' notes also say that one of the accused guards, Davis, lied when he said that he unintentionally stepped on prisoners' fingers and toes. Davis told investigators that he and a detainee he was escorting "both fell as we stumbled over another prisoner" lying on the cellblock floor, and stepped on the prisoner as he was trying to help him up. Investigators did not believe that account and said in the report obtained by The Times that Davis "lied on first statement about abuse." In another incident in which detainees were piled naked in a pyramid and Graner posed for a photograph as if he were about to punch one of them, the notes say that Harman, another accused guard, "did not feel what happened was wrong."

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a great deal of significance, i think, in a very small item

May 20, 2004 The Economist Magazine May 15, 2004 Management Education No More Boring Analysis? Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management. By Henry Mintzberg. Berrett-Koehler; 480 pages $27.95 HOW do you teach managers to manage? Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University in Montreal, has long held a contrary view to that proposed by most business schools. In this constantly stimulating book he divides his answer into two parts: first, he argues that the traditional qualification, the Masters of Business Administration (MBA), is the wrong way—he says it “prepares people to manage nothing”. Then he expounds what he believes is the right way: an imprecise mix of personal reflection and the sharing of experience. Mr Mintzberg finds fault with the emphasis that many MBA programmes place on frenetic case studies which encourage students to come up with rapid answers based on meagre data. But more than that, he criticises them for their concentration on dry analysis. Such courses, he says, enable their graduates to “speak convincingly in a group of 40 to 90 people”, and make them believe they can leapfrog over experience. That, though, is not the sum total of what is required to manage a complex commercial organisation. Synthesis, not analysis, argues Mr Mintzberg, “is the very essence of management”. On several occasions he cites Robert McNamara, once president of the Ford Motor Company and a United States secretary of defence in the 1960s, as the archetypal MBA, a man who thought that even in Vietnam “generic analysis could substitute for situational knowledge”.

More recently, the qualification has been thrown into deeper disrepute by the heavy dependence of companies such as Enron on MBA recruits. Its former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, currently awaiting trial on 36 charges of fraud and insider trading, liked to boast that he came in the top 5% of his MBA class at the Harvard Business School. And yet, if the MBA is so bad at teaching management, how come America has far more successful businesses than Europe and Japan, areas of the world that are significantly less enthusiastic about such methods of learning? Leaving aside the unprovable rejoinder that American firms would have done even better without the MBA, Mr Mintzberg argues that any list of America's most admired corporate leaders is heavily loaded with people who don't have the qualification: Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, Michael Dell and Andy Grove, to name but a few. The fact that some 40% of the bosses of America's biggest companies today have an MBA is, he claims, largely due to the fact that the system is self-perpetuating. “Enabling Harvard to place so many people at the top is the fact that Harvard already has so many people at the top.” Mr Mintzberg is not alone these days in questioning the value of the traditional MBA. Leading consultants such as McKinsey and Mercer are spreading their recruitment net much more widely. Mercer's London office says that one year's in-house training enables young graduates to “run circles round newly minted MBAs”. In its February issue, the Harvard Business Review (no less) said that “an arts degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the world of business”, with corporate recruiters trawling places such as the Rhode Island School of Design. “Managers not MBAs” throws a stone into the often complacent world of management education. It should be required reading for anyone who has the qualification, wants one, or just wonders what all the fuss is about.

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-another aspect of 'the human condition'

May 18, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Psyche's Torn Curtain Now seen as misguided butchery, lobotomies were once the treatment of choice for mental illness. Doctors, patients confront a dark past. By Benedict Carey, Times Staff Writer SANTA CRUZ — He is a big man with a sweep of white hair who lives in a small apartment by the sea, not far from the San Jose hospital where a doctor gouged his brain with a steel wand more than 40 years ago. The doctor had recommended the operation, and Howard's parents agreed to it. They thought it was the only way to relieve their 12-year-old son's "adolescent anxiety," to subdue his anger, to set his life straight. It didn't work out that way. Howard made far more mischief after the operation than he had before. He has struggled with anxiety, fits of anger and moodiness for much of his life. Eventually, he found a kind of peace. Today, at 55, he has a job, a wife who loves him, a sense of humor and a view of Monterey Bay from his easy chair. Yet the operation still haunts him. He fears that discussing it publicly could jeopardize his job at a transportation company, and with it the small comforts that have taken a lifetime to find. He agreed to be interviewed only if his last name would not be published.	"It horrifies people when I tell them what happened," he said. More than half a century after a Portuguese neurologist won the Nobel Prize for inventing the lobotomy, doctors view the procedure as little more than misguided butchery. About 50,000 Americans had the surgery between 1936 and 1960. An estimated several hundred, perhaps several thousand, are still alive. Silenced for decades by fear or shame, a handful have begun to speak out. Their children and grandchildren are speaking out too, as they struggle to understand the operation's effects on their own upbringings. "It's like we were all supposed to slink into the shadows, as if it never happened, as if doctors never cut into the brains of people we loved," said Christine Johnson, 34, a medical librarian in Levittown, N.Y. She is writing a book about her late grandmother, who was lobotomized in 1954. Johnson also hosts a website, http://www.psychosurgery.org , devoted to memorializing people who underwent the procedure. A new film, "A Hole in One," offers a fictionalized exploration of the lobotomy era, inspired by a patient's account. A book-length treatment of the subject by poet Penelope Scambly Schott, based on a relative's experience, is due out this year.
Some psychiatrists say it is important for the profession to confront this chapter of medical history because doctors today are pursuing increasingly aggressive, brain-altering treatments, from implantable electrodes to powerful drug combinations. "We as a profession had one generation of humility after the era of lobotomy, but it's gone," said Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist at UCLA. "We're now back to a point where the elite of our society believe that the most sophisticated way to treat mental illness is with drugs, magnetic fields, a knife or radiation beam. It's especially important that we hear the rest of the lobotomy story from people who were there." To fathom why lobotomy was once widely accepted, an understanding of the state of mental healthcare half a century ago is required. Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, many mental institutions in the U.S. were chaotic warehouses. Patients screamed in the hallways or lay chained to their beds. Drugs to control hallucinations or quiet imaginary voices were not widely available. Egas Moniz, a neurologist in Lisbon, had reported in 1935 that he "cured" a paranoid patient by destroying a portion of her prefrontal cortex, behind the forehead. Independently, several leading brain researchers in the United States found that an injury to the prefrontal region subdued aggressive behaviors. The frontal lobes help primates strategize, solve problems and manage emotions. In a lobotomy, nerve fibers leading to and from the region are severed. Typically, this flattens emotional responses and induces a kind of apathy.	The idea of purposely damaging the brain was appalling to many doctors. Yet the procedure seemed to offer hope to thousands of deeply disturbed men and women who otherwise were likely to remain institutionalized. Some top psychiatrists and neurosurgeons began performing lobotomies in the late 1930s and found that their patients emerged calmer and easier to manage. Many were able to return home. Soon, news accounts reported that doctors had devised a "surgical cure" for mental illness. By the mid-1940s, lobotomy was viewed as the most advanced treatment psychiatry could offer for severe mental illness. In 1949, Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. "In the context of that time, control of behavior became paramount, and any treatment that achieved that control was seen as therapeutic," said Joel Braslow, a UCLA psychiatrist who has written a history of the era, "Mental Ills and Bodily Cures." "The illness was being defined by the physician, and the outcome — whether it succeeded or failed — was also defined by the physician. The end result was placing the illness only in people's brains, rather than in the context of their lives." He has always been a misfit. Among the stepmother's bill of particulars are lying, stealing, cheating, snooping, scaring, teasing, bullying . The father, a teacher, admitted his inability to deal with the boy, sometimes beating him and calling him foul names. The boy seemed to bring this on himself.
— Doctor's notes on case history No. 6, lobotomized at Doctors General Hospital, San Jose, Dec. 16, 1960. Twelve-year-old Howard would have challenged any psychiatrist. His mother died of cancer when the boy was 3 years old — a loss he says he never fully accepted. After his father remarried, the boy clashed with his stepmother, first over cleaning his room, later over homework, table manners, everything. At Covington Junior High in Los Altos, his grades bottomed out. He was caught breaking into other students' lockers with a knife. One day, he bolted out of class and into the schoolyard, running around wildly in a downpour. "I just loved the rain, that's all," he recalls. "It was coming down so hard you couldn't see the ground." None of it amused his parents or teachers; the boy was too odd, too angry. "I think my parents were just so frustrated by this point they didn't know what to do," he says. "We went to several counselors, several psychiatrists, and then kept seeing more therapists. Until we got to Freeman." The late Walter Freeman, who wrote Howard's case history, had retired from the neurology department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. By then, he was famous for championing the lobotomy. Freeman was so convinced of the value of the operation that he traveled the country to "treat" just about any stubborn mental problem, charging as little as $25. He would damage the prefrontal region by driving steel ice picks through each eye socket, just above the eye. This "transorbital" lobotomy required no drilling into the skull, as other techniques did.	Freeman had settled in Los Altos, a few minutes' drive from where Howard's family lived. He was nearing the end of his career and would later lose his surgical privileges after one of his patients died on the operating table. Howard has only dim memories of the operation. His stepmother, who died in 2000, would not discuss it. Nor, Howard says, will his father or his five brothers. He remembers that his parents drove him to Doctors General Hospital. They told him he was going to get some tests. He recalls getting several shots in the arm. Then the lights went out. According to Freeman's report, the lobotomy "was followed by rather severe reaction with fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The patient remained in the hospital five days." "All I remember," says Howard, "is waking up with a massive headache." Perhaps the most enduring popular image of lobotomy is that of McMurphy, the rebellious mental patient played by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," who was reduced by surgery to nodding helplessness. It's a misleading picture, according to Donald Stuss, a Canadian neuropsychologist who studied a group of schizophrenics lobotomized in the 1960s. The study lasted more than a decade and included detailed evaluations of 16 American lobotomy patients in an effort to pinpoint the mental changes the operation induced.
Stuss' research team compared the 16 patients with healthy people and with schizophrenics who had not undergone the procedure. They found that the lobotomized patients functioned well in terms of memory, language and learning. "That scared the bejeebers out of me," said Stuss, now director of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, which is devoted to the study of the frontal lobes and memory. "We were actually showing real improvements in these areas, compared to the schizophrenics who hadn't gotten the operation." But the study missed larger problems, the scientists later found. Most brain researchers consider the prefrontal region crucial to a person's ability to act responsibly. It allows people to project into the future, restrain urges and concentrate. The lobotomized patients in Stuss' study could not focus on a task when there was any distraction. Childlike, they lost the thread of what they were doing, as if trapped in the moment. Those who lived with lobotomized parents and relatives later described grown men and women who didn't care for themselves, whose emotions were out of sync with what was going on around them. It would be years before doctors tallied the cost of the operation in strict medical terms. Early research papers reported that lobotomy was safe, with about 2% of patients dying (an acceptable risk, given the alternative, many thought), and successful as a treatment in 50% to 70% of cases. In researching his history of the era, Braslow reviewed records of more than 200 men and women lobotomized at Stockton State Hospital, east of San Francisco.	Twelve percent died from the surgery. Only about one in four improved enough after the operation to be released from the hospital. By the mid-1950s, psychiatrists had antipsychotic drugs, such as chlorpromazine, to subdue schizophrenics, and increasingly viewed lobotomy as extreme and primitive. As quickly as it had appeared, psychosurgery fell from favor. He preferred to be alone on hiking trips, resented being called back to the trail. — Doctor's notes, case history No. 6. When the headache cleared and he returned home, Howard noticed several changes. He no longer had to go to school, which was wonderful, but odd. His parents seemed to ease up, too, as if they'd become suddenly more tolerant, even doting. Then one day, his stepmother simply said it out loud: You've had a lobotomy. The word buzzed in the 12-year-old boy's head — it always would. At the time, there was no explanation, no discussion. Howard's teen years were a troubled journey, from Agnews State Hospital in Santa Clara to Rancho Linda, a reform school in San Jose, and on to a series of halfway houses and mental wards. He broke curfews, visiting hours and other rules. At a halfway house in San Jose, he was caught cashing tax-return checks sent to the institution by mistake. By his mid-20s, Howard had spent several months in jail and been put on probation for forging checks. He got married, then divorced, and meandered between jobs, from tow truck driver to fast-food cook.
"What happened was that any hope of normal life was gone," he says. Maybe the lobotomy had ruined his brain; maybe he was using it as an excuse to ruin his life. Of one thing he was certain: He'd been cheated. "I became a rough kid — chains, leather gloves, out-of-the-movies type of thing — and people would stay away from me. I would walk into liquor stores carrying my wife's purse just to see what happened. There I was, 6-foot-7. No one would say anything. They didn't dare." In time, the boy became a man, aware of what had happened but at a loss as to what to do with the rest of his life. He had no visible scars from the operation, only a lingering suspicion that somehow people knew he was a little "off." Was he? He questioned his mental soundness every day, longing for some clue to what the operation had done. "You don't know who you really are. You're always asking: Is this me?" he says. "The fact was, I'd had my brain done. Nobody was going to let me go out and actually be anything — that's how I thought about it. I was defective, and no one ever talked about it. No one ever explained what would happen. Would my brain suddenly turn off and I just fall over? No one can tell me that."	After returning home he was relaxed, more cheerful and almost perpetually hungry. It is too early to predict the outcome. — Doctor's concluding notes on Howard. It may be that Howard's brain was extraordinarily resilient. Or perhaps it was his youth that saved him. A still-developing brain has a better chance to adapt to a lobotomy-like injury than a fully mature one does, surgeons say. Or maybe Howard just got lucky, if luck is a word that can be used to describe a life like his. Three decades after the operation, he began to find the comforts of a settled life. He remarried at age 38. He earned a degree at 44 in computer information systems from a junior college. He found a steady job, working for a vehicle charter firm, where he has won a reputation as a gifted computer programmer and troubleshooter. He's being considered for a management job. He is a loyal son who often spends time with his father. He says he bears no grudge against his stepmother. "I'd sit down to dinner with her right now, if it were possible," he said. "They tried to fix me, and, well, here I am. Why not?

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-from readers on this book review:

"Very often people from West, Europe and US, ask me about untouchables...and I tell them to read about Victorian London...or read about how people, even today, in Peking/Shanghai collect sewage...these people are invisible".

"Boots and shoes were not brought inside. The Irish did the work and lived in hovels with the cows.."

May 16, 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Review By Andrew Scull, Hidden behind long skirts Andrew Scull is the author of several books, including "Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-Doctoring in Eighteenth Century England" and "Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade." Inside the Victorian Home A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England Judith Flanders W.W. Norton: 416 pp. $34.95 Victorian England has frequently been pictured (and often saw itself) as a society sundered into separate spheres: a thrusting, rapacious, heartless public realm, a masculine space where the ruthless values of the marketplace held sway; and a private protected arena of alleged domestic bliss, the harmonious home of love, charity and family feeling that was presided over by the female of the species. Home was where the heart was. Prominent in the carefully rendered portraits conjured up in the imagined worlds of a Dickens or a Trollope and pervading even the mundane realities recorded in contemporary diaries and letters, the cult of domesticity was a central feature of the ruling ideology of the age.	Inside the Victorian home, in theory at least, masochistic matriarchs served as ministering angels to children and husbands alike, dedicating their lives to soothing and restoring their battered menfolk and happily (or perhaps not so happily) dedicating their lives to providing a refuge for male providers whose lives might otherwise have been consumed by commerce. That all was not such sweetness and light will come as no surprise to anyone. But how, in reality, did the Victorian home function? It was not, after all, a private space but in many respects an extension of the public sphere: one as filled with labor and conflict as the "outside" world; a miniature universe that was as important a measure of a man's (and a family's) social standing and success as the world of employment; a contrived environment whose routines were rigidly controlled and stage-managed in a consuming effort to demonstrate its occupants' conventionality, conformity and thus moral standing. Founded on myths and lies that could never be overtly acknowledged, the hypocrisy of home life was emblematic of the contradictions that lay at the heart of 19th century society.
In Judith Flanders' skilled hands, the anatomy and physiology of the Victorian household are laid bare in "Inside the Victorian Home." With wit and imagination, she probes and pokes at the illusions that generations lived by, and she provides us with unparalleled insight into the machinations that went into constructing and maintaining a "respectable" home. Flanders' focus is limited, of course. Not for her the grand routines of the aristocrats' country houses and urban palaces, or the sordid squalor endured by the slum-dwelling laboring classes. Instead, it is on the domestic lives of Middle England that she concentrates her gaze. Minute gradations of social status were of overweening importance in such a class-conscious social order. Hence the overwhelming importance of display. The more publicly accessible portions of the house occupied a disproportionate amount of the available space, and comfort and convenience were routinely sacrificed to put the best possible face on one's circumstances. For many, backstage spaces were cramped and crowded. Bedrooms were often meanly furnished to leave more resources available for the public rooms.	Carpets, repositories of dust and vermin, slid inexorably down the social scale as they aged, moving from drawing room to parlor to morning room to bedroom and finally ending up in the scullery — the furthest backstage portion of the house, where the dirtiest, smelliest, least salubrious portions of household work were accomplished (and where the servants briefly got to rest their weary bones at day's end). Mimicking the allegedly rigid division between inside and outside, private and public, Victorians placed great emphasis on the importance of segregating functions within the household. Bedrooms were for sleeping, for sickness and presumably for sex (though Flanders is as reticent as her subjects on the latter topic, discoursing at length on childbirth and its tribulations but largely ignoring the antecedents of pregnancy and parturition). To read or to write there was to violate an important social norm. Public reception rooms were each supposed to be reserved for their own special functions: dining, receiving guests, providing separate retreats for gentlemen and ladies. Mixing categories was a grievous social sin, as bad as having pretensions beyond one's actual social station.
So appearances were vital, but they had to be the right appearances, and to neglect them was as disgraceful as to care too openly about them. "Breeding" was all about learning to make and maintain the requisite distinctions. For culturally competent Victorians, objects spoke eloquently about their owners. Thus to choose the wrong ones, or to use fakes or imitations to lay claim to a status one did not possess, was to commit an indiscretion or a fraud with potentially far-reaching consequences. Behavior of this sort threatened to undermine hierarchy, and with it the social and moral orders of society. Consequently, like dress, furniture was not a matter of personal taste or comfort but an indicator of one's place in the social system; just as one's commitment to segregation of functions within the home was vital testimony to one's moral worth. In reality, of course, few could afford the space or resources to live up to these standards, just as few could afford the substantial array of servants on which the full realization of Victorian ideals of domesticity was so heavily dependent. Compromise was everywhere, as was the need to pretend one did not see or smell what was not supposed to be there (and that servants, living cheek-by-jowl with masters and mistresses, did not see or hear what they inevitably must have). Wives were allegedly decorative, their publicly visible labors deliberately devoid of point or economic value.	The sorts of activities in which "respectable" women could engage without losing their respectability were limited to carefully choreographed visits to their social equals (or, if possible, superiors); charitable work (but not direct, stigmatizing contact with the poor themselves); making ceremonial pincushions and engaging in other sorts of laborious fancywork to fill up the empty hours, producing "items no-one would buy — or perhaps even want to buy." Meanwhile, these decorative creatures were supposed to ensure that the machinery that made the household work proceeded invisibly and in complete silence. But Victorian houses demanded far too much work for such surface calm to be anything but another illusion. They were, for example, filthy places. The air in English towns was thick with pollution from industry, but also from the open coal fires with which Victorians still insisted on heating their homes. The streets were covered in mud and dung that boots and shoes brought inside, and when the footwear dried the resulting dust would infiltrate the home. Gas lighting, growing ever more common, deprived rooms of oxygen and added its soot to the mix. Rats, mice and insects such as spiders, flies, bed-bugs and fleas provided yet a further layer of problems. Absent more than the most rudimentary of technological aids, cooking, cleaning and the laundry were extraordinarily labor intensive, and besides supervising such servants as they could afford, women of the middle and professional classes had to devote much of their time and attention to performing some of this labor themselves — all the while pretending they did not.
Flanders' discussion is organized around the physical structuring of space, within what were most often rented row or town houses. The bedroom, the nursery, the kitchen, the scullery, the parlor, the drawing room, the dining room, the morning room, the bathroom and the sickroom are each taken up in their turn, the furnishing and functions explored, and, in most cases, they are illustrated through some of the well-chosen illustrations that accompany her text. Such discussions, however, provide the excuse to range far more widely through the social history and underpinnings of Victorian domesticity. Flanders devotes considerable space, for example, to a discussion of the technology of lighting the home, examining how the advent of first gas and then electric lighting affected social life in myriad ways. The chapter on the nursery provides the occasion for extended excursions on infant feeding, sickness and mortality, and on the necessity of keeping children under wraps so that their noises, sight and smells did not annoy the master of the house on his return from his labors. (The Victorians' sense of the pleasures and pains of domesticity was quite different from ours, and children clearly fell into the latter category for most of their childhood.) Inevitably, attention to the social organization of the dining room entails attention to Victorians' diet and the prescriptions for serving and entertaining one's guests, while the activities in the kitchen and scullery (most often below street level) lead to substantial attention given to the servant problem. Similarly, the female enclave of the parlor prompts a lengthy discussion of the centrality of marriage to the fate of middle-class women.	Without marriage, as Flanders notes, women could hope to survive only as dependents in someone else's house. To be female and independent was to be an anomaly and somehow incomplete — the opposite of our own assumptions. (Only women of the servant class were exempt from this prejudice against the single female. But their status was not problematic, since in the words of a Lancashire mill owner, William Rathbone Greg, "they fulfill both essentials of a woman's being: they are supported by, and they minister to, men. We could not possibly do without them. Nature has not provided one too many.") For all the ideological emphasis on separate spheres, married men's comfort and their status were too nearly implicated in their households for them to remain indifferent to or detached from the nature of their domestic environment. And for all the apparent hostility to the notion of middle-class women entering the working world, their management of the household economy required them to manage budgets; hire, supervise and fire labor; and engage in a great deal of manual labor themselves — while maintaining the illusion that the whole elaborate domestic machine was self-operating and beneath their notice. With "Inside the Victorian Home," Judith Flanders has labored long and hard to set the record straight and in the process has provided a fascinating and invaluable guide to the perils, pleasures and contradictions of Victorian domesticity. •

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"When birds hit windows at high speed, the impact sometimes leaves an imprint on the glass. In this instance, a mourning dove in midflight, with its wings in an upstroke, struck a back-porch window. Fine powdery material from the bird's feathers left a record of the impact on the window's surface".
-DAVID MALAKOFF

May 15, 2004 The Economist May 8th 2004 Birds and buildings Traffic accidents CHICAGO How to stop one flying into the other CAN modern man pursue his urban ambitions and still coexist with nature? The question seems particularly relevant if you are a bird and you are heading for Chicago, where the annual spring migration is just reaching its peak. Perched on the edge of Lake Michigan, this huge city is directly in the path of some 300 species of avian travellers, many of whom prefer to hug the shoreline rather than cross the huge lake. That is not always a safe choice, given Chicago's lofty skyline. In the late 1960s, flocks of warblers, thrushes, cuckoos and other species flew headlong into the newly built, 96-storey John Hancock Centre. The birds, which navigate at night using celestial cues, were attracted by the building's lights. Their dead bodies littered the sidewalks below as the sun rose. Mirrored glass is a growing hazard, even in daylight. Michael Mesure of the Fatal Light Awareness Programme (FLAP), a Toronto-based environmental group, recalls seeing at least 500 birds hit two mirrored office towers in his city one morning a few years ago. “It was literally hailing birds,” he recalls. His group now tries to aid the injured, and rather bizarrely stores masses of dead birds in a freezer until it can photograph them en masse. On the worst count, some one billion birds a year hit glass in America. Those that die on the spring migration are the fittest of the flock, having already survived thousands of miles in the air. Chicago and Toronto are trying to help.

Both cities pursue organised “lights out” programmes during peak migration periods, when tall office buildings are asked to turn out the lights on their upper floors overnight—and death rates have fallen sharply. New York has a similar but smaller programme. Chicago is trying particularly hard to lure in feathered visitors. The mayor, Richard Daley, has added lakefront parks, bird sanctuaries and nesting grounds, and the result has been dramatic. As many as 7m birds use the city's lakefront parks annually, says Doug Stotz, an ornithologist at the Field Museum, many of them rare. Last year, a Grace's warbler was spotted in a local park—the first sighting east of the Mississippi. Bald eagles have returned to the city in recent weeks—the first such sighting in the city since the 1800s. Peregrine falcons are being bred in nests on the top of city skyscrapers.

Snowy owls have turned up at a peninsula along the lakefront best known as the former site of Meigs Field, a small airport Mr Daley bulldozed in the middle of the night last year. The mayor, still unrepentant, plans a 100-acre park and nature centre there. Despite all the progress, plenty of hazards remain. Chicago's lakefront parks are interspersed with massive man-made structures that are deadly for many birds. Mr Mesure says McCormick Place, Chicago's giant convention centre, “has a horrible history of bird strikes by both day and night”. The newly renovated Soldier Field, a gigantic football stadium along the lake, is another hazard directly in the flight path. And in Grant Park, a massive, twisting piece of shiny metal (designed by Frank Gehry) reaches for the sky above the new outdoor stage in the soon-to-be-dedicated Millennium Park. Those birds had better keep their eyes open.

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following are three great articles:
1 - "Public Enemy Number One: Tobacco or Obesity?" from science magazine and for which see the excellent, current documentary "SUPERSIZE ME!"
2 - "David Reimer, 38; After Botched Surgery, He Was Raised as a Girl in Gender Experiment" from the la times (with additional reference to not unrelated homosexuality and the problems of the intersexed -films references too).
3 - "Gusher to a Few, Trickle to the Rest" -an excellent investigative article by the latimes again, on US interests in Angolan oil etc.

perryb

May 14, 2004 Science, Vol 304, 7 May 2004 EPIDEMIOLOGY: Public Enemy Number One: Tobacco or Obesity? Eliot Marshall Sloth combined with bad diet may soon displace tobacco as the biggest cause of avoidable death in the United States, according to a recent report by scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. But some researchers, including a few at CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the paper's compatibility with a new antiobesity theme in government public health pronouncements--rather than sound analysis--propelled it into print. The authors deny this, saying they relied on the best available data and methods, which were extensively reviewed before publication.

The study, published in the 10 March issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), estimates that in the United States in 2000, there were 435,000 deaths associated with tobacco use compared with 400,000 deaths from "poor diet and physical inactivity" (see table). The authors--four CDC epidemiologists, including agency chief Julie Gerberding--blame the category that includes obesity for causing the "largest increase" in deaths since a similar study 10 years ago. (The other authors are Ali Mokdad, James Marks, and Donna Stroup.) Causes of Death In the United States Deaths Cause 1990 2000 Tobacco use 400,000 435,000 Poor diet-physical inactivity 300,000 400,000 Alcohol consumption 100,000 85,000 Microbial agents 90,000 75,000 Toxic agents 60,000 55,000 Motor vehicle accidents 25,000 43,000 Firearm use 35,000 29,000 Sexual behavior 30,000 20,000 Illicit drug use 20,000 17,000 Total 1,060,000 1,159,000 SOURCE: A. H. MOKDAD ET AL., JAMA 291, 1238 (2004)

That conclusion galls anti-tobacco activist Stanton Glantz, an expert in heart disease at the University of California, San Francisco, who has made a career of battling cigarette companies. A tireless advocate of smoking controls, Glantz argues that the evidence on tobacco is well tested, whereas the new numbers on obesity are weak--or as one critic in CDC says, "loosey-goosey." The General Accounting Office last year investigated CDC's tobacco-mortality estimates--at the behest of a legislator from a tobacco state--and gave them high marks. Specifically, Glantz and others grumble that the CDC authors use inconsistent methods for calculating relative risks associated with tobacco and bad diet. According to Glantz, this study bases its obesity risk factors on studies of people who were more youthful on average than the U.S. profile. Death is more likely to be blamed on obesity among young people than among old people. This small bias, if projected onto the whole nation, can overstate obesity's importance. In contrast, risks for tobacco were calculated in an age-specific way and summed, taking out the age bias, critics claim. For this reason alone, Glantz argues, the paper should be "withdrawn." Several epidemiologists at CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) echoed Glantz's concerns but declined to speak on the record. "I don't want to lose my job," said one CDC staffer who does research in this area. Critics also object that the authors added an arbitrary number of deaths from poor nutrition (15,000) to the obesity category. A CDC scientist says internal discussions on these issues got "very contentious" months before publication and left some feeling that the conclusions were not debatable. Expanding impact. CDC experts report that diet-related deaths are rising much faster than those from tobacco, but critics question their methods.

Not so, says Stroup, a mathematical statistician: The paper passed through an "extensive review by colleagues in the field, all the way up the chain, including by folks in the office of the director," as well as a review at JAMA. This is not an original project, she explains, but an improvement on a similar report 10 years ago. That study of 1990 data, by former CDC chief William Foege and epidemiologist Michael McGinnis, put 300,000 deaths in the obesity category. It also was criticized for its sketchy description of sources and methods; the authors of the new version say one objective is to clear the fog. Public health leaders had been using the 1990 paper recently in a campaign against obesity, Stroup says; when Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) requested an update, CDC agreed. The methods used to reach the 2000 findings are "well accepted in epidemiology texts and courses," Stroup says. Co-author Mokdad thinks there are a lot of "misconceptions" about the paper. The stipulated 15,000 deaths from poor nutrition in the obesity section, for example, represent a "conservative estimate" obtained by tripling the number (4242) of death certificates citing this cause in 2000. The CDC authors say that JAMA's space limitations prevented them from publishing the background information that some readers want. They hope to provide all of this--and more--on a CDC Web site in "about 1 month," says Mokdad. His hope is to make the analysis as reader-friendly as possible, so that public health agencies across the country can use the same approach to calculate local threats from tobacco, obesity, and other killers.

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May 13, 2004 Los Angeles Times OBITUARIES David Reimer, 38; After Botched Surgery, He Was Raised as a Girl in Gender Experiment By Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer David Reimer, the Canadian man raised as a girl for most of the first 14 years of his life in a highly touted medical experiment that seemed to resolve the debate over the cultural and biological determinants of gender, has died at 38. He committed suicide May 4 in his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. At 8 months of age, Reimer became the unwitting subject of "sex reassignment," a treatment method embraced by his parents after his penis was all but obliterated during a botched circumcision. The American doctor whose advice they sought recommended that their son be castrated, given hormone treatments and raised as a girl. The physician, Dr. John Money, supervised the case for several years and eventually wrote a paper declaring the success of the gender conversion.	Known as the "John/Joan" case, it was widely publicized and gave credence to arguments presented in the 1970s by feminists and others that humans are sexually neutral at birth and that sex roles are largely the product of social conditioning. But, in fact, the gender conversion was far from successful. Money's experiment was a disaster for Reimer that created psychological scars he ultimately could not overcome. Reimer's story was told in the 2000 book "As Nature Made Him," by journalist John Colapinto. Reimer said he cooperated with Colapinto in the hope that other children could be spared the miseries he experienced. Reimer was born on Aug. 22, 1965, 12 minutes before his identical twin brother. His working-class parents named him Bruce and his brother Brian. Both babies were healthy and developed normally until they were seven months old, when they were discovered to have a condition called phimosis, a defect in the foreskin of the penis that makes urination difficult. The Reimers were told that the problem was easily remedied with circumcision. During the procedure at the hospital, a doctor who did not usually perform such operations was assigned to the Reimer babies. She chose to use an electric cautery machine with a sharp cutting needle to sever the foreskin. But something went terribly awry. Exactly where the error lay — in the machine, or in the user — was never determined. What quickly became clear was that baby Bruce had been irreparably maimed.
(The doctors decided not to try the operation on his brother Brian, whose phimosis later disappeared without treatment.) The Reimers were distraught. Told that phallic reconstruction was a crude option that would never result in a fully functioning organ, they were without hope until one Sunday evening after the twins' first birthday when they happened to tune in to an interview with Money on a television talk show. He was describing his successes at Johns Hopkins University in changing the sex of babies born with incomplete or ambiguous genitalia. He said that through surgeries and hormone treatments he could turn a child into whichever sex seemed most appropriate, and that such reassignments were resulting in happy, healthy children. Money, a Harvard-educated native of New Zealand, had already established a reputation as one of the world's leading sex researchers, known for his brilliance and his arrogance. He was credited with coining the term "gender identity" to describe a person's innate sense of maleness or femaleness. The Reimers went to see Money, who with unwavering confidence told them that raising Bruce as a girl was the best course, and that they should never say a word to the child about ever having been a boy. About six weeks before his second birthday, Bruce became Brenda on an operating table at Johns Hopkins. After bringing the toddler home, the Reimers began dressing her like a girl and giving her dolls.	She was, on the surface, an appealing little girl, with round cheeks, curly locks and large, brown eyes. But Brenda rebelled at her imposed identity from the start. She tried to rip off the first dress that her mother sewed for her. When she saw her father shaving, she wanted a razor, too. She favored toy guns and trucks over sewing machines and Barbies. When she fought with her brother, it was clear that she was the stronger of the two. "I recognized Brenda as my sister," Brian was quoted as saying in the Colapinto book. "But she never, ever acted the part." Money continued to perform annual checkups on Brenda, and despite the signs that Brenda was rejecting her feminized self, Money insisted that continuing on the path to womanhood was the proper course for her. In 1972, when Brenda was 7, Money touted his success with her gender conversion in a speech to the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., and in the book, "Man & Woman, Boy & Girl," released the same day. The scientists in attendance recognized the significance of the case as readily as Money had years earlier. Because Brenda had an identical male twin, they offered the perfect test of the theory that gender is learned, not inborn. Money already was the darling of radical feminists such as Kate Millett, who in her bestselling "Sexual Politics" two years earlier had cited Money's writings from the 1950s as proof that "psychosexual personality is therefore postnatal and learned."
Now his "success" was written up in Time magazine, which, in reporting on his speech, wrote that Money's research provided "strong support for a major contention of women's liberationists: that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered." In other words, nurture had trumped nature. The Reimer case quickly was written into textbooks on pediatrics, psychiatry and sexuality as evidence that anatomy was not destiny, that sexual identity was far more malleable than anyone had thought possible. Money's claims provided powerful support for those seeking medical or social remedies for gender-based ills. What went unreported until decades later, however, was that Money's experiment actually proved the opposite — the immutability of one's inborn sense of gender. Money stopped commenting publicly on the case in 1980 and never acknowledged that the experiment was anything but a glowing success. Dr. Milton Diamond, a sexologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, had long been suspicious of Money's claims. He was finally able to locate Reimer through a Canadian psychiatrist who had seen Reimer as a patient. In an article published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine in 1997, Diamond and the psychiatrist, Dr. H. Keith Sigmundson, showed how Brenda had steadily rejected her reassignment from male to female. In early adolescence, she refused to continue receiving the estrogen treatments that had helped her grow breasts. She stopped seeing Money. Finally, at 14, she refused to continue living as a girl. When she confronted her father, he broke down in tears and told her what had happened shortly after her birth. Instead of being angry, Brenda was relieved. "For the first time everything made sense," the article by Diamond and Sigmundson quoted her as saying, "and I understood who and what I was." She decided to reclaim the identity she was born with by taking male hormone shots and undergoing a double mastectomy and operations to build a penis with skin grafts.	She changed her name to David, identifying with the Biblical David who fought Goliath. "It reminded me," David told Colapinto, "of courage." David developed into a muscular, handsome young man. But the grueling surgeries spun him into periods of depression and twice caused him to attempt suicide. He spent months living alone in a cabin in the woods. At 22, he prayed to God for the first time in his life, begging for the chance to be a husband and father. When he was 25, he married a woman and adopted her three children. Diamond reported that while the phallic reconstruction was only partially successful, David could have sexual intercourse and experience orgasm. He worked in a slaughterhouse and said he was happily adjusted to life as a man. In interviews for Colapinto's book, however, he acknowledged a deep well of wrenching anger that would never go away. "You can never escape the past," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000. "I had parts of my body cut away and thrown in a wastepaper basket. I've had my mind ripped away." His life began to unravel with the suicide of his brother two years ago. Brian Reimer had been treated for schizophrenia and took his life by overdosing on drugs. David visited his brother's grave every day. He lost his job, separated from his wife and was deeply in debt after a failed investment. He is survived by his wife, Jane; his parents, and his children. Despite the hardships he experienced, he said he did not blame his parents for their decision to raise him as a girl. As he told Colapinto, "Mom and Dad wanted this to work so I'd be happy. That's every parent's dream for their child. But I couldn't be happy for my parents. I had to be happy for me. You can't be something that you're not. You have to be you."

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May 13, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE POLITICS OF PETROLEUM Gusher to a Few, Trickle to the Rest Courted by oil firms and the U.S., the elite of impoverished Angola have extracted wealth from the boom, documents say. By Ken Silverstein, Times Staff Writer Just past the misnamed Beautiful Rose Farm, a shantytown without running water or sewers, is a lush, gated compound with spacious houses, manicured gardens and tennis courts that ExxonMobil built for its employees. Besides the foreigners, the development also has benefited a few well-connected Angolans: A local businessman close to President Jose Eduardo dos Santos was hired by the oil company to construct the complex, and a former army chief of staff collects rent on the land, according to an oil industry consultant's report and a source familiar with the arrangement. Picking them as partners won ExxonMobil "brownie points" with the ruling regime, the report said. Courting Dos Santos and other leaders of oil-rich African countries has become increasingly important as Western oil companies and U.S. officials seek to feed growing demand and reduce dependence on the Middle East. But in the process, Washington may be repeating what critics say is a mistake it has made for decades in other corners of the world: cementing the power of a local elite at the expense of an impoverished and resentful majority — and ultimately, fomenting instability. Oil companies have won favor with the Dos Santos regime by steering contracts to Angolan insiders and by giving millions of dollars to foundations controlled by the ruling family, internal oil company reports reviewed by The Times show.	The Bush administration has sought to strengthen ties to the Dos Santos regime despite allegations of widespread corruption. The two presidents met Wednesday in the Oval Office to discuss "issues of common interest." And the administration recently declared Angola's record on corruption and transparency sufficient to make it eligible for a trade program that eliminates duties on its oil and other exports. Meanwhile, as much as $1 billion a year has disappeared from Angola's national treasury, according to reports by the International Monetary Fund and two watchdog groups. International Monetary Fund figures show that Angola could not account for 15% of government expenditures it reported from 1997 through 2002. European judicial authorities say they have traced tens of millions of dollars in Angolan government funds to private bank accounts in Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. Evaristo Jose, a spokesman at the Angolan Embassy in Washington, said his country was making reforms to improve its accounting of oil revenue. He said allegations of official corruption were untrue. A senior Bush administration official said Angolan authorities had "acknowledged that corruption is a problem and they are addressing it." He said the administration was not going easy on Angola's record on human rights and corruption because of its status as a major energy exporter. Angola and other sub-Saharan African countries provided the United States with 15% of its oil imports last year, and that figure is expected to grow to 25% over the next decade. Yet the lives of many people along Africa's Atlantic coast have only worsened: Jobs have not materialized, basic rights have eroded and corruption has spread. "Global oil is a mixed picture, predominantly negative, and African oil is the most negative of all the stories," David Gordon, head of the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues, said at an energy conference last year in Washington.
A copy of a confidential report, written by an industry consultant in 2001 for Royal Dutch/Shell Group and obtained by The Times, provided an unusually frank assessment of oil's role in Angola: A charitable foundation set up in the president's name uses the money it solicits from foreign businesses to "bolster the personality cult of President Dos Santos and to attempt to convince his compatriots that he cares about them." "Angola's petroleum revenues, as they are currently used, are widely viewed as a curse," the report said. "Those ordinary Angolans who are aware of Angola's oil riches have grown to realize in recent years that this resource is managed for the immense profit of a very few, and the increasing misery of the many." Poverty Despite the Oil The story is much the same elsewhere in the region. Nigeria has exported more than $200 billion worth of oil during the last 15 years, but 70% of its 130 million people live on less than $1 a day. Former Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., who helped oversee U.S. military operations in most of Africa until 2003, said in April that widespread poverty had left the country "ripe for turmoil." Political instability there "could cause major disruption of the world's production of crude oil," he said at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. "If Nigeria explodes, we will feel it." American companies also have flocked to tiny Equatorial Guinea, investing $5 billion in a country where poverty is pervasive and the regime is notorious for torturing dissidents and suppressing civil liberties.	Industry lobbying won U.S. support for a controversial World Bank-backed pipeline in Chad, a country that has been racked by warfare for decades and that the World Economic Forum, a Geneva-based business organization, ranked as the most corrupt of 21 African countries it surveyed last year. ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco are lead companies in the consortium that built and operates the pipeline, which opened last summer. Most of Central and West Africa's oil is offshore, which can insulate oil companies from political turmoil. For example, oil was pumped without interruption during the 27-year Angolan civil war. Dozens of former senior U.S. officials use their experience and connections to promote the oil industry's interests in these countries and advocate closer ties to the U.S. Members of the U.S.-Angola Chamber of Commerce, which receives financial support from American oil companies, include five former State Department officials, two former U.S. ambassadors to the U.N., a former deputy U.S. trade representative, a former Defense Department official and a former U.S. ambassador to Angola. Their memberships are personal or through their company affiliations. The chamber led the successful lobbying push to include Angola in the U.S. trade program. "I firmly believe in engagement with Angola," Executive Director Paul Hare told The Times. "Transparency and accountability are part of the dialogue. You can never say what the results will be, but the trend line is positive." The Angolan government has paid more than $6 million to lobbyist Robert Cabelly, a former State Department and National Security Council official, according to his foreign agent disclosure filings with the Justice Department. Cabelly declined to comment on his work for Angola. During his three-day stay in Washington, Dos Santos is to be honored at a reception at the Ritz-Carlton hotel co-hosted by Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who has lobbied for Angola in the effort to strengthen ties to the U.S.
Eugenio Ngolo Manuvakola, an Angolan opposition leader, says the former officials play a significant role in shaping U.S.-Angolan ties. "It's offensive that these old diplomats are now making money off their former positions," he said. "They want American companies to invest here, and to help that happen they try to say that everything here is fine. That has political consequences." A Turnaround in Ties There is little dispute that oil has fortified Angola's ties with the United States for the foreseeable future. At a construction site in Luanda's Miramar section, offering a sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean, work is proceeding on a huge, expanded U.S. Embassy. Yet until a decade ago, the United States and Angola were ideological enemies. After gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola declared itself a Marxist state and allied itself with the Soviet Union. Dos Santos, 61, took power four years later and has held it ever since. The CIA supported an insurgency by rebels known as UNITA until the early 1990s. In mid-1993, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Angola's embrace of capitalism, the Clinton administration recognized the government and cut military aid to UNITA. But the civil war ended only after rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in combat in 2002. The fighting left an estimated 1 million people dead. At the height of the conflict, 4 million people were driven from their homes. In some provinces, most of the infrastructure — from roads and bridges to houses and schools — was destroyed.	Dos Santos swapped the uniform he often wore for portraits during the socialist era for tailored suits. He and the ruling party dominate the parliament, other political institutions and the media. Angola is sub-Saharan Africa's second-largest oil producer after Nigeria, with oil accounting for about 90% of its export earnings. ChevronTexaco produces about two-thirds of Angola's daily output of about 900,000 barrels, and approximately one-third of the total is sold to the United States. The country's output is expected to double by 2008. Despite billions of dollars from oil revenue, the country ranks 164th among 175 nations on a United Nations index that measures citizens' quality of life. "Most of the country's wealth remained concentrated in a few hands," the State Department said in a report this year. The ExxonMobil housing estate is one example of how the benefits of oil development have enriched Angola's wealthiest citizens. ExxonMobil declined to comment on who built the compound. The company said the property was "leased from a private corporation in compliance with all applicable laws" but would not identify the corporation's owner. Oil companies routinely employ politically connected Angolans for important posts. BP hired as a top executive Jose Goncalves Martins Patricio, a former Dos Santos press secretary. When asked about hiring the former official, BP — formerly British Petroleum — responded with a copy of a press release listing his credentials for the job. Henry Thompson, a London-based energy consultant who once worked for BP in Angola, says that when multinational companies need a local security firm to guard their facilities or handle construction work, Sonangol, the state-owned oil company, directs them to one owned by a government official or favored businessman. Foreign executives even receive recommendations on whom to rent their villas from.
"The list is endless, but no one wants to sit down and demand transparency from the [government]," Thompson said. "The money you're paying out is very small compared to the benefits you receive. It's not worth making noise about." Angola's elite lives in walled estates and weekend beach houses. Its members employ private guards, have backyard generators and water tanks to deal with frequent utility breakdowns, and dine at clubs such as Miami Beach, which is owned by the president's daughter, Isabel. A mixed grill of meats there costs about $40 — almost a month's pay for workers earning the minimum wage. "We have leaders who are foreigners in their own country," said Rafael Marques, a journalist who once was jailed for calling Dos Santos a dictator. Eighty percent of Angola's 10.8 million people live in poverty. At Beautiful Rose Farm, about 120 families live in tin-and-brick shacks between ExxonMobil's compound and Dos Santos' sprawling presidential retreat. Aside from one woman who works as a maid for ExxonMobil expatriates, residents say, none of the squatters has benefited from Angola's oil wealth. A muscled man who gave his first name as Mateus said he fought as a government soldier during the civil war and now makes about $50 a month working six days a week at a construction job. He recounted how his 4-year-old son had died recently, probably of malaria, which is common here. All he knew was that the boy fell ill and was dead within 24 hours. "The oil companies haven't helped us," he said. "To get a good job with them, you need a godfather." Civil War Gets the Blame The Dos Santos regime puts the blame for Angola's poverty on the civil war. "The government can't rebuild all at once everything that was destroyed during so many years of war," Prime Minister Fernando da Piedade Dias dos Santos, who is not related to the president, told the local press last year.	But others say Angola's development has been crippled by the disappearance of vast sums of money. About $4.2 billion — more than the $3.6 billion the government spent on social programs — disappeared from the Angolan treasury from 1997 through 2002, according to a report this year from Human Rights Watch, a New York-based nonprofit. The figures were taken from two International Monetary Fund reports on Angola, including one that the Dos Santos government barred the IMF from releasing, but which was obtained by Human Rights Watch. The fund is a quasi-governmental organization, made up of 184 member countries, that lends money to developing nations and monitors their finances. In the leaked report, the IMF said Angola filtered its oil revenue through "a web of opaque offshore accounts." There has been a series of allegations that Dos Santos — who is paid the equivalent of about $2,000 a month as president — and other Angolan officials have stashed government funds and bribes in foreign banks. • A Swiss judge in 2002 froze millions of dollars in bank accounts that allegedly were used by a foreign businessman to pay off Angolan officials. The Dos Santos government denied the allegation and filed a formal protest, but most of the accounts remained blocked. Related investigations by Swiss and French authorities uncovered two private accounts held by Dos Santos in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, according to banking and court documents shown to The Times by London-based Global Witness, which campaigns for greater transparency in the oil industry. Global Witness released a report two months ago that alleged that Dos Santos' offshore accounts held tens of millions of dollars, including funds diverted from the state treasury.
• The U.S. Embassy in Luanda in 2002 looked into an attempt by Aguinaldo Jaime, then head of Angola's central bank and now deputy prime minister, to transfer $50 million in Angolan oil revenue from a Citibank account in London to a private account at a Bank of America branch in San Diego, The Times has learned from three people familiar with the transaction. The Bank of America account had been opened several weeks earlier by a West African businessman who knew Jaime, the sources said. The transfer order alarmed the two banks and the U.S. Embassy in Angola. "We had questions about the origin and nature of the money, and the Angolan government could not provide an explanation," recalled Shawn Sullivan, who was the embassy's political and economic counselor at the time. To prevent seizure of the $50 million, Jaime withdrew the transfer order, Sullivan said. Citibank, Bank of America and Jaime declined to comment on the transfer order. • French oil giant Elf (now part of TotalFinaElf) pumped money into offshore accounts held by African officials, prosecutors charged in a trial last year in Paris. A former top official at Elf told investigators he had moved millions of dollars in payoffs to "ruling families" in Angola and two other African countries where the company operated. The trial concluded with the conviction on corruption charges and jailing of three former senior Elf executives, including Andre Tarallo, who had been known as "Mr. Africa" because of his role in overseeing the company's operations on the continent. The Dos Santos government denied the allegations, saying the charges were "dubious and irresponsible" and part of "defamation campaigns" against Angola's president. Some Angolan officials acknowledge that corruption has been a problem. Manuel Neto da Costa, director of studies at Angola's Ministry of Finance, points to the creation of an Accounting Court to monitor government expenditures and prosecute corrupt officials.	"We understand that more needs to be done," he said in an interview last year. But Sullivan, the former U.S. diplomat, said Angola has no genuine interest in greater transparency. "They have created a system that is based on corruption and patronage, and they are unwilling to change it because it is the source of their wealth." A Foundation's Backers Oil companies in Angola say they create thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue for the country. "If well managed, [oil] revenues can make a huge contribution to economic and social development," said Simon Buerk, a Shell spokesman. "If poorly managed, they can exacerbate poverty, corruption and poor governance." The companies also say they spend heavily on social endeavors, from a ChevronTexaco initiative to fight AIDS to an ExxonMobil-backed plan to combat malaria. Yet they privately acknowledge that some of their donations are aimed more at winning support from high-ranking authorities than at helping average people. Oil companies are among the biggest backers of FESA, the Portuguese acronym for the Eduardo dos Santos Foundation, whose stated aim is to fight poverty in Angola. FESA's glossy annual reports include numerous photographs of Dos Santos, as well as stories about schools and health clinics the organization has built or refurbished, and about food and medicine it has distributed to the poor. One Christmas, FESA arranged to have a Santa Claus land by helicopter on a soccer field and hand out toys to hundreds of kids. "The foundation is doing a great job of supplementing the state's efforts, because the state lacks funds," said Jaime, the deputy prime minister. FESA also nominated Dos Santos for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
A copy of a 2001 BP memorandum obtained by The Times said that FESA was "increasingly seen as a political apparatus that supports the presidential agenda." It said that the company's donations to the foundation "could be seen as 'contributions to political parties,' thus contravening our ethics." Spokesman Toby Odone said the company contributed $1.2 million, mostly given by Amoco before its merger with BP six years ago. Odone said the company adopted a formal policy of stopping all corporate political donations in April 2002, and made no contributions to FESA beyond that point. "Therefore we were not breaking our ethical policies" when the company previously donated to the foundation, he said. The BP memo offered similar warnings about contributions to the Lwini Foundation, which is headed by Dos Santos' wife and says its goal is to help Angolans injured by land mines during the civil war. The foundation rejected requests for copies of an annual report or accounting of expenditures. Its website lists only a few activities, including an event to honor Princess Diana, who had visited Angola in 1997. Odone said Amoco had contributed to Lwini but BP has halted donations. ChevronTexaco, which is a contributor to Lwini, said in a statement that the foundation had an auditing committee "that provides an annual opinion of [its] accounts." FESA and Lwini did not respond to interview requests. In 1998, Royal Dutch/Shell Group donated $400,000 to another organization, the Kissama Foundation, which was set up by senior generals to rehabilitate a national park near Luanda. The confidential report from the company's outside consulting firm said that Kissama had been "utterly mismanaged" and that "Shell's donation now looks like little more than an ill-advised attempt to curry favor with some well-placed generals."	Buerk, the Shell spokesman, said the company disagreed with the consultant's assessment. "The donation was made with the best of intentions," he said. FESA officials provided several past annual reports and financial summaries. The 2001 summary of fundraising and expenditures, the latest made available, said that $9.6 million had been raised for the year, but it itemized only $417,000 in contributions . In addition to oil industry donors, an Israeli arms broker, a South African diamond firm and a Brazilian construction company contributed to the foundation, according to its annual reports. Thompson, the energy industry consultant, said Angolan officials, usually from Sonangol, the state-owned oil company, were designated to solicit contributions to FESA from oil companies and other foreign firms. A typical contribution is $100,000, he said. "If you say no, they will pester you," Thompson said. "They can make life pretty difficult, so you look at the pros and the cons, and you decide what to do." ChevronTexaco said that the company and its partners in Block 0, a huge Angolan oil field, contribute a combined $50,000 annually to FESA. "This funding goes towards projects supporting education, sports, maintaining national heritage and providing medical aid," ChevronTexaco said in a statement. A former Mobil official in Angola said the company had made several small contributions before its merger with Exxon in 1998. ExxonMobil said it could find no record of payments to FESA. Marques, the journalist, offered a Times reporter a tour of some FESA projects, including the renovation of a public garden near the foundation's headquarters.
This is FESA's second restoration of the garden. After the first renovation, completed in 2002, residents from a nearby slum without running water used the fountain as a water source, and kids bathed in it. Someone finally walked off with the water pipes. Three years ago, FESA renovated the Imperial Santana School in the poor Rangel district. The pink-and-cream building has colorful painted figures of Donald Duck, Pluto and other Disney characters on the walls, as well as a sign: "FESA, with us now and in the future." But Angola's schools are badly funded. Joao Castro Lemos, an Imperial Santana administrator, said many of his students didn't have basic supplies such as pencils. A clinic FESA built for residents of the dirt-poor Pentrangol neighborhood of Luanda had similar problems. The pharmacy's shelves held only a few medications, mostly antibiotics. There was an X-ray room, but FESA hadn't supplied an X-ray machine. The only ambulance, pictured in FESA's 2002 annual report, broke down long ago. In a treatment room for malnourished kids, about 30 women and children sat on mattresses on the floor while a nurse made a thin meat broth. The storeroom was empty save for a few sacks of cornmeal, four onions, powdered milk and a powder to make soybean porridge. Much of the clinic's paltry supplies were provided by European charities and the Japanese government. Leader's Birthday Party Every August, FESA sponsors a week of festivities in honor of Dos Santos' birthday, from concerts to soccer tournaments. Last year, state TV, radio and newspapers featured extensive coverage of "FESA Week" events. TV announcers read numerous tributes to Dos Santos from Angolan political figures. One sports radio station even featured a lengthy special report on the president's soccer prowess as a teenager.	A group of the president's business allies flew in Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias for two concerts. One was a private affair; the other was a "Social Gala for All of Society," but the $200 admission price limited the audience to Angola's elite. The high point of the week is a party on Aug. 28, Dos Santos' birthday. On that morning last year, hundreds of people converged on a soccer stadium, many of them bused or trucked in by FESA. They wore foundation T-shirts and waved little flags with its insignia. "Let's make a celebration for our president," an emcee shouted. Children representing Angola's provinces sang and danced. A contingent from Cabinda, where ChevronTexaco's operations are based, had their hair arranged in long, spiky cornrows and wore white fringed skirts. Another group representing peasants from northern Uige province carried hoes on their shoulders. After the performance, Dos Santos cut a huge, three-tier cake as the audience sang "Happy Birthday." In parting remarks to state TV, he said: "I'm happy because it's my birthday. But I'd be happier if our country was different, if there weren't children on the street, if there was less misery."

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May 13, 2004 - Audubon Magazine May 2004 Book Reviews OIL, TOIL, and TROUBLE Political chaos and war will go hand in hand with global warming unless the world takes aggressive steps to end our dependence on fossil fuels. By Keith Kloor The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World By Paul Roberts Houghton Mifflin, 400 pages, $26 In the next decade, catastrophic storms, droughts, and heat waves could trigger widespread political unrest and war across the planet, according to a recent Pentagon report on global warming. Its 22 pages dwell on international conflicts over energy and food shortages as nations cope with extreme environmental disasters. When news of the report became public a few months ago, it received scant media attention, owing perhaps to the disclaimer that it was merely "imagining the unthinkable." Nonetheless, its authors did conclude that the "potentially dire consequences" of sudden climatic changes were "plausible" and thus "would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately." If you want to know why Pentagon planners are preparing for a global meltdown, read Paul Roberts's The End of Oil. His lively, penetrating investigation of the world's energy economy will leave you feeling as if someone splashed cold water on your face. "While climatologists and environmentalists fret about the quality of the energy we produce, a great many other experts worry far more about the quantity of energy we can make and, more specifically, whether we can produce enough energy of any kind or quality to satisfy the world's present and future needs," he writes at the outset. Now go back to that Pentagon report for a minute and consider this little tidbit, which is no idle speculation: "According to the International Energy Agency, global demand for oil will grow by 66 percent in the next 30 years, but it's unclear where the supply will come from." Translation: The planet's oil wells are running dry.

And that's not even the half of it. "By 2020, the world will need more than twice as much energy as it uses today," Roberts says. Besides the increased need for oil, the use of natural gas "will climb by 75 percent, coal use by nearly 40 percent." The demand will be especially acute, he says, in emerging economies, like those in China and India, "whose leaders see voracious energy consumption as the key to industrial success." Can you blame them? Especially when, as Roberts points out, more than 2.5 billion people—nearly half the world's population—"lack access to electricity or fossil fuels and thus have virtually no chance to move from a brutally poor, pre-industrial existence to the kind of modern, energy-intensive life many of us in the West take for granted." So if Americans can have gas-guzzling SUVs and a TV in every room, surely the less fortunate are entitled to their share of the energy pie. The End of Oil covers everything from the geopolitics of energy and the world's "fatally flawed" dependence on fossil fuels to the promises and pitfalls of alternative energy sources, like wind and solar power. Roberts, a veteran magazine journalist who specializes in the confluence of business, environmental, and technological issues, is a deft synthesizer. He impressively lays out the various scenarios that will likely ensue in the next few decades when, as many experts predict, oil becomes a high- priced, unreliable commodity—because it is fast dissipating and because the largest reserves are concentrated in countries with unstable governments. The trouble is that few U.S. policy makers seem to be preparing for this situation. Roberts finds that the very thought of eventual oil depletion isn't even acknowledged in government circles, much less considered. Why? Joe Romm, a former U.S. assistant energy secretary, offers this: "If the U.S. government even brought up the possibility that global oil production might peak in, say, 2020, not only would that have an enormous and very negative impact on the markets, but it would essentially force the United States to abruptly change its energy policy to one that emphasized energy efficiency and alternative energy."

That prospect seems unlikely at the moment, given President Bush's we-can-drill-our-way-to-energy-security domestic policy. Yet a great strength of The End of Oil is Roberts's evenhanded probing of all sides of the energy equation. "Of the 750 million cars, trucks, and other vehicles now roaming the planet (and the number grows by 50 million a year), some 90 percent use oil," Roberts reports, "not because of some vast oil conspiracy" but because by every conventional measure, "oil fuels generate more power, more efficiency, more bang for the energy dollar" than any other fuel technology. Then there is the massive infrastructure of the world's energy economy to consider, with its pipelines, tankers, refineries, power plants, and transmission lines—estimated to be worth $10 trillion. "No company or country," he says, "can afford to walk away" from that asset. True, there are vested political and business interests that want to keep us hooked on fossil fuels. Since 1990 the oil and gas industry has funneled more than $159 million to American politicians (73 percent of it to Republicans). The oil-rich countries, for their part, have an obvious incentive in keeping the spigots flowing, especially to the United States, which is still the biggest and fastest growing oil market in the world. Today, Roberts says, "Saudi Arabia is so desperate to maintain its share of the U.S. market that it sells oil to Americans at a discount." I guess if you own a Hummer, that's a good thing. But in the long term, is there any hope of us kicking the oil habit before the planet succumbs to an overdose of carbon dioxide? Alas, after surveying the promising crop of renewable energies, Roberts concludes there will be no quick "green" fix. Even the biggest boosters of much-hyped hydrogen fuel cells concede the technology is decades away from practical use. And though solar and wind power—especially wind—are becoming increasingly competitive with fossil fuels, by themselves they are not expected to meet the future demand for electricity. To this end, Roberts says that "a good many energy experts believe that our best bet isn't displacing hydrocarbons" but figuring out how to use them more cleanly. Indeed, there is much research well under way to help "decarbonize" natural gas and coal, which would prevent greenhouse gases from being released into the atmosphere. This breakthrough would be most welcome for coal, a highly polluting but preferred source of energy in the developing world, because it is abundant, cheap, and easy to access.

A more immediate, largely forgotten measure is one that has already proven highly successful: energy conservation. Remember the 1970s, when Middle Eastern wars and revolutions triggered sky-high oil prices, sending the U.S. economy into a tailspin? In response, the government imposed higher efficiency standards for air conditioners, refrigerators, cars, and windows. Energy use took a big drop. By the 1990s, though, cheap oil had made its triumphant return, reducing the incentives for energy conservation. Fuel efficiency standards have declined since the 1980s—today the average car gets 20.8 miles to the gallon—and all attempts to raise them have been repeatedly beaten back in Congress. Efforts to upgrade the efficiency of everything from home furnaces to power plants have also stalled. But by making additional improvements to cars and buildings, Roberts says, "America could save the energy equivalent of 12 million barrels of oil a day"—more than half of the country's total demand. In the end, Roberts himself settles on a middle path to energy stability. He sees natural gas serving as a "bridge fuel" between the current coal- and oil-based economy and the newer, alternative energy systems of the future. Natural gas is cleaner- burning, more efficient and, unlike oil, less prone to volatile price swings. At the same time, Roberts is in favor of a carbon penalty, or carbon tax, which would "internalize" the costs of pollution, climate change, and respiratory illnesses as part of the price of energy. This, in turn, would presumably spur the development of "decarbonizing" technology. Whether such a tax, much less a movement away from fossil fuels, could happen is anyone's guess, given the economic and political hurdles. Lawmakers might be prodded into action, Roberts says, if consumers showed more interest in where their energy came from and how much they used. But some of the experts he spoke with believe that nothing short of environmental calamity from global warming, or deep recession from 1970s-like oil-price spikes, will prompt necessary energy reform. Maybe it would be smart to take a hint from the Pentagon and start considering what such a world would look like.

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May 2004 Audubon Magazine FAITH SEPARATING Church and Park CREATIONIST RIVER GUIDE TOM VAIL DOESN'T believe that Arizona's Grand Canyon was carved out of the Colorado River over millions of years -the scientific view of nearly all geologists. To make his case that the canyon was instead created by a biblical flood a few thousand years ago, Vail recently teamed up with the Institute for Creation Research to publish Grand Canyon: A Different View, which since last August has been sold at bookstores in the national park. But many geologists are outraged, and one environmental watchdog group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), says the creationist text's acceptance by the National Park Service is further evidence that under the Bush administration, America's ecological and recreational crown jewels are turning into "faith-based parks." ;   Last summer three plaques bearing Christian psalms were removed from the Grand Canyon grounds after the American Civil Liberties Union made an inquiry about them. The park itself had received several letters of complaint, and the superintendent had the plaques taken out. But they were reinstalled a few weeks later on orders from Donald Murphy, deputy director of the National Park Service. ;   Creationists argue that in the Southwest -and at the Grand Canyon in particular- park guides commonly enliven their tours with bits of American Indian folklore, including the Havasupai Indians' creation myth, which says the Grand Canyon was formed by the receding waters of a great flood. Also, Native Americans attach religious meaning to many of the thousands of terrestrial and aquatic species in the Grand Canyon, including the recently reintroduced California condor, known to many western tribes as the rainmaking thunderbird. But Native American folklore, according to PEER, is in a different league than biblical interpretation.

Vail's creationist version of the Grand Canyon is dressed in scientific authority, directly challenging the integrity of the park service, says Chas Offut, the communications director of PEER. "[Native American] myths and folklore add to the wonder of the park without drawing definitive conclusions for the visitor," he adds. ;   "There is a geologic and a biblical interpretation [of the park] -that's fine," says Christopher Keane, a geologist and spokes- person for the American Geological Institute. But "there are no books for sale in the park written by scientists trying to disprove the existence of God." -Dan Porras

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May 10, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE A River Losing Its Soul Along the banks of the Colorado, the Grand Canyon's habitat is still vanishing despite years spent trying to minimize the effects of damming. By Bettina Boxall, Times Staff Writer GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. — Four decades after one of the West's last big dams blocked the free flow of water into the wild recesses of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado still manages to roar through here like the granddaddy of Western rivers. But it has become the Hollywood version — strikingly beautiful and in vital ways, fake. With every passing year, the Grand Canyon's stretch of the Colorado River bears less and less resemblance to its former self. The fine, white sand beaches on which thousands of weary boaters unfurl their sleeping bags every summer are disappearing. So are native fish species that have been in the canyon for millions of years. Millennium-old Native American burial sites are washing away with the eroding sands. Without the scouring of regular flooding, the feathery green tamarisk bush imported to the United States in the 1800s is overrunning the river banks, and boulders washed out of side canyons are piling up in the main channel. The river's mythic rapids are growing more difficult to navigate and some may become impassable. The 1963 completion of Glen Canyon Dam just upstream from the park is best known in environmental circles for drowning stunning canyon lands under the waters of Lake Powell. But its effects have also been traumatic in the downstream river corridor of the Grand Canyon, through the heart of the park.	A warm, muddy, violently unpredictable river that shaped the canyon's ecosystem for millions of years turned cold, clear, steady and aquamarine. It may match the romantic notion of a river, but it is utterly unnatural in this sunbaked cleft in the Colorado Plateau. The damage has long been recognized. Congress in 1992 passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act, directing the Interior Department to devise ways of making the dam's water releases for generating hydroelectric power less harmful to the canyon environment. But it is increasingly apparent that the modified flows, adopted eight years ago, haven't worked. The failure has deepened the pessimism of some experts that, short of taking down the dam, humans may not be able to offset the harm done by its construction. "The Grand Canyon river corridor is getting nuked," said David Haskell, a retired National Park Service career officer who directed the Grand Canyon's science center from 1994 to 1999. "It's in the final stages of having the natural ecosystem completely destroyed and replaced with a man-made one because of the presence of the dam." That is not exactly the way federal scientists put it in their briefings to a group of some two dozen water managers, Interior Department officials and journalists who recently spent a week rafting down the river, discussing the drought and federal water policy with Assistant Interior Secretary Bennett Raley. But the canyon told the tale. "The beaches continue to erode. The humpback chub [a native fish] continues to decline," said Jeffrey Cross, the current director of the park's science center. "Tamarisk has not only invaded the main stem but has moved up many of the tributaries of the canyon. These are all changes that have happened and have continued to happen."
There were 10,000 humpbacks in canyon reaches in 1992. Now there are 2,200. Of the eight native fish species found in the canyon before the dam, four are now gone. In the early 1970s, there were about 180 sand beaches roomy enough to allow rafters to pitch a tent. Half that number are left, Cross said. The rest have washed away or are so overrun by the alien, salt-exuding tamarisk bush that camping is impossible. Lars Niemi, a 42-year-old boatman who has been on the river since he was a teenager, has watched the beaches dwindle. "We just used to be able to throw down in a lot of places that aren't there anymore," he said, his hand on the rudder of one of the Raley group's two big pontoon boats. It was the third trip through the canyon for Raley, the Bush administration's point man on water policy. A Colorado attorney and property rights advocate who has no qualms about dams, Raley is nonetheless drawn back here, not just by the rock-walled grandeur, but by the river's imprint on the Western psyche. "I don't know how you can come down here and not be humbled," said Raley, who sees political life as a tug of war between idealism and compromise — one that is reflected on the river. "There's virtually nothing that goes on here that doesn't involve trade-offs or balances." The rafting party glided by pale red and beige canyon walls that opened onto majestic vistas of mesa and then closed into dark gorges chiseled into a million different faces. The water arched in polished blue-green curls, looking more like the Caribbean than a river named Colorado — "colored red" in Spanish — after the ruddy sediment washed into it along its 1,400-mile length.	Geologically, the river functions as a huge watery conveyor belt carrying ancient, eroded bits of the Colorado Plateau to the Gulf of California. Before the Glen Canyon dam, at least 60 million tons of sand and silt tumbled and slid through the Grand Canyon every year, swept along by annual floods four times greater than today's high flows. When the dam went up, it stopped not only the floods, but the sand, which is piling up at the bottom of Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the dam. Now the canyon's only sand comes from two tributaries below the dam, the Paria and Little Colorado rivers, which contribute less than 10% of the river's historic volume of sediment. Without sand, the Grand Canyon river system is like a body without nourishment. Fine sands and silts are loaded with nutrients for aquatic life that become food for insects that, in turn, become food for fish and birds. The sediment builds spawning beds for fish and sand bars where plants can grow and river rafters can sleep. "At all sorts of levels the sand is the foundation of the system," said Ted Melis, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist with the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center who has studied the river for years. The banks are actually more verdant than they used to be because there are no longer any major floods to wash out vegetation. But most of the growth is tamarisk, which is shunned by the canyon's desert bighorn sheep and displaces native willow and cottonwood that offer more diverse bird habitat. With less sand in the canyon, long-buried Indian sites have become exposed, as have the chub, which depended on the murky cover of muddy water to hide from predators.
The endangered fish is a snout-nosed survivor of the canyon's harsh extremes. Its hump helped it navigate the river torrents. It withstood the leaps in river temperature from freezing in winter to 80 degrees in the summer and spawned as the water warmed. It can't stand the clear, cold water now released from the depths of Lake Powell at a year-round 46 to 48 degrees. The only adequately sized spawning population of chub left is in the Little Colorado, which is warmer, and often murkier, than the main stem. But as soon as the young fish swim into the big Colorado, they are stunned by its frigid temperature and became sitting targets for nonnative trout, which have thrived in the chill. "We get [reproduction] here but we never see them again," Arizona Game and Fish research biologist Bill Persons said as he logged a silvery young chub caught in a monitoring net on the Little Colorado. In 1996, the Interior Department conducted an ambitious flooding experiment that officials hoped would reverse some of the declines by reestablishing sand bars and washing away nonnative vegetation. They opened Glen Canyon Dam's floodgates, letting out enough water to raise the Colorado by as much as 13 feet. At first they declared success. But within a couple of years, the new beaches were gone. Scientists learned that the river didn't work the way they thought it did. It wasn't a bathtub in which sand would settle, to be later lifted to the banks with higher flows. It was a pipeline, constantly pushing sand through unless flows were kept low. The results of the big flood experiment led researchers to question the basic premises of the flow regimens adopted under the Grand Canyon Protection Act. Traditionally, operators had cranked dam releases up and down every day to respond to the rise and fall of energy demand, causing the river to advance and retreat along its banks as if it had tides. The new rules restricted those fluctuations on the theory that more stable flows would arrest beach erosion and help the native fish.	"It turned out we were wrong. The larger fluctuating flows were probably better, at least for the fish," said Dennis Fenn, director of the Southwest Biological Science Center, of which the Grand Canyon monitoring center is an arm. Officials also are planning another, shorter flood to rebuild beaches with sediment dumped into the Colorado from the Paria after monsoonal rains. But the drought has thwarted that effort. The ongoing decline of the river ecosystem has sparked criticism. "The environmental community is looking at this as somewhat of a failed process," said Jennifer Pitt, a senior resource analyst with Environmental Defense who was on the river trip. "There's so much foot-dragging it's hard to move forward." A linchpin of the restoration program is adaptive management, an approach that is supposed to give officials the freedom to try something different if their initial game plan doesn't work. But there are so many competing interests on the program's advisory committee — power producers, environmentalists and state water managers, to name a few — that Fenn says it's not easy to adapt. "I think too many people are saying, 'I don't want anything to happen because I don't want to lose what I got,' " he said. "They're all well-meaning and want to do the right thing, but they have their interests." Another obstacle is the complicated body of law that governs use of the Colorado River and the Glen Canyon Dam. Under 1968 legislation, for instance, dam spills above the amount needed to generate power are legal only if done for safety reasons. Environmentalists argue the 1992 protection act changed that, allowing for spills for ecological purposes, but power producers disagree. Ultimately the dispute will probably have to be settled in court.
Raley concedes the program is "struggling a bit now." But he contends the experiments hold promise. "I think we're making material progress, whether it's sediment, fish or the cultural resources," he said. "It's easy to say you haven't fixed this." Raley grew up in a ranching family and rafted the river in cowboy hat and jeans waxed to keep out water. He said he was frightened by water and the Grand Canyon's churning rapids. But, riding in a red rubber kayak, he insisted on shooting some of them, including "Hermit," one of the bigger drops on the river. Halfway through, he flipped. Clinging to the overturned kayak, he was carried by the churning white water to a calm stretch, where he climbed, somewhat shaken, back on a raft. He later scribbled the name "Hermit" on the back of his lifejacket, a souvenir of his dunking. There are those who believe that as long as Glen Canyon Dam is in operation, efforts to restore the river through the Grand Canyon are doomed to failure. The only solution, they argue, is to decommission the dam. "There really isn't any hope," said Haskell, who has become active in environmental causes since leaving the Park Service. "They can continue to tinker and try to slow the demise," but the task, he said, is as futile as trying to "raise rhinos and elephants in the Arctic."	The dam provides hydropower that supplies electricity to the rural West, flood control and nearly half the water storage space on the Colorado. "These are the things you'd give up" if the dam was decommissioned, Fenn said. If the dam is an immovable object, what remains are little fixes. Under one scheme officials are considering, temperature control devices would be installed in the dam to draw water flows from the warmer top layers of the lake. Another idea is to scoop sediment from Lake Powell and pipe it around the dam into the river. "We're not a drain-the-reservoir group," said Nikolai Ramsey, president of the Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group based in nearby Flagstaff that has a seat on the adaptive management committee. "We think there are plenty of management alternatives to be tried." But, if anything, the unsuccessful 1996 experimental flood taught caution. Raising the water temperature to make the chub more comfortable would make the river more hospitable to some of the chub's warm-water predators. Piping in sediment trapped behind the dam would be expensive and could stir up contaminants in the lake bottom and funnel them into the canyon. "Playing God is a lot harder than it looks," Raley said. "I'm not aware of a bold move we could jump to on this canyon that would be responsible.

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Some have already read a listserve member's comments which certainly added 'a touch of questionable reasonableness' to the 'abuses' in Iraq. Below, and not inconsistent that, is another (very short) 'perhaps higher and even more proper' view.

May 9, 2004 Los Angeles Times GOVERNMENT A Climate That Nurtures Torture By Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks is an associate professor of law at the University of Virginia and a former senior advisor at the State Department's Human Rights Bureau. CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Donald H. Rumsfeld announced Friday the appointment of a special commission to investigate the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel. But if the Defense secretary is casting about for someone to blame, he needn't look far. What happened was the predictable result of the Bush administration's "anything goes" approach to national security. Since Sept. 11, high-level administration spokespeople — including the president — have repeatedly asserted that the executive branch of the U.S. government is free to ignore both the laws of war and the U.S. Constitution, and that executive branch actions are essentially unreviewable by the courts. It began shortly after Sept. 11, with President Bush's breezy announcement that he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive — either way. It doesn't matter to me." The administration also offered a multimillion-dollar reward for Bin Laden, although such statements and bounties have traditionally been viewed as contrary to the laws of war and U.S. military regulations. Soon after, Bush signed a secret intelligence order permitting the CIA to expand covert actions, which, as one senior U.S. intelligence official put it, gave the agency "the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-Sept. 11 are now underway."

In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush continued to imply that legal niceties were of little importance in the war on terror, commenting that while some Al Qaeda members had been arrested, others had "met a different fate." What kind of fate? "Let's put it this way," he said: "They are no longer a problem to the United States." Vice President Dick Cheney, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and Rumsfeld wasted no time establishing their own tough-guy credentials after 9/11. Rumsfeld insisted that military detainees in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Convention. At home, Ashcroft asserted that foreign terrorist suspects "do not deserve the protections of the American Constitution." Cheney stuck to the same script, insisting that terrorism suspects "don't deserve" judicial "guarantees and safeguards." Never mind the fact that due-process protections are designed not to give the guilty what they "deserve" but to ensure that the innocent, who may be wrongly accused, get the rights that they deserve. The Bush administration has been similarly cavalier about the use of torture-like practices against detainees. In 2002, a series of media stories reported that U.S. detainees in Afghanistan were hooded, deprived of food, water, sleep and pain medications, forced to remain in agonizing positions for hours, kept naked, and beaten. The truth of these allegations was tacitly acknowledged by numerous senior national security officials (none willing to be named). As one official said, "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job. I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this." No high-level administration official either denied the reports or publicly promised to investigate. Indeed, their response consisted of little more than winks and nods: As J. Cofer Black, then head of the CIA's

Counterterrorist Center, told the House and Senate intelligence committees, "all you need to know [is this]: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves come off." Over the last year, prisoners released from Guantanamo Bay have alleged they too were subjected to brutal and humiliating detention conditions and interrogations. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former Guantanamo commander recently sent to oversee Iraqi detention facilities, wrote in a report last fall (based apparently on his Guantanamo experiences) that military guards in Iraq should be "enablers for interrogations," actively "engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees." When pressed on how conditions at Abu Ghraib prison would be reformed to prevent further abuses, Miller told reporters, "Trust us. We are doing this right." "Trust us" has been the sole assurance the Bush administration has offered in the face of concerns about possible abuses. In its response to court cases brought on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo, the administration has insisted that executive branch actions at Guantanamo cannot be reviewed by any U.S. court. When judges on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asked Justice Department lawyers whether the administration position would be the same "even if the claims were that it was engaging in acts of torture or that it was summarily executing the [Guantanamo] detainees," the administration's lawyers said yes. Similarly, in recent U.S. Supreme Court arguments involving two U.S. citizens being held by the U.S. military as alleged "enemy combatants," the administration insisted that it had the right to designate any citizen an enemy combatant on the basis of secret and unchallengeable evidence and to hold such a person as long as it wanted, without charge or any right to counsel, and with no mechanism for the detainee to challenge detention conditions. (The administration claimed that allowing access to counsel would undermine the "trust and dependency that is essential to effective interrogation.")

When asked directly by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whether the administration would acknowledge any judicial check to prevent the use of torture against detainees, Deputy Solicitor Gen. Paul Clement ducked the question. He disparaged "judicial micromanagement" and informed the court that "you have to trust the executive." But as the recent revelations made clear, "trust" in executive benevolence and good judgment is no safeguard against abuses. Only when graphic photos of prisoner abuse sparked a worldwide scandal did the Bush administration explicitly condemn brutality and humiliation as tactics to be used against prisoners. Now, as the public outcry against the Abu Ghraib abuses mounts, the administration is trying to spread the blame around. The low-level enlisted soldiers directly involved seem destined to face criminal charges. The administration has also been quick to point fingers at the more senior military personnel supervising Abu Ghraib and to designate civilian contractors and the CIA as potential villains as well. But high-level administration officials — Rumsfeld, Cheney, Ashcroft and the president — need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. The president should accept direct responsibility for having created a climate of impunity in which the Abu Ghraib abuses were likely to occur, if not inevitable. Bush needs to acknowledge that even in time of war, human rights and the rule of law must be respected. This means respecting both the letter and the spirit of the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution and allowing the courts to play their proper constitutional role in reviewing executive actions. If we fail to hold our leaders accountable for what happened — if we sacrifice our most cherished American values in the name of national security and simply replace Saddam Hussein's Iraqi torture chambers with our own — we will find one day that the statement best characterizing our current situation comes not from Bush but from Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

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May 8, 2004 Science Magazine 30 April 2004 Vol 304 NATURAL DISASTERS Farsighted Report on Flooding Augurs Economic Waterloos CAMBRIDGE, U.K.- The annual cost of damage from floods in the United Kingdom could soar to about $48 billion -20 times the current figure- in the coming decades if drastic steps are not taken to deal with the threat, says a wide-ranging report commissioned by the government. The Foresight report on Future Flooding gazed up to 100 years into the future, taking into account factors such as climate change, economic growth, and urbanization. The main message: The status quo of flood defenses is not good enough. "It's quite a dire picture," says the report's lead expert, Edward Evans, a water engineer at the University of Glasgow. "We can't go on building walls higher." Drawing on the expertise of 60 researchers, the pioneering report forecasts floods according to four socioeconomic scenarios ranging from "world markets;' marked by a surging global economy and high greenhouse gas emissions, to "local stewardship" involving greater community involvement and environmental awareness.

Factors driving elevated risk include rising sea levels and extreme weather events associated with climate change; urbanization, which could put more housing in flood-prone areas and increase rainwater runoff; and regulations that restrict flood defenses. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study predicts that the most devastating floodwaters would rise in the markets scenario. Today, 1.6 million Britons Barrier to bad tidings. New report calls for urgent measures are at risk of flooding, and $3.9 billion to bolster flood defenses, such as London's Thames Barrier. lion is spent on defenses and on mopping up the damage each year. The world markets scenario suggests that, if the government were to take no action, the threatened population could swell to 3.6 million and the costs increase to $48 billion per year by 2080, due to climate change, development in flood-prone areas, and increased value of threatened properties. But even in the more benign local stewardship scenario, risk and costs are predicted to escalate if nothing is done. Although there is no silver bullet, the report's authors argue that a range of steps could sharply curb risks. "We need a complex bundle of responses;' says Edmund Penning-Rowsell, head of the Flood Hazard Research Centre at Middlesex University. These could include diverting rising waters into temporary storage pools rather than letting runoff overwhelm city drainage systems, dredging or widening rivers to increase capacity, and beefing up sea walls and river defenses such as the Thames Barrier, which protects London. And although climate change accounts for around a quarter of the flood damage potential, the report points out that any greenhouse gas cuts would slow sea level rise only a half-century down the road. -DANIEL CLERY

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December, 2002, Afghanistan-
"... The technique of sleep deprivation to get detainees to spill their secrets has not been used at this camp, officials say.
A sign on the wall now informs detainees:

"You will be treated fairly and humanely as long as you are cooperative and follow the rules."

-from a situation discovered and corrected by Marines there, but not, apparently, at Abu Ghraib -see Recent little news items on 'the human condition'
('The beating will continue until the morale improves'?)

May 7, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD Marines Were Investigated for Iraq Jail Abuse The 2003 cases of eight reservists, including one in which an inmate died, prompted officials in the Corps to change how their prisons are run. By Tony Perry and Esther Schrader, Times Staff Writers FALLOUJA, Iraq — Before many of the notorious photos of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison were taken, American military officials were investigating accusations of abuse by eight Marine reservists at a detention facility outside Nasiriya, including a case in which one prisoner died. The Whitehorse detention case is among several dozen cases of potential abuse of prisoners by American personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan investigated by the military dating back to December 2002. Criminal charges have been filed in only a handful of the incidents so far, and some of the accused faced no punishment beyond demotion, discharge or sacrifice of pay, according to available reports and public records. In addition to charges filed against six military police officers at Abu Ghraib, the Army discharged three soldiers in January for mistreating detainees at the Camp Bucca detention facility in southern Iraq. And the military is investigating the deaths of two Afghan men who died in U.S. custody at Bagram air base, Afghanistan, in December 2002, Army officials said. The emerging details of detainee abuse dating to the early days of U.S.-led military actions against Afghanistan and Iraq suggest that defense officials had a trail of evidence of problems in the system long before the shocking Abu Ghraib abuses had occurred. Human rights groups that have questioned U.S. detainee efforts for months expressed skepticism of Bush administration statements that top officials were unaware of the extent of abuses at Abu Ghraib until graphic, sexually oriented photographs documenting the mistreatment were revealed a week ago.

"We've been raising questions since the first detentions in the Afghanistan conflict," said Alistair Hodgett, a spokesman for Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group. "These cases and these concerns have been well-known. It should not have taken graphic photographs to trigger a response from the Bush administration." Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had compiled "detailed, precise and systematic" reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib as far back as last summer and had provided them to the U.S. government. The Red Cross inspected the prison periodically and was told of the abuse by prisoners and their families, officials said. Pentagon officials said this week that 35 cases of possible detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of U.S. personnel have been detailed in the last 17 months. Ten of the 35 cases involve allegations of rape, assault and other injuries and are still under investigation, military officials said. Twenty-five cases of possible abuse involved deaths. Of those, 12 were labeled "undetermined or natural" causes. Ten others remain under investigation, including the deaths of the two Afghan men at Bagram air base. The remaining three cases are suspected homicides, one of them considered justifiable. Pentagon officials say they have been moving as quickly as military judicial proceedings allow to get to the bottom of the remaining cases of alleged abuse in detention facilities across Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Camp Bucca case, three Army soldiers were found by investigators to have held down a detainee while soldiers beat and kicked him at the urging of their superior, Master Sgt. Lisa Girman, according to an Army statement. The three were discharged after electing a less serious nonjudicial hearing rather than court-martial. A fourth soldier charged in the case accepted a dishonorable discharge in lieu of court-martial. At Camp Bucca, one Iraqi detainee allegedly was knocked to the ground and repeatedly kicked, and Girman reportedly encouraged subordinates to follow suit.

Another inmate was thrown to the ground by a staff sergeant who stepped on a previously injured arm. An Army specialist was charged with holding an inmate's legs apart while kicking him the groin. Two of the Marines involved in the Whitehorse detention facility case face more stringent punishment. At Whitehorse, Marines made prisoners stand for hours with sandbags over their heads, testimony at hearings at Camp Pendleton showed. Some prisoners were struck and kicked, according to the testimony. The death of a Baath Party member may have been the result of inadequate medical care, witnesses testified. Last October, eight U.S. Marine reservists, including two officers, were charged with the mistreatment at Camp Whitehorse. Of those, two face court-martial proceedings this summer. Another was given nonjudicial punishment, and cases against five more were dismissed. Maj. Clark Paulus and Sgt. Gary Pittman, accused of kicking and beating prisoners of war, were arraigned at Camp Pendleton this week. And disciplinary action was taken against a lance corporal, officials said. Like the soldiers at Abu Ghraib later, the accused Marines complained of a lack of instruction on how to be jailers. And there was apparent confusion involving the amount of authority that interrogators at Whitehorse had in dealing with prisoners. As a result of the Whitehorse case, Marine Corps officials said they made sweeping changes in how their detention camps would be run before the Marines' return to Iraq in March. Training sessions were held, including a two-week practice session at March Reserve Air Force Base in Riverside for troops assigned to run detainee facilities. And a 55-page manual was compiled to explain to Marine Corps personnel each step for handling detainees. Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, ordered the investigation into the Marine cases. In an interview this week in Fallouja, where he has been leading Marine operations, he said he did so in order to put a halt to any improprieties lest the problem grow.

Since the Marines' return, Mattis has banned the practice of placing hoods over the heads of detainees. He also sent word through the ranks that he would closely watch the treatment of detainees. The detention camp here, where Iraqis are held in tiny cells behind rows of concertina wire, is an example of the new policy at work, Marine officials say. The Fallouja camp — among several in the region — is meant to hold prisoners for 72 hours as they await word on whether they would be transferred to a secondary facility and then on to Abu Ghraib. Of 82 detainees held at the camp since the Marines' return, 63 have been released after interrogation. Under the rules for interrogation procedures, each detainee must be examined by a Navy medical corpsman before and after being interrogated by Marines or by intelligence agency officers, providing a record that could be used to detect any abuse. The technique of sleep deprivation to get detainees to spill their secrets has not been used at this camp, officials say. A sign on the wall now informs detainees: "You will be treated fairly and humanely as long as you are cooperative and follow the rules." Extensive documentation is required of Marines who have arrested any detainee. Every 24 hours a medical corpsman visits each detainee. Marine rules call for a respectful attitude, while still maintaining an emotional distance and a sense of control. "We want to be positive with them," said Staff Sgt. Juan Plancarte, a senior noncommissioned officer at the site. "We want to emulate the American way: respect for everyone." Mattis said abuse of prisoners is as serious a crime as a U.S. service member can commit and must be examined and punished. "We cannot lose our humanity," he said. "We're Americans, and we should act like it at all times. Americans don't do things like this.

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-overly long, but still important material-

May 6, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE A Breeding Ground of Death Hood Canal looks beautiful, but pollution is nourishing plankton blooms, which consume oxygen and devastate fish and sea plants. By Tomas Alex Tizon, Times Staff Writer BELFAIR, Wash. — Scuba diver Jerry Ehrlich saw the signs of something ominous in Hood Canal starting in the summer of 2002. The blunt-nosed six-gill sharks swimming in the shallows caught his attention first. You never see that, he thought. Such sharks, which have a strong aversion to light, almost never leave deep water. There were other deep-water dwellers — dogfish, octopuses, shrimp — squirming in the shallows, as if trying to escape to shore. Deeper down, Ehrlich spotted wolf eels, which usually stay close to their dens, meandering in open water. He saw rockfish that couldn't swim straight. He found abandoned octopus dens full of rotting eggs, and sea anemones, normally bright and erect, slumped flaccidly against hard ground. In 2003, fish began to die. Ehrlich, along with residents and scientists, witnessed three major fish kills. Tens of thousands of surf perch, greenlings and 25 other species washed up onto rocky beaches. The state closed the canal to fishing for the first time, and tests were conducted. The results corroborated what Ehrlich, who has explored these waters for three decades, and others suspected: Hood Canal, a scenic deep-water arm of Puget Sound and once a glimmering symbol of Washington's natural bounty, was choking to death.	Pollution brought on by rapid population growth and development has caused oxygen levels in the water to drop, rendering one large section of the canal a "dead zone." The scene "is pretty frightening," said Ehrlich, 56. The growing dead zone threatens not just sea life — Hood Canal has one of the richest shellfish beds in Puget Sound — but the entire ecosystem, a panoply of birds and mammals, forests, and a vast network of salmon-rich rivers and streams. Also at stake is the canal's image as a pristine outpost, the last natural barrier protecting the Olympic Peninsula from the plagues of urban sprawl. The canal makes up the peninsula's still-wild eastern edge, a watery shield against the westward push of people and machines. Gov. Gary Locke warned recently that the canal could turn into a "dead sea." If that happened, Washington would lose "one of its great jewels," said state fishery biologist Duane Fagergren. The state also could see the effluence of sprawl trickle into the peninsula, one of the last great unspoiled areas in the West, he said. Dead zones are created by large concentrations of people and the pollution they generate. Researchers have identified dead zones in Los Angeles Harbor, Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The phenomenon has been known for years to environmental scientists but is only now getting widespread attention. The United Nations in March identified coastal dead zones as the most serious emerging environmental problem in the oceans.
The problem, called eutrophication, results from people doing everyday things like flushing toilets, driving cars and taking care of lawns. Auto emissions (washed down by rain), lawn fertilizers, sewage, and storm water runoff all feed nitrogen and other nutrients into the water. The nutrients generate plankton blooms, which die after a few days, sinking to the bottom, where decomposition uses up oxygen. The lack of oxygen kills fish and sea plants, which decompose and use up most of the remaining oxygen. The result of this cycle over many years is evident in Hood Canal today. Now the people whose lives touch the canal — residents, weekenders, bureaucrats and scientists — face a problem that defies easy solutions. Unlike the water-fouling associated with industry in the 1960s and '70s, where the solution was purifying the discharges or closing off the drains, the causes of the Hood Canal dead zone are harder to isolate because there are so many potential sources. "This kind of pollution doesn't come from the end of a pipe," says Donald F. Boesch, a University of Maryland oceanographer who conducted a 2003 study of dead zones for the Pew Oceans Commission. There are no factories to blame, no oily slicks to clean up. This kind of pollution, unless one knows what to look for, is hard to see. Even Ehrlich says the canal is still "beautiful and wonderful and magical" on the outside. It's below the surface that he sees a different picture. Like most of Puget Sound, the waters of Hood Canal are a dark green, turning gunmetal gray on cloudy days.	On maps, the canal looks like an elongated fishhook, stretching 62 miles north to south, with the curve of the hook curling east. On average, the canal is about a mile-and-a-half wide. It's surrounded on all sides by lush forests. To the west tower the Olympic Mountains; to the east, Seattle; beyond that, the Cascade Range. At the top of the hook, there's the Naval Submarine Base Bangor, home port for the Pacific fleet of eight Trident nuclear submarines. Sixty miles south, on the point of the hook, sits the unincorporated but rapidly growing community of Belfair. In between and along the shores are a handful of small towns and isolated clusters of homes. The dead zone lies in the lower third of the canal, comprising the entire hook area, from Belfair to Hamma Hamma. It's the most densely populated section of the canal. Cabins and vacation homes line the shore on both sides. New houses sparkle in the hills above the canal, their white vinyl window frames gleaming like streaks of pearl. The canal stretches through three counties: Mason, Kitsap and Jefferson. Since 1980, the population in those counties has grown by nearly 120,000 to a total of 310,000. An estimated 54,000 people live in the Hood Canal watershed, about 20,000 in the Belfair area. Before the 1980s, the canal was mostly a weekend escape for city-dwellers. The Gates family, of Microsoft fame, owns a retreat along the canal, as do members of the Nordstrom department store family.
In years past, the most common sights at the canal were often of recreation: people digging for clams or oysters on the beaches, boaters and Jet Skiers riding the waves between private docks, children fishing along the shore. Today, it's more common to see someone driving to and from work. The settlements along the canal have become bedroom communities; year-round residents commute to Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia and Bremerton — all within an hour's drive of Belfair. Karen Lippy, a high school teacher who came to Belfair 20 years ago, worries about the number of people moving to the area. Lippy, 45, teaches an environmental class that explores issues surrounding the canal. "This is a critical time," she says. "If we want to save it, we're going to have to act soon." The region's infrastructure has not kept pace with the population. Belfair, once a quaint tourist stop, has grown into a full-fledged town with supermarkets, video stores and strip malls — all without a sewer system. Nearly all cabins and homes on lower Hood Canal are on septic systems, many of them decades old. "Flushing" is a theme that comes up often in discussions about the low-oxygen problem. Researchers theorize that at least some of the nitrogen fed into the canal comes from toilets that drain into failed septic systems, which leach sewage and waste through the soil and into the canal's waters. Because of its geography, the canal doesn't circulate as well as the rest of Puget Sound, where pollutants are flushed away by tides, waves and rivers.	Hood Canal actually isn't a canal, which implies openings on both ends; it's a fjord, closed on one end. Capt. George Vancouver, in 1792, named it after a British lord, but the name he chose was Hood Channel. The body of water was mistakenly called Hood Canal on maps, and the name stuck. The canal, as deep as 600 feet in some places and only a few feet deep in others, takes as long as a year to clean itself out. Rivers such as the Skokomish are the main source of fresh water. River flows have been impeded by dams and development. There has always been a small area of low oxygen in the hook portion, but the condition was seasonal, lasting only a few weeks or months. In the last two years, the dead zone has grown dramatically and lasted year-round, said Jan Newton, senior oceanographer for the state Department of Ecology. Fish and sea plants need between 5 and 20 parts per million of dissolved oxygen to survive. Below 5 ppm, fish are subject to stress, and below 3 ppm, most sea life can't survive. For much of the last two years, a huge section of the lower canal — from Belfair to Hamma Hamma — has measured below 2 ppm of dissolved oxygen. "That's lower than anything we've ever seen in these waters," Newton says. "It makes you wonder whether there's anything left down there." One of Ehrlich's favorite dive spots is just off Sund Rock, in the lower canal, a place named after the man who settled the land in the 1890s, and whose grandson, Bob Sund, still lives there. Sund's home perches above a gravel beach.
Like Ehrlich, Sund is distressed by the condition of the canal. At the moment, Sund, a 74-year-old retired high school principal, stands at the water's edge, near some large boulders, pointing to various places along the shoreline where once-abundant life — sea lettuce and kelp — have been erased, leaving only barren rock. He picks up a stone and throws it about 15 feet in the water. "There used to be an eelgrass bed right there," he says. Baby salmon used to feed on organisms clinging to the blades of grass. Herring used to lay their eggs in there, he says. When the eelgrass died off, the fish disappeared and the gravel on his beach, which was held in place by the grass, began sliding into the canal. The gravel slide exposed topsoil, which began to erode, harming plants on the beach. When the fish disappeared, the seals and birds — mostly ospreys and eagles — that used to eat them stopped coming around. The orcas that used to eat the seals haven't been seen around Sund Rock in a long time. "Everything's connected. It's just a giant web," Sund says. "One thing goes, the rest follow." Locke and U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who owns a house on the canal, announced an aggressive recovery plan in February that would include federal, state and local efforts, setting aside millions of dollars for the project. Both the governor and congressman acknowledged the problem would take years to study and address. A preliminary plan to be released today was expected to propose immediate action, such as educating canal residents to service their septic tanks, avoid lawn fertilizers and not dump waste along the shorelines. Long-term solutions will be more difficult, says Jay Watson, director of the council in charge of coordinating all the agencies.	Take septic tanks, Watson says. There are an estimated 5,500 septic systems in the lower canal. Nobody knows how much of the dead zone is caused by sewage from failed tanks. But even if it were determined to be a major cause, the ruling jurisdiction, Mason County, wouldn't have the money to do anything about it. The county has one part-time employee assigned to regulate septic tanks but no ordinance requiring homeowners to allow the inspector onto their property. "It takes a full search warrant issued by a judge," says Watson. A warrant requires probable cause, which is difficult to establish because septic tanks are underground. Replacing failed septic systems would cost $3,000 to $10,000 each, and many property owners would resist spending money on a problem that wasn't visible, Watson says. Any solution would almost certainly mean an increase in local taxes. Says Watson: "You say 'tax increase' around here and the people will run you out on a rail." Meanwhile, volunteer organizations — salmon recovery groups and environmental and social organizations — have signed up with the state to take weekly measurements of the canal's oxygen levels. They report their findings to Newton, the oceanographer, who will play an instrumental role in the recovery effort. Ehrlich, who owns a small office supply business in Olympia, continues his weekly dive in the canal. He still inventories the changing seascape and talks to anybody who will listen about what he sees. Sund regularly gets in a small rowboat and paddles along the shoreline in front of his house, watching the beach as if it were an old, dying friend. "I hope they do something about all this," Sund says. "I hope they don't just study, study, study, and let years go by. They need to act before it's too late."

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This article immediately below continues the April 30 Los Angeles Times article, 'Iraq Prison Staff Seen an Issue', a few pages back:

1 - Psychologists have lab-proven that it is relatively easy to make us 'crank up the pain to teach someone to respond properly'.

2 - The military interrogation of interest here (US) works something like this:
a - We need the information, but we don't know how to get it in such situations, and law does not permit us to 'exact' it -especially by torture.
b - We can however, bring in professional interrogators and translators who are properly trained for such inquiries and-
c - We are too understaffed and under-equipped to always know exactly how those interrogations are made.
d - Yeah, sometimes some of our own military get carried away in such situations (a, above), but there's not a hell-of-a-lot we can do about it either.

3 - Bottom line: if the US government were really ignorant about what was going on (and 'moral', whatever that means) and if were we really outraged (and 'moral'?), we might, conceivably and for example, find some way to have those 'interrogators and translators' and related military tried in The Hague Court.

May 2, 2004 Los Angeles Times - Opinion COMMENTARY Above Law, Above Decency Private military contractors may escape punishment in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. By P.W. Singer The recent reports of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners during interrogations are both horrifying and depressing. Fortunately, there is a clear and proper legal response. Those accused will be court-martialed and, if found guilty, they will be punished. But the story, sadly, does not end there. It now appears that this deeply disturbing episode — in which Iraqi prisoners were beaten, sexually assaulted and forced to perform simulated sexual acts, among other things — may have involved not only soldiers but also private contractors hired as interrogators. That private contractors are interrogators in U.S. prison camps in Iraq should be stunning enough. This is incredibly sensitive work and takes our experiment with the boundaries of military outsourcing to levels never anticipated. But even more outrageous is the fact that gaps in the law may have given them a free pass so that it could be impossible to prosecute them for alleged criminal behavior. Most people by now know that in an attempt to fill the gap between the demand for professional forces and the limited number deployed by the Pentagon, an array of traditional military and intelligence roles have been outsourced in Iraq, all without public discussion or debate. There are 15,000 to 20,000 private military contractors operating in Iraq, outsourcing critical military roles from logistics and local army training to guarding installations and convoys.

This outsourcing of critical roles to private companies represents a sea change in the way we fight a war. However, until the last few days, not many Americans were aware that private firms were also providing interrogators and translators in the prisons. According to recent reports, the Army's investigation on the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in November and December named Virginia-based CACI International Inc. and San Diego-based Titan Corp. Titan, however, denies having contracts that involve working with prisoners. The Army investigation discovered such depraved behavior as making prisoners perform simulated sex acts and form naked human pyramids and putting "glow sticks" in bodily orifices. The perpetrators even took more than 60 photographs, including one showing an Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with his head covered and wires attached to his hands and genitals. He was told that if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted. One civilian contractor was even accused of raping a male juvenile prisoner. The Army has responded swiftly and correctly, at least with regard to its soldiers. Seventeen soldiers were relieved of duty and six face court-martial. As Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmit said: "We're appalled they wear the same uniform as us, and they let their fellow soldiers down . These acts that you see in these pictures may reflect the actions of individuals, but, by God, it doesn't reflect my Army." But although the military has established structures to investigate, prosecute and punish soldiers who commit crimes, the legal status of contractors in war zones is murky. Soldiers are accountable to the military code of justice wherever they are, but contractors are civilians — not formally part of the military and not part of the chain of command. They cannot be court-martialed.

Normally, an individual's crimes would then fall under the local nation's laws. But, of course, there are few established Iraqi legal institutions — that is why we are running prisons in Iraq in the first place — and, besides, coalition regulations explicitly state that contractors don't fall under their scope. In turn, because the acts were committed abroad, and also reportedly involve some contractors who are not U.S. citizens, the application of U.S. domestic law in an extraterritorial setting is unclear and has never been tested. This appears to leave an incredible vacuum. Indeed, as Phillip Carter, a former Army officer now at UCLA Law School, says, "Legally speaking, [military contractors in Iraq] actually fall into the same gray area as the unlawful combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay." So far, none of the contractors involved have been criminally prosecuted. As for the contractor accused of raping a prisoner in his mid-teens, Central Command spokesperson Col. Jill Morgenthaler told the British newspaper the Guardian: "We had no jurisdiction over him. It was left up to the contractor on how to deal with him." It is clear that our policies on military contractors must be updated. If found to be involved by investigators, the contractors should not escape prosecution. Yet that's exactly what happened in the Balkans when several DynCorp employees, working as military contractors, were implicated in the trafficking of women and other sex crimes. Felony crimes merit harsher punishment than simply the end of a good paycheck.

This may require breaking new legal ground, such as testing the extraterritorial standards for civilian prosecution, requiring detention of the suspects until the Iraqi legal system gathers strength or even transferring jurisdiction to the international court. To not only pay contractors more than our soldiers but also give them a legal free pass is unconscionable. More broadly, the U.S. must reexamine which military and intelligence roles are appropriate for outsourcing and which are not. For the roles that we do choose to outsource, we must close the gaps in the law. The overwhelming number of contractors are probably just as sickened and embarrassed by this behavior as the American military and the public. That is why we have laws in the first place: to govern for the worst of human behavior, not hope for the best. The private military field should be no different. P.W. Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of "Corporate Warriors: Rise of the Privatized Military Industry" (Cornell University Press, 2004).

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American Scientist May-June 2004 vol 92 The Imperiled Giants of the Mekong Ecologists struggle to understand -and protect- Southeast Asia's large migratory catfish Zeb S. Hogan, Peter B. Moyle, Bernie May, M. Jake Vander Zanden, Ian G. Baird The Guinness Book of World Records lists the Mekong giant catfish as Earth's largest freshwater fish. This species (Pangasianodon gigas), which grows as fast as a bull and looks a bit like a refrigerator, can measure 3 meters in length and weigh up to 300 kilograms. Called the "king of fish" in Cambodia, "buffalo fish" in Thailand and Laos, and "blubber fish" in Vietnam, this catfish is well known throughout Southeast Asia. Only the caviar-producing sturgeon, goliath catfish of the Amazon and a few species of poorly understood freshwater sting rays rival the Mekong giant catfish in size. In Europe, the Wels catfish (Silurus glanis) reportedly once grew to a monstrous 5 meters in length, but today a 2-meter specimen is considered remarkable. A century ago, the range of the Mekong giant catfish spanned the entire length of the river and its tributaries from Vietnam to southern China. But in the 1930s and '40s, this species began disappearing, first from the segment of the Mekong that flows between Thailand and Laos and later upstream, in northern Laos. During recent times, the status of P. gigas has become extremely precarious. For example, in Chiang Khong (northern Thailand) and across the river in the Houay Xai district (Laos), the 1990 haul included just 69 of these fish. The catch from this stretch of river has fallen considerably since then, and over the past three years local fishers have not reported a single one. Noting this absence and similar patterns unfolding elsewhere, we estimate that the total number of these giant catfish has decreased by 90 percent or so during the past two decades.
Efforts to save this fish from extinction will hinge on many factors -including how well biologists understand the migratory behavior of these animals. Using a variety of approaches, we have endeavored to provide such knowledge. Here we relate how we became involved in this effort and where that journey of discovery has taken us. The King (of Fish) and I In 1996, one of us (Hogan) received a Fulbright scholarship for graduate study at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. During his year in Chiang Mai, he met another of the authors (Baird, a geographer and fisheries biologist then working in southern Laos with the Lao Community Fisheries and Dolphin Protection Project), who suggested to Hogan that he focus his graduate research on the threats to various fishes of the Mekong ecosystem. At the time, this river was gaining recognition as the most important natural resource in the region, because it provides up to two million tons of food (both animal and plant) for rural people each year and because only the Amazon and the Congo can boast a greater diversity of freshwater species. But the Mekong also faced new threats. Just a year or so earlier, the Mekong River Commission, a body created by the four countries bordering the lower Mekong (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand), coordinated a study to consider building 12 hydroelectric generating stations. According to plans, the dams would stand, on average, about 35 meters high. The slack water behind many of these enormous concrete constructions would stretch for roughly 100 kilometers upstream, representing, in total, more than half of the length of the Mekong River along the span of the slated projects. It was obvious that these dams would have serious environmental consequences.	The Commission found, for example, that all of the proposed dams will block fish migration. This one impact alone may cause the wholesale decline in the fishery throughout the lower Mekong River. Blocking migration cuts out a critical link in the biological chain of migrating species. While it is possible that some species may find alternative spawning and rearing areas, there is no data to support such a possibility. It is not known how far certain species migrate [or] whether stocks can continue … to function between dams, because stocks and their migration patterns have not been identified. The urgent need for even this basic knowledge prompted Hogan to begin searching for ways to chart fish movements through the Mekong river system, an effort that would end up engaging all of us in one way or another. Hogan began by learning the Thai language. Then, with a small grant from the Wildlife Conservation Society, he traveled to towns along the Thai section of the river to record the species for sale at local fish markets. During this time, he narrowed his focus to the dozen or so Mekong catfish species in the family Pangasiidae, which were relatively common, important commercially and interesting ecologically. What is more, the installation of dams was thought to pose a particular threat to these fish, given their highly migratory behavior, adaptation to the natural variation in river flow, and sensitivity to water quality and temperature. What he found generally supported what was already known about Asia's pangasiid catfish: They are seasonal spawners, grouping together in May, June and July to breed at the beginning of the rainy season. Catches of Mekong catfish peak at this time, when most of the fish apparently migrate in schools up the Thai-Lao segment of the river.
Hogan couldn't describe specific migratory patterns just by inspecting the offerings in fish markets, but these surveys were nevertheless valuable. While traveling from town to town, he had a chance to learn about the fisheries firsthand and to chart the distribution in space and time of various species of Pangasiidae from the border between Isan, Thailand, and Champasak Province, Laos, in the south to the Golden Triangle region in the north. He noted, for example, that the Mekong giant catfish and the slightly less gargantuan "dog eating" catfish (Pangasius sanitwongsei) appeared in the northern section of the river between Thailand and Laos in April, May and June. Smaller species, including the mouse-faced catfish (Helicophagus waandersii), the snail-eating catfish (Pangasius conchophilus) and the whiskered catfish (Pangasius macronema), inhabited the middle stretches of the river and represented the majority of the catch in this area between April and June. Surprisingly, one species commonly found in markets, the river catfish (Pangasius hypophthalmus), turned out to come from fish-farming operations, not (as Hogan had first been led to believe) from the river. Wild examples of this fish are, in fact, very rare in Thai portions of the Mekong. Perhaps most interesting was the presence of large (meter-long) silver-toned catfish (Pangasius krempfi) in many fishmongers' stalls.	Why were silver-toned catfish a surprise? A few years before Hogan arrived in Thailand, Baird had reported that this species could be found in the South China Sea and also in southern Laos. Baird surmised that this migratory catfish might be anadromous, traveling from the marine waters of the South China Sea up the Mekong through Vietnam and Cambodia and into Laos, where they presumably spawned. His basic theory, along with Hogan's later observation of this species in Nong Khai, Thailand (about 1,600 kilometers upstream of the Mekong Delta), provided impetus for a study of the silver-toned catfish that could better document its travels. We (Hogan and Baird) began by carefully examining, of all things, small structures in its ears. Hogan realized that this curious tactic might reveal migratory patterns after a chance meeting with Robert Kinzie and Richard Radtke of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. These investigators studied the migratory behavior of a different kind of fish, gobies, using a novel technique-analysis of strontium:calcium ratios in otoliths ("ear stones"). These small, hard deposits are found in the heads of all bony fish. Otoliths can be used to tell how old a specimen is, because they are built up of distinct layers that are deposited annually. Radtke and Kinzie found that otoliths can also indicate events that take place as the animals mature. In particular, the ratio of strontium to calcium in an otolith records whether the fish had been living in salt water or fresh water, because strontium concentrations in the ocean are one to two orders of magnitude greater than in rivers or streams.
Listening to the Stones With Radtke's offer of help, Hogan and Baird decided to use otoliths to test whether silver-toned catfish caught far inland had migrated up from the sea. The base of operation for this study was Hang Khone, a small village of about 45 families where Baird had been conducting community-based research on Mekong fisheries since 1991. This tiny enclave is located in the southernmost province of Laos, at the edge of Khone Falls, the Mekong's only mainstream waterfall, and a stone's throw from Cambodia. There, Hogan collected 36 specimens of silver-toned catfish for otolith analysis. Hogan, Radtke and Baird found that the otoliths contained significant amounts of strontium-clear evidence that these fish had lived in salt water. Conversely, the analyses did not turn up elevated strontium concentrations in related species. These results helped bring the migratory pattern of this catfish into clearer focus. Baird had already documented silver-toned catfish living in the ocean from January through April. And Sophie Lenormand, a French graduate student working with the Asian Catfish Project in Vietnam, had determined that adults of this species move upstream of the estuarine zone in February or March. Higher yet on the river, in southern Laos, Baird had seen just adults weighing more than a kilogram or so -and only from May to October.	It thus seems likely that in February and March the silver-toned catfish move from the sea into the river to spawn, reaching the Khone Falls, 719 kilometers upstream, in May or June, which is when the residents of Ban Hang Khone net 98 percent of their yearly haul of fish. This investigation kept Hogan well occupied through his year as a Fulbright student, but his interest in Mekong catfish did not end there. Hogan moved back to the United States in 1997 to begin study for a Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis, under the direction of another one of us (Moyle). A few years into Hogan's studies at Davis, Jake Vander Zanden joined Moyle's research group on a postdoctoral fellowship sponsored by The Nature Conservancy. Vander Zanden's specialty was stable isotope analysis, specifically the measurement of carbon and nitrogen isotopes, which can help to delineate food webs and energy flows in aquatic systems. So it was quite natural that three of us (Hogan, Moyle and Vander Zanden) decided to use stable isotopes to fill out the story pieced together from the earlier otolith study of silver-toned catfish. We figured that such an analysis could readily tell us whether this big fish fattens up while at sea. And indeed, our results indicated that the flesh of this fish has an isotopic signature that reflects growth in a marine environment, something not seen in other related species of catfish.
Taken together, our analysis of catch data, strontium in otoliths and stable isotopes in muscle tissues provided ample evidence that the silver-toned catfish migrates long distances between fresh and salt water -the first documented case of anadromy in a Mekong River species. That is, we had fully confirmed the notion that this species was a Mekong "salmon," as Baird and Tyson Roberts of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute had dubbed it in 1995. Despite this success, it was clear early on that these chemical and isotopic methods wouldn't work to investigate the migratory habits of other species of Mekong catfish, which, as far as we knew, remain in fresh water throughout their lives. The inability of these techniques to chart such movements prompted Hogan to explore an entirely different avenue of investigation, one that he had earlier rejected as being too expensive and difficult- following some fish around. Tag Team At the time, fisheries biologists in the Mekong region were suggesting that fish migrate between the Mekong River and Tonle Sap Lake, the largest inland lake in Southeast Asia, which connects to the Mekong through a river also named Tonle Sap. In the dry season (November to February), this remarkable lake covers about 2,500 square kilometers. At the height of the rainy season (August), the lake area expands fourfold, and the maximum depth increases from 4 meters to 10. Life around the lake, including that of the local people, is uniquely adapted to this annual cycle. Fish use the flooded habitat to feed and to grow. The variety of landscapes, including inundated forests and fields, ephemeral streams and small satellite lakes, provides habitat for more than 100 kinds of fish and many more species of birds, reptiles and amphibians.	Every year at the end of the rainy season, the flow of the Tonle Sap River changes direction from north to south as the water begins to drain from the flooded forests and plains into the Mekong. With this outflow come millions of fish. (Residents take advantage this annual movement by fixing all manner of traps and nets in the lake and river to snare the migrating fish.) We wanted to determine where exactly these animals swim: Do they exit the Tonle Sap River and enter the Mekong? If so, where do they then travel? That is, do they move upstream or downstream? How far do they go? Underwater biotelemetry (fitting fish with acoustic or radio transmitters) seemed a good way to answer these questions. Biotelemetry systems have often been used to study fish migrations, to locate spawning and feeding grounds and to describe important seasonal habitat. But this high-tech strategy had never before been applied to chart fish migrations within the Mekong River basin, because most fisheries biologists believed that such tagging would not be fruitful in a river system so large and complex. Thankfully, Hogan was able to obtain support from the World Wildlife Fund to try this approach as well as the more common form of tagging -attaching plastic markers to fish. For this study, Hogan and coworkers from the Cambodian Department of Fisheries collected live fish from a "bagnet" fishery located in the lower part of the Tonle Sap River near Phnom Penh. This particular fishery contains about 60 individual nets, each 120 meters long and 25 meters in diameter at the mouth. The first row of four side-by-side nets is located just outside the city, and the final phalanx is located some 35 kilometers to the north. This operation, like many other fisheries in the Tonle Sap River, runs from October to March, the period when water flows out of the great lake and into the Mekong and adjacent Bassac River.
Between November 6 and December 1, 2001, Hogan and his Cambodian colleagues outfitted two Mekong giant catfish and 11 river catfish with acoustic transmitters and plastic tags labeled "Please return to the Department of Fisheries." On the evening of December 9, the hydrophone we were trailing from our survey boat picked up signals from one of the tagged river catfish. We were cruising the Mekong, 20 kilometers upstream of its confluence with the Tonle Sap and Bassac rivers. This acoustic contact indicated that the fish had moved out of the Tonle Sap River and on up the Mekong. Although we never actually saw the fish, we were able to identify it (a 17-kilogram specimen we had tagged on the last day of November) using the unique pattern of beats programmed into its transmitter. Two months later, this same fish gobbled up the baited hook of a local fisher approximately 300 kilometers upstream from Phnom Penh, which meant that it had traveled nearly 5 kilometers per day. Fishers have since recaptured several other tagged specimens in this same area (we learn about such catches promptly, because we provide a small reward for the return of our tags), suggesting that this migration route -from the Tonle Sap Lake, down the Tonle Sap River and on up the Mekong- is typical of river catfish. Adult river catfish move into deep water areas of the Mekong River to survive the dry season. They then migrate upstream and spawn with the onset of the first heavy rains in May and June. Young fish float downstream with the rising water, eventually finding their way into inundated areas during the rainy season.	These temporary wetlands, such as the flooded forest of the Tonle Sap Lake, act as rainy season nurseries for young fish of many other species as well. Caveat Emptor While Hogan was tagging fish in the Tonle Sap River, he was becoming increasingly concerned about the plight of the giant catfish. Populations were clearly in a nosedive, yet this species continued to be caught, and there didn't seem to be any readily available means of regulating the fishery. Then in 1999 he and Nicolaas van Zalinge (head of the Mekong River Commission's Freshwater Capture Fisheries Program in Cambodia) hatched an idea: Why not buy any live specimens caught and release them? In Cambodia, fishermen capture giant catfish essentially by accident -as "bycatch" in the local bagnet fishery. These fish sell for very little: about fifty cents a kilogram. In Thailand, this species was in greater demand and thus was more expensive. A large fish there could fetch as much as $4,000. Although purchasing live Mekong giant catfish from local fishers clearly wasn't a long-term solution, starting a buy-and-release program seemed better than doing nothing. The fishers were happy enough with our scheme, because we reimbursed them for the fish at market price. This approach was attractive to us, too, for a reason that went beyond just saving the few individuals that were caught: By purchasing, tagging and releasing giant catfish, we had a chance -albeit a very small one- to document any link that might exist between the specimens found upstream in Thailand and those found downstream in Cambodia.
Hogan figured that it would be straightforward to mark any live specimens caught with labeled plastic tags and then release the fish back into the river. Because he had developed contacts in both Thailand and Cambodia and was thus able to monitor both fisheries, he'd soon know when one of these marked fish was recaptured. And, obviously, if a fish tagged in Cambodia showed itself in Thailand, or vice versa, he'd have concrete evidence that these fish moved between the two locations (and past the proposed dam sites). The study of migratory connectivity between these two populations was not just of academic interest. Indeed, developments taking place at the time made it seem especially important to understand what the catfish were doing: The upstream section of the river posed several threats to this species, the most obvious being the continued fishing in Chiang Khong, Thailand, where catches of the giant catfish were shrinking dramatically. Would a decline in the numbers of giant catfish upstream carry over to the downstream population? To address such concerns, we needed to know whether the two stocks intermingled. But suppose no "northern" fish turned up down south (or vice versa) -would this finding, or rather lack of finding, mean that these two populations lived in isolation or merely that all of the tagged fish had been lucky enough to escape recapture? Knowing that the results of the tagging program might be ambiguous, Hogan joined the Genomics Variation Laboratory at the University of California, Davis, where with the help of another one of the authors (May) he developed genetic markers to study the Pangasiidae.	Using tissue samples from the upstream and downstream stocks of the giant catfish, Hogan and May hoped to be able to determine whether these two populations mix. In 2000, Hogan traveled to northern Thailand to observe the giant catfish fishery in Chiang Khong. His intent was to buy, tag and release the giant catfish captured there, as well as to obtain tissue samples. It was mid-April, the hottest time of the year. So Hogan found a small, well-shaded guesthouse and checked himself in for the month. Fishing records showed that most giant catfish were caught at about this time -and that the season for them was getting shorter each year. In 1992, for example, the season began with a catch on April 26 and lasted until June 9. In 1999, the season started on May 6 and finished just two weeks later. So for a month, Hogan waited on the patio of his guesthouse, walked down the street three times a day for a plate of fried rice, read books and worked on his laptop. But the locals caught none of the big fish. As it turned out, 1999 was the last year that the catch of giant catfish in Chiang Khong could be termed a "fishery." After failing to locate any of these fish in 2000, Hogan returned there in 2001 and again in 2003, yet he never saw a specimen. During his last trip, Hogan spent a month interviewing local fishers about their practices and the catch of giant catfish. Everywhere the story was grim. In one village, locals said that the giant catfish had disappeared in 1960. In another community, they reported netting the last one 20 years ago. In Chiang Khong, the giant catfish held out only through 1999. Taken together, these accounts all pointed to the same conclusion -that the Mekong giant catfish was all but gone from northern Thailand.
Fortunately, downstream in Cambodia at least some giant catfish remained. And the Cambodian Department of Fisheries was eager to conserve its catfish stocks. So Hogan, with financing from the University of California and the National Geographic Conservation Trust, started a program to buy and release the giant catfish that survived capture, beginning in 2000. In all, he and colleagues in the Cambodian Department of Fisheries have purchased 21 adult giant catfish -about 80 percent of the total reported catch- letting them slip back into the Tonle Sap River. (They are confident that they hear about most captures of giant catfish, both because news of these events travels quickly on the river and because their project has garnered enough publicity that most fishers know to contact them.) Hogan and his Cambodian counterparts do the same with 10 other vulnerable species, including the giant carp (Catlocarpio siamensis), the giant sting ray (Himantura chaophraya) and the river catfish. In all, they have bought, tagged, and released approximately 5,000 fish. But with no giant catfish to examine from the Thai sections of the Mekong, Hogan had no way to verify whether the tagged "Cambodian" fish migrate upstream, and he, Moyle and May had no way to compare genetic makeup between the two populations, if indeed there still is an upstream population worth talking about. Despite this setback, we don't consider the investigation a total washout -far from it. Our genetics work has proved valuable for other reasons. For one, our results can be used to study the genetics of other catfish species.	And the genetic markers that we developed also allowed us to examine the diversity of stocks bred in captivity and to anticipate the effect of release of hatchery -raised fish into the wild. Sibling Rivalry Hatchery fish were a concern because the Thai Department of Fisheries was pursuing an artificial breeding program for the giant catfish. Since 1985, thousands of giant catfish that were artificially reared have been stocked into the Mekong. The site of their release is almost certainly spawning habitat for their wild cousins, raising concern about the loss of genetic diversity that might result from having large numbers of stocked fish overwhelming the small natural population. Loss of genetic diversity would further limit the ability of the already-rare catfish to adapt to changing conditions. Unfortunately, the program may be doing more harm than good. For example, in 1999, the largest catch of Mekong giant catfish in northern Thailand in the last ten years (almost two dozen fish) was sacrificed to supply eggs and milt for the artificial propagation. Genetic analysis of the progeny indicated that roughly 95 percent shared the same two parents. More than 10,000 of these fingerlings were released in 2001. Although we applaud the Thai government's desire to rescue the giant catfish from the verge of extinction, the current method of brood collection and captive breeding seems likely to erode the genetic diversity remaining in the wild Cambodian population while also depleting the wild Thai population.
Will the southern population ultimately suffer the same fate as the one in the north? Perhaps. But we prefer to be more optimistic. Last year there were several positive steps that may help the Mekong giant catfish and other threatened freshwater species of the region. For example, in November the World Conservation Union officially classified the Mekong giant catfish as critically endangered. This designation is reserved for Earth's most threatened species -ones living in only a single location, numbering less than 50 wild individuals or suffering rapid, dramatic population decline. Although nobody wants to celebrate that this animal is in grave danger, the new classification is, in fact, good news for the giant catfish, because it raises awareness about the necessity for immediate protection. Another recent development shows how important it is to get the word out that this fish is in trouble. Participants in the Mekong Wetlands Biodiversity Program, an effort of the World Conservation Union, together with people working for that organization's Bangkok-based Water and Nature Initiative, recently conducted an assessment of fish biodiversity, along with a study of the community fisheries in northern Laos and Thailand. These efforts produced evidence that the Mekong giant catfish spawns in the area where rapids were being blasted as part of the Upper Mekong Navigation Improvement Project, an initiative intended to spur the local economies.	Since publication of these results, plans for blasting more of the river rapids in Thailand have been postponed. Although the reasons for that postponement are manifold, one hopes that icreased awareness of the environmental disruptions the blasting causes will help to keep the project on hold. Another recent triumph for the Mekong giant catfish is that one of us (Hogan) has just completed Samnang and the Giant Catfish, a children's primer on the ecology and conservation of aquatic life in the Mekong River. The publisher, a Cambodian organization called Save Cambodia's Wildlife, is distributing the book to thousands of youngsters throughout that country. If the big fish holds on for long enough, perhaps the book will raise awareness in the next generation of Cambodians about the value of conserving this and other endangered fish species of the Mekong. Action Plans Although much remains to be learned about the ecology of the migratory catfish inhabiting the Mekong, enough good science is now available to forge a strategy for the sustainable management of these inland fisheries. This broad survey of the problem isn't the place to detail prescriptions for better fisheries management, but we can at least outline what would be involved.
First, maintaining the connectivity between spawning grounds and nursing areas is absolutely critical, in part because many seasonal fisheries are based on the catch of migratory fish. It is important to avoid what happened on the Mun River, the Mekong's largest tributary in Thailand, where a dam blocked the upstream migration of many fish, especially catfish, most of which cannot navigate the ladder constructed to allow them to climb over this obstruction. Not surprisingly, the local catch of migratory species plummeted after construction of the dam. The resultant political fallout has been widespread and long lasting: Fishers protested, and eventually occupied, the dam site in 2000, and in 2001 the ongoing opposition prompted the government to consider removing the dam. In the end, authorities decided to operate the dam at reduced capacity (opening the massive flood gates for four months of the year), in hopes of bolstering stocks of migratory fish. If the Mun River Dam is any indication, planners should be cautious about proposals for mainstream dams on the Mekong River, recognizing that no workable design yet exists to mitigate the harm these dams bring to migratory fish. Dams would also alter the natural variation in river flow, which is critical to maintain, because the behavior of migratory fish (and the people who depend on them for a livelihood) is closely tied to these seasonal changes. Because the central governments have only limited presence in the rural areas where the fishing takes place, management of this natural resource must begin at the local level. But with fish migrating between Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, action at the local, or even the national level, is not sufficient.	The fisheries of the Mekong need to be managed as a transboundary resource. And the authorities drafting the regulations need to be aware that in a mixed-species fishery such as this, slowly maturing species are especially vulnerable to over-exploitation -and thus to extinction. That is, regulations that are able to maintain the total catch in a multi-species fishery can nonetheless lead to severe declines among vulnerable groups, most notably large-bodied, migratory fish. Ultimately, the preservation of such species must be considered not only as a matter of fisheries management but also as a conservation issue. The growing list of threatened migratory fish (P. gigas, P. sanitwongsei, P. hypophthalmus, P. jullieni, C. siamensis) demonstrates the need for precautionary actions to aid their conservation and for greater efforts to assess their status. One option that acknowledges the shortcomings of typical approaches to fisheries management would be to pursue an idea recently championed by Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson: conservation concessions. Adopting this tactic on the Mekong River would blend something similar to what can now be found on land in several places (including Guyana, Suriname, Bolivia, Peru and the Congo) with the situation in various marine protected areas. The idea is to purchase the right to fish commercially in a specified area but not to exercise it. These "fishing rights" would then become nonfishing rights: the power to halt large-scale commercial fishing in certain areas in favor of small-scale subsistence fishers -and fish. Some people living along the Mekong already use a similar tactic on a small scale, forbidding fishing in reaches of the river adjacent to their villages.
This strategy offers a direct method to protect these natural resources for the long term. If carried out effectively, conservation concessions have the potential to boost fisheries production elsewhere, by increasing the spawning stock while at the same time providing revenue to the governments that issue them, new jobs for fisheries officials (to enforce regulations within the concessions) and opportunities for community participation in their management. Such concessions could either be established with revenues from ecotourism or with funds from organizations such as the Asian Development Bank or the Global Environment Facility, which are both currently involved in large-scale projects in the Mekong River basin. Whether or not such conservation concessions are quickly established, a complete moratorium on the catch of Mekong giant catfish, including those caught incidentally, is urgently needed. The remaining population simply cannot support a fishery at this time. What is more, the ban needs to extend to wild fish caught for artificial breeding. The Thai Department of Fisheries should breed existing captive stocks to supply the commercial aquaculture sector. The captive stocks should also be used to develop a breeding program that produces greater genetic diversity in the fish that are to be introduced into the wild. Even if this strategy fails, effective conservation measures in Cambodia may allow the wild population there to bounce back, and this "downstream" stock might then replenish other stretches of the river.	It's obvious that in some spots, notably in China and along some tributaries, the river ecosystem is deteriorating rapidly. But when considering the Mekong River as a whole, there is still ample reason to be optimistic. So far, the main channel of the Mekong river has not been dammed below China. This waterway remains relatively unpolluted, and fishers here and on many of the tributaries are still able to capture phenomenal quantities -some 16 percent of the world's total freshwater catch. The countries of the lower Mekong (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) have shown resolve to work together for the sustainable development of their shared aquatic resources. Perhaps they can accomplish something that we have largely failed to do in North America: develop truly sustainable fisheries while protecting local biodiversity.

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Godel's Proof puts Father Gabriele Amorth (below) and Dubya in a common intellectual drawer.

April 30, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE He Sends the Devil Packing The Vatican's top exorcist has a full schedule. But not every troubled person is possessed, and evicting Satan takes time, he says. By Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer ROME — In a small room, well away from the street so that no one hears the screams, Father Gabriele Amorth does battle with Satan. He is a busy man. As the Vatican's top exorcist, Amorth performs the mysterious, ancient ritual dozens of times a week. A confused world engulfed in tragedy and chaos is turning increasingly to black magic, the occult and fortune-telling, he said, proof that the devil and his handmaidens are having a field day. "These customs open the door to evil spirits and to demonic possessions," Amorth said. "Exorcism is God's true miracle." The practice of exorcism — driving demons and evil spirits from people or places — has been experiencing a renaissance of late, from Europe to the Americas to Africa. In part, the rite owes its popularity to people's need to believe that the devil is real, philosophers say, and that it is possible to get rid of him.	In Italy, the number of exorcists has increased more than tenfold in the last decade to about 300. This year, one of the country's largest archdioceses established a special task force to handle the growing demand for devil detox. Amorth is arguably the world's most famous practitioner of exorcism and certainly its greatest promoter. He co-founded the International Assn. of Exorcists, an organization of priests that meets in secrecy every two years, and he remains its president emeritus. Author of numerous books on the subject, he has had a hand in recruiting, training or inspiring most of today's exorcists. Amorth said his calendar is always full. "I have three this afternoon," he said matter-of-factly recently. With little prompting, he whipped out his equipment, sheathed in a weathered leather bag that is always at his side: a silver and wooden crucifix, an aspergillum for sprinkling holy water and a container of baptismal oil. He acted out simple steps from the ritual, wrapping his purple priest's stole around the shoulders of a visitor and making the sign of the cross on her forehead. (All clear, he pronounced.) In an exorcism, that opening is followed by prayers, anointment with the holy water and oil, then a demand to the devil that he state his name and be gone. Anything can happen: If the person is possessed, and that's a rarity, he or she will often turn violent and fight the intervention, Amorth said. "I've never been afraid of the devil," Amorth said. "In fact, I can say he is often scared of me."
Amorth, who will turn 80 Saturday, is a serious but not frightening figure. He has intense, piercing eyes encircled by dark rings, yet his features also relax easily into a smile and chuckle. Oval-faced, balding and dressed in a long black cloak, he's more Uncle Fester than Max von Sydow. The devil is a stubborn foe, however, and no patient (as the possessed are called) is cured in a single exorcism, Amorth said. In fact, the "liberation" can take years — but Amorth always wins, he insisted. Help From the Master A case in point is Lucia, a 44-year-old mother of two. She had been undergoing exorcisms for 13 years, until her priest finally took her to Amorth. Her symptoms were typical; the possessed experience a visceral, utter repulsion from all things holy. Each time the priest initiated the ritual, she'd enter a trance, rant in languages she didn't know and show violent, superhuman strength. It was more than they could do to hold her down, her husband, Renzo, recalled. At one point, she vomited whole needles, her priest said, a symbol of diabolical torment. "I know people say we are crazy," Renzo said. "You can't believe this stuff until you see it." Amorth acknowledged that quite a few people — including senior prelates in his church — think all of this is more than a little nutty.	It doesn't help, perhaps, that Amorth sees the devil in many places: A couple of years ago he fought to ban publication of the Harry Potter books because, he said, they teach sorcery to children. "I know there are a lot of skeptics," he said. "The presence of the devil is often ignored." Lucia, the patient, believes that her troubles started when an enemy — a man who wanted her as a lover but whom she spurned — cast an evil spell on her. She fell ill, experienced terrible pains, lost weight. Doctors conducted tests and operated on her, but nothing cured her. She consulted spiritual healers, but the rituals they subjected her to left her bruised and battered and still in anguish. Finally she turned to an exorcist, Father Vincenzo Taraborelli, a protege of Amorth. Confronted with what he describes as his most difficult case — the woman attempted suicide more than once — Taraborelli eventually turned to Amorth. Now, Lucia feels strong and well on the way to full recovery — ready, as she put it, to live again. Lucia does not need additional exorcisms, Taraborelli said, but they continue to pray together regularly. The practice of exorcism in Christianity can be traced to at least the 2nd century. It enjoyed a certain popularity through the ages but by the 18th century had fallen out of favor and was largely abandoned by the church, thanks in part to the Enlightenment, rationalism and advances in science.
The spirit of modernization possessed the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, and church leaders frowned upon clearly medieval, controversial and, in the view of many, backward rites such as exorcism. In the drafting of the Second Council guidelines, emphasis was placed on good, hope and compassion, and discussion of evil and demons was minimized. Then the pendulum began to swing the other way. Exorcisms made a comeback, spurred in part by the rise of the Catholic charismatic renewal movement, a Pentecostal faction that believes in healing and prophecy, and by the favors of the current pope, who has frequently referred to Satan as a dangerous force in the world. Even the success of "The Exorcist," the 1973 horror classic starring a foreboding Von Sydow in the title role, which was re-released in 2000, helped stir interest. (Amorth loves the movie.) Pope John Paul II is reported to have performed at least three exorcisms, most recently in 2000 when a 19-year-old woman burst into shouts, spewed vulgarities and writhed violently during a papal Mass at St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. The pontiff prayed over the woman for half an hour but failed to rid her of the demon, said Amorth, who also examined her.	For the first time since 1614, the Vatican in 1999 revised the rite of exorcism. Most prayers and exhortations were left largely unchanged, but the document included a new warning against confusing psychiatric illness with possession and urged priests to use "maximum circumspection and prudence" in deciding to exorcise. An exorcist must be so appointed by his bishop. The growing popularity of these rituals, as well as of black magic and witchcraft, comes from the need of many people to believe that Satan is real, said University of Florence philosopher Sergio Moravia. It helps explain unspeakable tragedy and helps a suffering mankind cope. But belief in the power of the devil to possess people, and of priests to free them, is too often a crutch that masks serious psychological and physiological disease, Moravia said. "I don't think it's crazy. It's worse," he said. "An exorcism is the residue of a medieval practice completely devoid of any foundation of reason. "It's a scam. You promise something to someone who is very sick and at best you offer a temporary cure." Alternative to Medicine In the Roman Catholic world, he said, people turn far too readily to exorcists out of desperation when medicines and other therapies don't seem to work.
And in Italy, superstition remains a powerful force. An estimated 10 million Italians — 17% of the population — use the services of fortune-tellers, faith healers and magicians who cast evil spells, according to a 2002 study by the Eurispes research institute. They pay nearly $6 billion a year to about 22,000 purveyors of such wizardry, Eurispes said. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the archbishop of Genoa, said a society bereft of values and moral codes is creating a fertile field for evil in the world. Bertone recently set up a task force of exorcists and doctors to handle the overload of troubled Italians seeking the church's help, some of them possessed and some of them just "disturbed." "The devil is real, he is at work, and he is agitating," Bertone said in an interview. Doctors have proved an important asset in assessing the state of mind of potential patients, Bertone said. Surprisingly (or not), the practice of exorcism gets some endorsement from Italy's medical establishment. Salvatore DiSalvo, a psychiatrist in the city of Turin, has been counseling priests in how to recognize the symptoms of schizophrenia and other mental disorders. He sees a valuable role for the exorcist. "Science can't explain everything," he said. "I believe the exorcist is the last resort."	DiSalvo credited Amorth with working to bring scientists into the mix and said there had been a regular exchange of information and experience between devil-battling priests and doctors for years. Amorth stressed the importance of screening the scores of people who solicit his help or that of any exorcist. The failure to discern serious illness has led to tragedy and a number of deaths in exorcisms gone awry in the United States — where hundreds of non-Catholic exorcism ministries have sprung up — and Mexico. In 1996 in Los Angeles, for example, a Korean Protestant woman died of beatings in a six-hour exorcism. "In the majority of cases, the people who come to me are not in need of an exorcism but of medical care," Amorth said. "But when some people, after having gone through extensive medical treatment, have had no benefits, they begin to think their problems are not natural. "And the reality is, medicine is limited and often incapable of supplying diagnoses and cures," he said. "The idea of evil spirits is a universal idea, one that belongs to all cultures, all religions, all times."

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"... Pentagon officials late Thursday did not deny that private contractors were being used as interrogators, but referred questions to U.S. military officials in Baghdad, who said they could not comment on Myers' account..."

Explanation: 'Queasy, wimpy liberals have tied our hands in past interrogations, but there are any number of professionals (and mercenaries -some our own) that know how to get the information we need to defend ourselves, and the best part is that, under private contract, they don't have to be accountable to us as to how they get their information'.

April 30, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD Iraq Prison Staff Seen as Issue Lawyer for a U.S. soldier accused of abuse alleges contractors are used to question inmates there. From a Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — A U.S.-run prison in Iraq, where American troops are under investigation in connection with abuse of Iraqi prisoners, used private contractors to interrogate detainees, the attorney for an accused soldier has charged. The private contractors from American companies have been used to question prisoners as part of aggressive intelligence-gathering efforts at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, where U.S.-led forces have held hundreds of captives during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the attorney said.

In March, military officials charged six members of the 800th Military Police Brigade with offenses including assault, cruelty and dereliction of duty in connection with the abuse of about 20 prisoners. The misconduct at Abu Ghraib was underscored this week by photographs aired on U.S. television showing the mistreatment, which involved physical abuse and sexual intimidation. Among those charged was Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, 37, of Virginia, an Army Reserve officer. Frederick and his relatives have spoken with news organizations. Relatives provided Associated Press with personal writings that backed his account that he and others were given little instruction or guidance by the U.S. military in how to treat prisoners. Gary Myers, Frederick's Washington-based attorney, said Thursday that it was clear that the military contracted with private firms to interrogate prisoners, raising questions of oversight of the prison and treatment of prisoners. "It's one of the most disturbing elements of this," Myers said in an interview. "It's a question of what kind of guidance [Frederick] was getting and what kind of training he was receiving."

Myers said two U.S. firms — CACI International of Arlington, Va., and Titan Corp. of San Diego — were involved in providing private interrogators and interpreters at Abu Ghraib. Both firms were named in a military investigative report looking into the allegations. According to the report, a CACI employee was terminated from duty at the prison because of the infractions. Myers said it was difficult to know what percentage of the prison's staff consisted of private contractors, but he said those figures and other elements of the operations would be disclosed during a trial. Pentagon officials late Thursday did not deny that private contractors were being used as interrogators, but referred questions to U.S. military officials in Baghdad, who said they could not comment on Myers' account. A spokeswoman for CACI could not be reached for comment late Thursday. Gene Ray, chief executive officer of Titan, said his company provided translation services to the U.S. military in Iraq, but said the work did not involve the Abu Ghraib prison.

"We employ translators," Ray said. "Translators are not inclined to be involved in prisons one way or the other." On Wednesday, the photographs showing abuses at Abu Ghraib were aired on CBS' "60 Minutes II." The six members of the 800th Military Police Brigade, based in Uniondale, N.Y., face court-martial. In addition to those criminal charges, seven officers in the brigade's chain of command face an administrative investigation, including Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the military's top prison official in Iraq. However, it is unclear whether any law or legal proceeding applies to private contractors. There are an estimated 20,000 private security guards in Iraq, a growing force that has prompted concern among some U.S. officials. In Congress, five Democratic senators asked Thursday for an inquiry into the use and activities of private military contractors. The senators told the congressional General Accounting Office that the private security firms are unregulated by the federal government. Those signing the letter were Sens. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin.

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-lot of material in this one :-)

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April 25, 2004 Los Angeles Times - Book Review By Anthony Lewis Hiding in plain sight 'Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush' John W. Dean; Little, Brown: 254 pp., $22.95 After all the conflict over former President Nixon's tapes and papers, Congress in 1978 passed a law to regulate the handling of such records. The Presidential Records Act gave former presidents 12 years to control their records, presumably to write memoirs. Then they were to become public property, open to all. The last of President Reagan's documents still withheld from release by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library were to be open, under the law, on Jan. 21, 2001, the day after President Bush's inauguration. But Bush's lawyers asked for an extension, and then two more extensions, to consider "many constitutional and legal questions." On Nov. 1, 2001, Bush issued an executive order that: (1) let former presidents keep their records closed as long as they live; (2) after their deaths, allowed friends and relatives to invoke executive privilege as a basis for keeping records secret; and (3) shifted the burden so that people seeking access to records must show justification instead of the former president having to give a reason to withhold.	John W. Dean tells that story in "Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush" as an example of Bush's obsessive desire for secrecy. So it is. But it is something more. It is an example of Bush's view of law as something to be ignored or manipulated for his convenience. Dean well understands that the law was thus twisted in the case of the Presidential Records Act. "In essence," he writes, "Bush was repealing an act of Congress and imposing a new law by executive fiat." Secrecy and lack of regard for the law, in fact, go hand in hand in the Bush administration, as they did in Richard M. Nixon's. No one knows that better than Dean, who served as Nixon's White House counsel for 1,000 days. For those too young to remember, it was Dean who warned Nixon that Watergate was a "cancer" on his presidency and who then testified in the congressional hearings that helped drive Nixon from office. Dean thinks the secrecy of the Bush administration is far worse, and he makes a powerful case in a riveting book. Secrecy and disregard for the law have played a crucial part in the Bush administration's environmental policy, for example. Again and again, Bush has sought to exempt industry from having to comply with the Clean Air Act. Impatient at attempts to amend the act, with all the public debate and congressional bargaining involved, Bush has chosen the closed-door process of executive regulations.
One of the crucial provisions of the act requires "new source review." It provides that owners of a power plant must install new pollution controls if they make any significant — that is, more than routine — changes in the plant's equipment. The purpose is to ensure that there will be less pollution as plants are modernized, among them those in the Midwest that send thousands of tons of pollutants through the air to the East, where they stunt forests and intensify breathing difficulties for many children. The question for the Environmental Protection Agency was how big an expenditure could be allowed as routine repair and maintenance. EPA staffers suggested allowing as routine annual spending equal to 0.75% of a generating unit's value. Thus, if the unit was worth $1 billion, the owner could spend up to $7.5 million a year on it without having to add antipollution equipment. What happened in the Bush administration was described by Bruce Barcott in an April 4 New York Times Magazine article. After secret internal discussions among Bush's EPA appointees, the agency issued an order that spending up to not 0.75%, but 20% of a power unit's value, would be considered routine. So the owners of a $1-billion plant could spend up to $200 million a year without having to install new pollution controls.	For anyone who cares about the environment, the Barcott article made for grim reading. The 20% figure is so outlandishly high that no power company would ever be required to install new pollution controls, effectively a repeal of a central provision of the act. And because the deliberations were all behind closed doors, hardly any of the millions of Americans who suffer the effects of sulfur, mercury and other pollutants in the air knew what Bush and his people had done to them. Even before he became president, there was evidence that Bush had little reverence for the law, no feeling for it, really. As governor of Texas, he declined to intervene as 152 men and women were put to death, the largest number executed under any governor at least since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a national death penalty ban in 1976. The Chicago Tribune studied all of the death cases at a point when 131 had been executed. In a third of them, it found, the defendant had been represented at trial by a lawyer who had been or later was sanctioned or disbarred. In 40 cases, the lawyer presented no evidence or only one witness in the sentencing phase of the trial. Asked about the Tribune study, then-Gov. Bush said the defendants in every case had had "full access to a fair trial." His statement ignored the rank reality of capital trials in Texas — that appointed defense counsel have been asleep or drunk during trials, or incompetent.
Just before he left the governorship to move to Washington, Bush took an extraordinarily brazen action to keep his gubernatorial papers secret. Texas law requires that a governor's papers be indexed by state archivists upon leaving office and made available to the public immediately. But Bush had the papers shrink-wrapped on 60 large pallets and sent to his father's presidential library at Texas A&M University. There, federal archivists said they were too busy with the father's papers to process the son's. Again, secrecy combined with disregard for law — Texas law in this case. Dean writes that Peggy D. Rudd, director of the Texas State Library, fought and eventually won a battle with the former president's library to get control of the gubernatorial papers, but then Bush's successor as governor, Rick Perry, used other methods to keep many of the governor's papers locked up. One wonders: What are they trying to hide? Bush's inclination to secrecy was fortified by his choice of a running mate. Dick Cheney is probably the most influential vice president in U.S. history, but he works so secretively that he leaves virtually no marks. He has spent years fighting to keep Americans from knowing which private business executives advised his energy policy group, an issue now before the Supreme Court.	The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have turned the federal government more radically toward the path of secrecy. At the same time, they legitimized Bush as president, giving him the stature he lacked after being put in the White House by the Supreme Court, and provided a rationale for greater secrecy. Bush has a particularly zealous advocate of secrecy in his attorney general, John Ashcroft. In the weeks after Sept. 11, on Ashcroft's orders, FBI agents arrested about 5,000 noncitizens (the exact number has been kept secret) and held them in prison for weeks or months on suspicion of terrorist connections. Their names and places of detention were not disclosed. Most have been deported for such violations of immigration rules as overstaying visas after closed deportation hearings. Then Ashcroft invented a secret substitute for trials. He detained two U.S. citizens without trial — and without counsel — as "enemy combatants." At this writing they have been imprisoned for more than 23 months, in solitary confinement, unable to challenge the government's charges that they are linked to Al Qaeda. Their cases, too, are before the Supreme Court. Anyone looking for a philosophical view of these matters will not find it here. Dean has written what he calls a "bill of particulars": a detailed account of what Bush has kept secret and how. Dean says he is angry — and scared. He has reason to be.

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April 25, 2004 Los Angeles Times - Book Review By Robert Scheer Without a doubt 'Plan of Attack' Bob Woodward; Simon & Schuster: 468 pp., $28 If Bob Woodward is right — and he has had more access to the president of the United States and his team than anyone else in the Fourth Estate — George W. Bush views introspection as a sign of weakness, and doubt as a failure of character. Though there are several major revelations embedded in the hundreds of pages of minutiae that fill out "Plan of Attack," the famed reporter's latest epic fly-on-the-wall chronicle of the halls of power is fascinating less for its scrupulous examination of the administration's inexorable rush to war with Iraq than for the way he vividly captures Bush's resolve. For it is the president's native gift to remain "on message" no matter how confounding the facts on which he bases his policies or tragic the consequences of his actions.	Woodward has written an astonishing book: It reveals the startling degree of contempt, confusion, political ambition and personal vendetta that seems to dominate the inner circle around the president but which, until recently, has been largely kept from the public. Along the way, Woodward confirms many of the assertions in recent books by former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and National Security Council antiterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke. Here, in abundant detail, is a convincing portrait of a president who, it appears, consciously exploited America's fears after Sept. 11 to pursue an extraneous but deeply held animus against Saddam Hussein, the already-defanged dictator of Iraq. According to Woodward, Bush was told repeatedly by many of his advisors that the evidence linking Hussein to Sept. 11 was nonexistent; nonetheless, the president in his public speeches continued to successfully connect the two. Eighty percent of Americans would come to believe something that the president knew privately to be false. The president was never convinced that the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction could be substantiated with sufficient credibility to satisfy himself; nor did he believe that the evidence presented to him would sway, as the president put it, "Joe Public." In public, however, he never evinced any misgivings.
Why then was Bush determined from the outset to topple Hussein from power? The closest explanation Woodward elicits from the president is that Hussein is "a bad guy." Bush promises Italy's prime minister on Jan. 30, 2003, that "we will kick his ass." But the question that Woodward does not get Bush to answer is, why preemptively strike Iraq? Why dethrone the Iraqi despot when you have enjoined the nation to fight a ubiquitous band of terrorists in Afghanistan led by a disaffected Saudi religious fanatic who is a sworn enemy of the secular Iraqi dictator? According to "Plan of Attack," Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney began to gear up to get Iraq only 72 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Moreover, their effort to overthrow Hussein was underway in earnest even as U.S. troops were battling in Afghanistan, trying to capture or kill the elusive Osama bin Laden, root out the Taliban and bring competing local warlords to heel. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of that operation, knew he had much work ahead to stabilize Afghanistan and, according to Woodward, sputtered a string of expletives when asked to suddenly plan for the overthrow of Hussein, who, as was already well known, had no serious ties to the terrorists harbored in Afghanistan by the Taliban.	But the president is a man whose mind is made up. Woodward shows him collaring Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a White House hallway after a meeting and announcing, out of the blue, that he wants the planning for an invasion of Iraq to begin in earnest. Somehow, Bush is convinced that the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda is not merely the violent expression of the perverse pathology of an obscure minority religious sect but that it represents something more: a battleground in an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of good and evil. Bush makes it clear to Rumsfeld that he doesn't want Congress — let alone the public — to know that he's planning to invade Iraq while fighting is going on in Afghanistan. He fears the average American will not support the new venture. Woodward writes that Rumsfeld is taken aback, seeming surprised by Bush's sense of urgency since neither the Pentagon nor the CIA has yet to prove a connection between Hussein and Bin Laden. (Nor would they ever.) He tells the president that the Defense Department has contingency plans for invading more than 60 countries, including Iraq. He can dust them off if the president wishes him to do so. Bush isn't satisfied. The president's early fixation on Iraq is mirrored by (perhaps even inspired by, on evidence in this book) Cheney's. Woodward says that Secretary of State Colin Powell "detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Persian Gulf War. Cheney was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed."
The cause of Cheney's "fever" is never fully explained. One can speculate that its taproot lies in the unfinished business of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when the failure to take Baghdad and overthrow Hussein engendered considerable criticism in the war's aftermath. For Cheney, as for some others, Hussein's remaining in power might well have been a continuing embarrassment and humiliation. Now history offered him a second chance. What is beyond question in Woodward's account is Cheney's omnipresent role in the president's decision-making, a role Bush fully and repeatedly concedes in the book. Cheney is always shown at Bush's side. According to "Plan of Attack," no one else in the president's inner circle is as firmly in the loop, and it is clear that Cheney's views of the world, and his belief in the need to forcefully redraw the map of the Mideast, carry the day. What drives Cheney is unknown. Is it his sense that time is running out, that the heart blood-vessel stent introduced to save his life is a constant reminder that there is much to be done and little time left to leave his mark on history? Whatever the explanation, it is clear from Woodward's dozens of interviews with others that the vice president is driven in a way so frenetic that he is a man who never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. And so he is undeterred by the administration's repeated failure to establish a convincing connection between Hussein and Bin Laden or by the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction. There is another mystery at the heart of Woodward's book: It is not at all clear why the president isn't sufficiently inoculated to protect him from catching Cheney's fever. All administrations have their zealots, but usually they are able to surround themselves with more sober counselors. Bush could certainly have sought the advice of men such as former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who had assisted his father, or, for that	matter, his father, the former president. Bush tells Woodward, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength; there is a higher father that I appealed to." Bush is revealed in Woodward's account to have his own worldview and, like Cheney, to be a driven man. He speaks to Woodward of his need to do "fantastic things" to liberate the backward areas of the world. Iraq, he says, is just the beginning. He insists that his war in Iraq will result in the flowering of Iraqi democracy that ultimately will be a model for the entire Muslim world. Critics who denigrate Bush's intelligence, his ignorance of the world's complexity and the arrogance of his unilateralist instincts underestimate this politician's survival instincts: his imperviousness to criticism, his willful determination, his abundant rectitude and tenacity. In their last interview, Woodward refers Bush to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's admission after Hussein's ouster and the taking of Baghdad that he had "doubts" that the deaths of British soldiers were worth it. Blair, who had received letters from those who lost sons in the war and wrote of their hatred for what he had done, told members of his Labor Party, "Don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that they don't suffer doubts." Bush responds, "Yeah, I haven't suffered doubt." Woodward was incredulous: "Is that right? Not at all?" Bush replies, "No. And I'm able to convey that to the people." The president is a gifted politician. In this remarkably revealing book, Bush appears as a man detached not only from the complex political implications of his actions and policies, but also, depressingly from the human cost as well.

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April 24, 2004 Los Angeles Times Boy Charged in CHP Killing Suspect in shooting of officer in Pomona has a history of juvenile offenses, records show. Authorities describe him as incorrigible. By Andrew Blankstein, Richard Winton and Anna Gorman, Times Staff Writers Two days after he reportedly admitted gunning down a California Highway Patrol officer outside a Pomona courthouse, 16-year-old Valentino Arenas appeared in the same court Friday, where he was arraigned on charges that he murdered the lawman to win stature in a street gang.   : Arenas, who allegedly used his parents' car to ambush CHP Officer Thomas Steiner on Wednesday, wore a white T-shirt and handcuffs as he stood before some of the same court personnel who had heard the fatal shots.   : A slight youth with a shaved head, Arenas allegedly killed the officer to impress members of the 12th Street Pomona gang.   : He has been accused by Los Angeles County Dist Atty. Steve Cooley of committing "the ultimate hate crime: the random assassination of a law enforcement officer." He will face trial as an adult.   : Prosecutors on Friday charged him with lying in wait, murdering a police officer and committing a murder during a drive-by shooting.   : Because of his age, he cannot be sentenced to death if convicted, but he could spend the rest of his life in prison without hope of parole.

: At Friday's hearing, police and prosecutors described the teenager as an incorrigible juvenile delinquent and high school dropout who was surrounded by a family of law violators.   : The youth told police he aspired only to be a gang member, and chose to kill the 35-year-old CHP officer to win notoriety, authorities said.   : But at least one relative who attended the packed hearing insisted that prosecutors were wrong.   : From her front-row seat, aunt Cecelia Arenas blew the defendant a kiss as deputies escorted him from the courtroom. As he left, the boy turned his head and looked fearfully toward the woman.   : "He's not in his right mind," Cecelia Arenas said outside the courtroom. "He's not a gang member. He's never been in a gang. He's a good kid; he's a quiet kid."   : She said her nephew was working in construction with his grandfather in south Pomona and that "Things were going well in his life up until the shooting."   : Authorities say that is far from the case.   : Arenas, authorities say, went by the street name "Lil Jr." and court records show he had been found guilty of three juvenile offenses, including possession of a firearm. He once attended Garey High School in Pomona but dropped out.   : The boy's parents live in Fontana, though he spent most of his time living with his aunt and grandfather in south Pomona while his father was in prison.

: Valentino Arenas, the father, was being held at the West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga Friday night on an outstanding warrant.   : Cecelia Arenas, the boy's aunt, has been on parole for the last month after her release from state prison for petty theft, according to parole records. She is not prohibited from associating with gang members.   : An uncle, Marty, was paroled Friday from the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco after serving a sentence for burglary and possession of a controlled substance. He is a member of the 12th Street Pomona gang, parole officials said.   : "It's apparent that all the older family members, who are supposed to be role models, are not," said Fernando Rios, deputy regional administrator in charge of field operations for the division of parole of the California Department of Corrections.   : "Whether they are gang members or not, they project a lifestyle of criminals," Rios added. "What does a 16-year-old look at? To be tough and be a criminal."   : Others who knew the teenager said they saw him headed for a difficult life.   : "He wasn't a natural-born killer with demonic tendencies," said Jerome Rucker, a former teacher. "He was one of those kids I think was crying out for help."   : Rucker said Arenas was quick to get into fights and was always beaten up badly. He had been suspended several times but would still hang out on campus. He often skipped classes. He had a tough exterior and told

everyone he wanted to be in the gang, Rucker said. He "wanted to be associated with something."   : Rucker said he tried to steer Arenas in the right direction, but it didn't work. "I hate to say it, but I feel like this was a long time coming. I was praying that it wouldn't come."   : Arenas did not enter a plea at Friday's hearing. Prosecutors alleged that he killed "for the benefit of, at the direction of, and in association with a criminal street gang."   : They said they would seek to try him in the same courthouse where the shooting occurred.   : "We can get a fair trial in Pomona. This is where the incident happened. This is where his peers are," said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Cooley.   : At the courthouse, more than 500 people, many of them uniformed police officers and firefighters, mourned Steiner at a candlelight vigil Friday night.   : Pomona Mayor Eddie Cortez said the killing was a double tragedy.   : "While one family will bury a loved one in a grave, one will bury theirs in a penitentiary a mere teenager," Cortez said.   : Steiner was the 201st CHP officer killed in the line of duty in the agency's 75-year history.   : His funeral was scheduled for 11 a.m. Tuesday at Calvary Chapel, at the corner of Woodruff Avenue and Imperial Highway in Downey.   : Flags were flown at half-staff Friday in Pomona and, at the order of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, at the state Capitol in Sacramento.   : In a statement, the governor called Steiner "a true hero."

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16 April 2004 Science, Vol 304 ENVIRONMENT: Human Impact on the Chinese Landscape A review by J. R. McNeill The Retreat of the Elephants An Environmental History of China by Mark Elvin Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004. 592 pp. $39.95, £25. ISBN 0-300-10111-2. Environmental history is the study of the evolving relations between humankind and the rest of nature. Historians, most of whom long proceeded as if nature did not exist, have lately shown a growing enthusiasm for situating human history in its ecological contexts and for inquiring into how people have thought about the natural world in times past. The broad and deep documentary basis for this sort of history in China has attracted a handful of scholars, none more ambitious, or skilled, than Mark Elvin.	Human hand on the land. Summer crops dominate this Landsat Thematic Mapper image (22 August 1999) of an area in Liaoning Province (northeastern China).
Some 4000 years ago, wild elephants roamed through woodlands that blanketed much of China. Until 1662, tame ones were worked as war elephants in Chinese armies. But today pachyderms survive only in a few zoos and, provisionally, in tiny protected areas in southwestern China. In Retreat of the Elephants, Elvin uses this vanishing act as a metaphor for the vast environmental transformations that characterize, and helped to shape, Chinese history. The book's scope is unusually large, encompassing roughly four millennia in a region that has accommodated about a quarter of the world's human population. Elvin does not quite cover it all. He confines his study to China proper, leaving aside the borderlands and regions that, although often politically controlled by Chinese, were inhabited chiefly by other peoples. He also avoids the 20th century, with its sweeping environmental changes [see, for example, the account by Judith Shapiro (1) and numerous works by Vaclav Smil, including (2, 3)], and he almost entirely neglects the invisible but always important world of microbes. These exclusions still leave plenty for Elvin to discuss.	Environmental transformation, according to Elvin, took place in China with a thoroughness rarely if ever matched in other preindustrial societies. The heart of the story was the relentless deforestation of the landscape and the spread of farming. Elvin finds three main pulses in the history of forest clearance. The first took place circa 1500 to 1000 B.C., mainly in the north. The second came with a great economic expansion under the Song dynasty after about 1000 A.D., which led to acute but localized shortages of wood and to quarrels among communities over forest resources, especially in the lower Yangzi region. The third pulse occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries, when wood shortages became widespread throughout the country. Although the progressive deforestation derived partly from population growth, Elvin takes pains to show that China's environmental history is not simply the result of Malthusian pressures. Politics and the state played crucial roles in encouraging and shaping environmental changes. Elvin's main explanation for this is that states which engaged in the active manipulation of nature for short-term advantage enjoyed a competitive economic and military edge over those that did not--a matter of Darwinian politics more than Malthusian processes. This idea seems entirely plausible for the periods when various states struggled against one another within China. But, as Elvin recognizes, it carries less weight for eras of centralized and unified control. During such times, markets (for food, fiber, and timber) played large roles in shaping pressures on forests and the environment in general--as did demographic growth.
Elvin offers masterful and engaging narratives of deforestation, species loss, agricultural expansion, and the establishment of irrigation. He follows them with tightly focused environmental histories of three localities: Jiaxing, just south of the Yangzi delta; Guizhou province, in the south (originally home to the Miao people); and Zunhua, in the northeast. These local studies show the larger themes of the book at work in specific contexts. The story of Guizhou, in which the Miao were gradually dispossessed and replaced by Han Chinese, is especially illuminating. Like the history of Amerindians and Euroamericans in North America, this clash of cultures involved environmental transformation as a means to political control. To defeat the Miao, the Chinese had to eliminate Guizhou's forest environment and replace it with cultivation. Elvin's sources show that the Chinese conducted this ecological warfare deliberately. The book is full of interesting details. For example, Elvin says that the Bai people of Yunnan province, and Chinese who lived near and among them, were well aware of the link between malaria and the anopheles mosquito from at least the 14th century. Western medical science made the connection only at the very end of the 19th century. The book also deals in depth with Chinese perceptions of nature, mainly as revealed in literature. Here Elvin concludes, as others have before him, that the reverence for aspects of nature expressed in countless Chinese texts did next to nothing to restrain Chinese behavior toward nature. Buddhist and Daoist prescriptions about achieving harmony with nature could and did coexist with rapacious conduct motivated by hunger, by	economic opportunity, or by political urgency. As Elvin notes on his final page, this conclusion raises doubts that transformations of consciousness can lead to solutions of current (or indeed any) environmental crises. Elvin relies heavily on ancient literary texts, often poetry, which requires careful sifting and judgment. I was initially skeptical of how much environmental information could reliably be extracted from poetry, but found myself converted and convinced along the way. Elvin allows readers to form their own judgments by including scores of long translated quotations from the original sources. Elvin, who is now based at the Australian National University in Canberra, made his mark 30 years ago with an insightful, if sometimes controversial, interpretation of the economic history of pre-modern China (4). More recently he coedited a large anthology (5), which until now was the first stop for anyone interested in Chinese environmental history. His latest book is a worthy successor to those and will stand for a long time as the standard work on the topic. It will prove essential for those who want to understand the long sweep of Chinese history, and it will enhance the perspective of those who think they already understand that saga. The Retreat of the Elephants is a scholarly tour de force, definitely not intended for beginners. Elvin does not always wear his immense learning lightly, but his book amply repays perseverance by providing unusual depth and texture to the story of anthropogenic environmental change in China.

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April 9, 2004 Science Magazine VOL 304 RANDOM SAMPLES Wind energy is supposed to be environmentally friendly -but ask a bat about that. Puddles of dead bats, apparent collision victims, have been found at the bases of wind turbines in West Virginia.    Last summer, wildlife biologists found almost 500 casualties representing nine species near the 44 turbines at the Mountaineer Wind Energy Center in West Virginia. Now scientists and bat conservationists have established a three-member group. funded by the u.s. government and the wind industry. to do a 3-year study on how many bats are losing their lives at wind power sites and what to do about it.    Wildlife biologist Merlin Tuttle of Bat Conservation International, a member of the study group, says that scientists suspect the dead bats were migrating -and might even have been attracted to the sound of the turbines. The fix could be as simple as air foils that disrupt the wind vortices created by the towers, he says.    In any case, "there's an urgency to the problem," says wildlife biologist Alan Hicks of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation in Albany. "These [wind energy] projects are popping up all over the place." In fact, another 366 turbines are planned for the Mountaineer site in the next few years.

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perryb here- In general, I think I try to be careful about my opinions. Be what it be, this is a picture of Dubya Bush from Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2004, a very common picture of his 'fiercely purselipped, righteous determination', the picture, in this writer's 'educated opinion', of out-and-out posturing of the most simplistic kind. It is a fact of politics today however, that 'among more sophisticated heads of state' (European in general, and 'sophisticated' is correct), Dubya is regarded 'a bumpkin-American ignoramus', a 'primitive ideologue/believer'. My further opinion? Most people do not like to 'eat shit', arrogant Americans least of all -the hard facts? those people, in general, that 'democracy manipulated to have made Bush president' will also continue to justify their faith in him. -Fuck him, and pity manipulatedly duped them. -Oops! forgot 'fiercely purselipped, righteous determination' Rumsfeld too!

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The 'next page' three items below are linked by anthropology.
Re: 'Ice Age Siberians': anatomically modern man had so advanced and become an efficient killing machine that altho 'only still diasporating into his econiche/earth', he was already 'cutting-edge saturating his econiche and extincting woolly rhinoceros and mammoth (Neanderthals too, aced-out about 30,000 years ago).
Re: Ancient Jewelry (English spell it 'jewellery' apparently):
40-50,000 years earlier, H sapiens had not yet become 'an efficient killing machine' and was 'only still diasporating' -no 'carrying capacity saturation' yet- but pecking order was 'up and running' along with an animism only a shade more primitive than the religion of Christians, Jews and Muslims today for beating on each other -and, yes, there also was homosexuality (but the jokes were not as good :-)
Re: High-Stakes Albatross: we are so advanced that we can now bet on anything (deriviatives? -'betting on the outcome of betting'?) -and even have fun while 'doing science'! -"Lured by the bait, an estimated 300,000 seabirds are accidentally hooked and drowned each year".

[source lost!] ICE AGE SIBERIANS The verified human history of eastern Siberia just got 16,000 years longer. Several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, along one of northeast Asia's largest rivers, a team led by Vladimir V. Pitulko, an archaeologist at the Institute for the History of Material Culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia,recently discovered a 30,000-year-old encampment -almost twice as old as the next-oldest known Arctic settlement. The team has unearthed stone tools, animal bones showing signs of butchering and cooking, and spear shafts made from woolly rhinoceros horn and mammoth tusk.

Plant and pollen remains suggest the region was probably dominated by larqe expanses of floodplain meadow -an attractive landscape for plant eaters such as bison, hare, and reindeer. Whether the people at the site were permanent residents or seasonal hunters is unclear, but to some investigators their mere presence indicates that people had already habituated to a cold climate. More important, it raises the possibility that people were poised to cross the Bering land bridge to North America earlier than commonly believed -well before the height of the last ice age, 20,000 years ago. ("TheYana RHS site: Humans in the Arctic before the last glacial maximum,"Science 303:52-56, January 2,2004) -Kenneth D. Kostel

APRIL 17-23 2004 The Economist Ancient jewellery They may not look like much, but these tiny shells, which belong to a marine snail called Nassarius kraussianus, are believed to be the oldest examples of jewellery yet discovered. They come from Blombos cave in South Africa, a site that has already yielded the earliest examples of abstract art-grids of lines scratched on stone. Christopher Henshilwood, of the University of Bergen, in Norway, and his colleagues, report in this week's Science that they have found 41 shells pierced in an identical manner, as though to be threaded on a necklace or bracelet. Most come from a layer of the cave floor that is 75,000 years old, and thus represent more evidence that Homo sapiens was artistically active long before the first of the famous cave paintings found in southern Europe were made, some 35,000 years ago.

2 APRIL 2004 Science Magazine VOL 304 p44 High-Stakes Albatrosses Gamblers accustomed to betting on horseflesh will get the chance this month to try their luck with birds. Seabird biologists from the Tasmanian government and the U.K.-based Conservation Foundation have formed an unusual partnership with Ladbrokes--the world's biggest bookmaker--to track and time 18 Tasmanian shy albatrosses on their 10,000-kilometer austral autumn migration from Australia to South Africa. Ladbrokes is footing the bill for fitting 27 of the birds--from a total of about 50,000--with satellite transmitters so scientists can track how long it takes juvenile albatrosses to complete their first migration. Scientists are particularly interested in seeing where the birds come into contact with longline fisheries. Lured by the bait, an estimated 300,000 seabirds are accidentally hooked and drowned each year. In what they are calling the Big Bird Race ("the ultimate flutter"), Ladbrokes will take bets on the first albatross to reach Africa and the one with the fastest average speed. Each racer will be given a name and a celebrity "owner," and bettors will be able to follow their picks on Ladbrokes' Web site.

The race is the brainchild of Conservation Foundation seabird biologist Tim Nevard, who says the idea "just popped into my head." Profits will go to seabird conservation. Organizers also hope the race will encourage countries to sign the Agreement for the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels, established in February, which aims to reduce seabird by-catch.

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March 28, 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Review Enduring legacy of a man apart by THOMAS CURWEN, staffwriter for the Times, a regular contributor to Book Review. Ishi's Brain In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian Orin Starn W.W. Norton: 352 pp., $25.95 Ishi in Three Centuries Edited by Karl Kroeber and Clifton Kroeber University of Nebraska Press: 416 pp., $49.95 The identification tag bore the number, 60884, which was meaningless until you opened the catalog and scanned down the row of entries. 60882: Ivory charms (elephant tusks) from Abyssinia. 60883: Set of current postage stamps from the Philippine Islands. 60884: Brain of Ishi (California Indian). .	The year was 1917. The catalog belonged to the Smithsonian Institution, and California's most famous Native American had been dead for nearly a year -dead, cremated and memorialized -all except for the business of Item No.60884. Floating in a jar of formalin, it must have looked no different than the other brains in the collection -including explorer John Wesley Powell's -each wrapped in cheesecloth, suspended in this solution for eternity. In time -decades later, in fact- it was placed in ethyl alcohol and transferred to Tank 6, Pod 3 of the Smithsonian's Wet Collection in Suitland, Md. As good as missing. Missing, that is, until Orin Starn, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University, came along and rediscovered it. "Ishi's Brain" is Starn's intimate, provocative, even cathartic account of Ishi's long journey home. It is -along with the more scholarly collection of essays, "Ishi in Three Centuries" -a valuable addition to the 1961 seminal biography, "Ishi in Two Worlds," by Theodora Kroeber, wife of the anthropologist most singularly associated with Ishi's fate. Like Banquo's ghost, Ishi will not go away. It was inopportune for him to step into the world that late summer day in 1911, wandering down from the foothills half-starved and alone, like the sole survivor of some terrible massacre, setting the dogs in the Oroville slaughterhouse to barking and reminding us of the warfare and genocide that had in a little more than 50 years reduced the California Indian population from 300,000 to 20,000. No wonder we pretended he was something he wasn't. The truth was too shameful, too frightening. The San Francisco Examiner called him a "savage of the most primitive type." As "aboriginal in his mode of life as though he inhabited the heart of an African jungle," said the San Francisco Call. The "most uncontaminated and uncivilized man in the world today," said Alfred Kroeber ,head of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Kroeber had Ishi brought from Oroville to San Francisco and set him up at the university's Museum of Anthropology as janitor, caretaker and specimen-in-residence. He earned $25 a week making fire, producing animal sounds and creating his art for visitors. Anthropology at the time was a new science, concerned mostly with the study of "primitive people." At one extreme, it attempted to rationalize the brutal sweep of colonialism -from slavery to the Indian wars- by finding evidence of the racial superiority of Caucasians (mostly in the measurements of conveniently selected skulls). Kroeber, on the other hand, a student of the liberal-minded Franz Boas, practiced "salvage anthropology ," which held that all cultures, no matter their fate, are to be valued for their customs, cultures and mores. Thus began Kroeber's five-year cultural study of Ishi, and by extension the Yahi tribe, of which he was deemed the last living member. Though Ishi preferred not to speak about his recent past, he shared generously his skills and his songs. Today we can still see him in black-and-white photos, posed in loincloth on a riverbank, and we can hear his voice on an early recording. So thoroughly was his presence documented that it is difficult to believe that he was among us for only five years before dying of tuberculosis on March 25, 1916. Starn picks up the story in the winter of 1997. While researching a book about Ishi, he learned that a Northern California tribe, the Maidu, was attempting to repatriate Ishi's ashes from a cemetery south of San Francisco to the foothills of Mt. Lassen. Rumors, however, persisted that Ishi's brain had been secreted away after the autopsy.	Starn plays it like a mystery, crosscutting past and present, interviewing or profiling anyone, living or dead, whose identity had somehow become entangled with Ishi's. Eventually he breaks the case when he finds a series of letters between Kroeber and the head of the physical anthropology department of the Smithsonian, Ales Hrdlicka. "Dear Dr. Hrdlicka," Kroeber wrote on Oct. 27, 1916, "I find that at Ishi's death last spring his brain was removed and preserved. There is no one here who can put it to scientific use. If you wish it, I shall be glad to deposit it in the National Museum collection." Hrdlicka wrote back 10 days later: "I hardly need say that we shall be very glad to receive and take care of Ishi's brain, and if a suitable opportunity occurs to have it properly worked up." And soon thereafter, Ishi's brain, wrapped in cotton and excelsior, was shipped in a brown paper package to the Smithsonian by Wells Fargo. How do we explain Kroeber's actions? He was a man who by all accounts viewed Ishi as a friend. We know that he was in New York at the time of Ishi's death and vigorously objected to the autopsy. "Ishi in Three Centuries," edited by Kroeber's sons -Karl Kroeber, professor of humanities at Columbia University, and Clifton Kroeber, professor emeritus of history at Occidental College- attempts in part to answer this question. Its contributing essayists, perhaps not surprisingly, are conciliatory, arguing that to criticize Kroeber is to lose sight of his humanity, as surely as some lost sight of Ishi's. According to Gerald Vizenor, professor of Native American studies at Berkeley, Kroeber was "not sentimental enough, and anthropology was not ethical enough," and in her essay, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes speculates that Kroeber's final disregard for Ishi was "an act of disordered mourning, of ravaged grief."
If grief and guilt kept us from seeing Ishi for whohe was, then certainly the work of the Maidu and Yana peoples of the Redding Rancheria and Pit River tribes, who stepped beyond the tragedy of the past and fought for Ishi's repatriation, is courageous. Starn's conclusion, coveting the ceremonies that marked the return of Ishi's brain and its burial along with his ashes in Deer Creek Canyon on Aug. 10, 2000, is all the more poignant for their determination and rectitude. But who was Ishi? If we think of him as a Stone Age Indian, we commit an act of racism on a historical level. Indians, Vizenor wrttes, have long been defined by their absence, not their presence, in American society, and this absence, willful and intentional, allows us to define them as we need them to be, not as who they are. Ishi, Vizenor reminds, was not his real name but a construct devised by Kroeber. Perhaps the greatest service of these books is to draw Ishi closer to us. Hardly the "wild Indian," Ishi grew up in hiding from white settlers, never knowing what it was like to roam the hills without fear of being gunned down. His life and his family's were filled, by necessity, with scavenging and improvising: picking up Spanish words, using iron nails for harpoon tips, window glass for arrowheads, stealing canned food, sacks of flour and livestock.	In San Francisco, he liked pillows and beds and was enamored of screened porches and matches. He was quick to joke and smile, but he most likely suffered, as a man who was aware that his days were over. As Scheper-Hughes suggests, Ishi knew he was "at the end of his existential rope. Though not of his choosing, Ishi accepted his final destiny with patience, good humor, and grace. He was exceptionally learned in the art of waiting." Understanding Ishi's humanity will always be the real challenge. Poet Yusef Komunyakaa imagines Ishi in the San Francisco museum in his "Quatrains for Ishi": Here, in this ancient dust on artifacts pillagedfrom Egypt & Peru, I know why a man like you laughs with one hand over his mouth. Also, I know if I think of you As me, you'll disappear... Ishi certainly was a strange gift to us. At a time when native culture in the state had been nearly eradicated, he stepped from the wilderness and greeted us in friendship, and by his manner extended a forgiveness that is unaccountable and unwarranted. Nearly 100 years later, we seem close to reciprocating the gesture.

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two items -unrelated to each other except as 'americana'-

April 9, 2004 Los Angeles Times HANFORD * Police Kill Mentally Ill Man Wielding a Knife    A mentally ill man was shot to death by Hanford police after he aIlegedJy walked toward officers holding a large kitchen knife, officials said.    Police answered a call from the Kings County Mental Health Department saying that the victim, identified by a neighbor as Mario Perez, had stopped taking his medication and had become violent.    The health officials who called wanted the man to be evaluated and taken to a hospital for treatment, a Police Department spokesman Pete Howes.    Two people were rescued and two firefighters were injured. Neighbors from adjoining homes were evacuated.

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April 6, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Dante's Digital Junkyard Chinese laborers eke out a living using acid, fire and their bare hands to recycle mountains of electronic scrap, most of it from the U.S. By Ching-Ching Ni, Times Staff Writer GUIYU China, — The peasant works without a break, smashing cellphone chargers, battery packs from laptop computers and other electronic refuse. With scarred hands, he picks through the splintered debris for copper, bronze and anything else that might have value. Every day, Luo Yinghong and others like him claw through mountains of discarded high-tech equipment, looking for reusable materials. The waste piles have turned this onetime rice-farming community into a foul-smelling, toxic digital junkyard. "I've been doing this for almost nine years. Even if it is harmful to my health, what else can I do?" said Luo, 28, who comes from Sichuan province. "I am just a migrant worker. I can't afford to worry." A growing graveyard of the Information Age, filled with cables, keyboards, cathode-ray tubes and motherboards, stretches for miles in this corner of Guangdong province on China's southern coast. Luo is one of an estimated 100,000 scavengers who scrape together a precarious existence here.	For a decade, ships have been bringing the waste from foreign countries, mainly the United States, in huge containers. Drivers load it onto trucks, mopeds and tricycles and deliver it to places like this. China is the world's largest destination for e-trash, and Guiyu, a cluster of villages close to major ports, is one of the biggest reprocessing centers. Local entrepreneurs buy the trash in bulk and employ migrant laborers to break it down to its constituent parts, which are sold and reused. The work is dirty and dangerous. Computer components are roasted over coal fires, for instance, or treated with acid to extract copper, gold and other metals. Few, if any, precautions are taken to protect the workers or the environment against lead, mercury, cadmium and other toxic substances found in monitors, keyboards and other electronic refuse. Women and men with no protective gear, sometimes with babies strapped to their backs, sift through the junk, fishing for salvageable parts before dumping the remains into open fields to be burned, or into long-dead rivers. Despite a government ban on hazardous imports and periodic crackdowns, the electronic-waste business thrives. As much as 90% of the e-trash generated by the U.S. ends up as "recyclables" in China. The rest is sent to India, Pakistan and other developing countries. "You can control this thing so much easier from the exporting side, but the U.S. is being completely irresponsible," said Jim Puckett, coordinator for the Basel Action Network, or BAN, a Seattle-based environmental group.
"Americans are able to externalize real pollution costs and dump it onto another country," Puckett said. "Everybody is getting a free ride and everybody is looking the other way." The United States will have discarded an estimated 500 million computers between 1997 and 2007, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a San Jose-based advocacy group. Californians alone buy more than 3 million TVs and 5 million personal computers a year, and thousands of older models are discarded every day, according to the California Environmental Protection Agency. The United States is the only developed country that has not ratified the 1989 Basel Convention prohibiting the export of hazardous materials, including e-waste. An official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cited legal technicalities as the reason. "The administration is currently drafting legislation to be sent to Congress. Passage of this legislation would enable us to ratify the convention," said Dave Ryan, an EPA spokesman. It is unclear when that might happen.	A few years ago, most Americans probably didn't know where their old computers went. Some believed they had done the right thing by taking their used PCs to local recyclers. But in many cases, brokers sold the waste to middlemen who shipped it to China. Corrupt Chinese officials whisked the discards through customs. Two years ago, a coalition of environmental groups, including BAN, conducted a study that documented the huge flow of American e-trash to Asia and the resulting environmental damage. To their dismay, the findings stirred little outrage and led to no significant change. "There was a time when [people could] say they were ignorant," Puckett said. "But that time has long passed. Now there is no excuse." With no federal rules on e-waste, some states are taking action on their own. In 2001, California banned the dumping of computer monitors and televisions in landfills. Last September, then-Gov. Gray Davis signed the nation's first law requiring recycling of electronic junk. A surcharge on sales of computers and TVs will fund recycling operations. The fees take effect July 1 and will range from $6 to $10 per product.
The law also aims to restrict exports of e-waste. Waste-disposal firms must give the state 60 days' notice before shipping such trash abroad and must demonstrate that the destination country permits such imports and will dispose of the material responsibly. An array of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, supported the law. BAN leaders, however, predict that unscrupulous operators will finds ways around the export restrictions. China is not waiting for the United States to stem the flow of junk. Under a policy announced this year, any vessel carrying illegal e-waste will be turned away from Chinese ports. But enforcement is likely to be spotty. Even if the crackdown is effective, environmentalists fear suppliers will turn elsewhere, possibly to Vietnam and the Philippines, among other countries. As long as Americans are unwilling to dump their castoffs in their own back yard, they will need places like Guiyu. "I'd rather be farming," said a villager willing to give only his family name, Li. The 38-year-old father of three runs a recycling business on the ground floor of his two-story home. "But there is no more land to farm. So everybody does this. If you don't, you starve," he said, downing a tiny cup of a rich, espresso-like tea through teeth so decayed they looked like kernels of burnt corn.	Over the years, a division of labor has developed among the four villages that make up Guiyu. One specializes in sorting plastics; another concentrates on taking apart printers. Workers in Li's village burn circuit boards to extract semiconductors and other components, one of the most environmentally damaging aspects of the recycling process. Li employs one worker to break apart computer hard drives and two others to burn circuit boards over a grill-like metal sheet heated by cakes of coal, much like a barbecue. The men work for about $5 a day burning off the solder, plucking off chips and tossing them into buckets for resale. Since the government began to crack down a few years ago, workers have become less open about what they do. They work behind brick walls or beneath tarps, but it is easy to find them. Lead fumes escape and heaps of discards litter the areas. Many workers seem oblivious to the health risks they are taking. "I've been doing this for a decade. Look at me: I am fine," said one man, stooping over his stove, flipping chips off the boards with pliers. Tattered cotton gloves were his only protection. A few steps down the road, more than a dozen women sat side by side, leaning over sizzling grills hidden behind a brick wall. The women tossed spent circuit boards through a tiny window onto a growing mound outside. Farther along the country road, laborers in abandoned buildings and on the sides of streets pulled copper from telephone cable.
Loud crunching noises emanated from homes where workers were feeding computer casings and cellphones into grinders that spit out tiny pieces of plastic. Outside, men in slippers and rolled-up pants washed the plastic in ceramic jugs and spread the pieces out on the sidewalk to dry. Older children helped out by picking through the plastic chips and sorting them by color. The fragments are eventually sold and reprocessed into cups, containers and other goods. Toddlers squatted between the junk piles, watching 5-ton trucks unload more e-waste packed in bulging burlap sacks. Nearby, chickens and ducks pecked for food scraps among discarded ink-jet cartridges on a riverbank. A shaggy guard dog barked at strangers approaching a family warehouse stacked high with mangled PCs. In the distance, waste that could not be recycled smoldered in fields once used for crops. "This business has been a critical part of the local economy for about a decade. It's almost impossible to get rid of it overnight," said Lai Yun, a member of the environmental group Greenpeace who has monitored the situation in Guiyu for several years. In exchange for some cash, local officials look the other way, villagers say. "The Communist Party doesn't care what we do, as long as they get money from us," said a laborer from a village that specializes in recovering plastics. "If we stopped doing this, we wouldn't be able to pay them anything."	According to an informal survey by students at a local medical school, salvage workers suffer from skin, neurological and respiratory problems. Headaches, dizziness and coughs are the most common. "Of course it's not safe, and sooner or later it's going to catch up with us," said Peng Dalian, a resident who employs a dozen workers to take apart cellphones in the basement of his home. "We are lucky because we work at the low end of the pollution chain," said Peng, who shares the house with his wife and six children. "In the village where they burn acids all day, they have children who are born dead or deformed. But we're not dead yet. We have to keep doing this so we don't starve to death." Those performing the most dangerous jobs tend to be migrant laborers who can't afford medical help. "My health has definitely deteriorated since I came here," said Luo, the peasant from Sichuan province. "If I'm meant to live, I'll live. If I'm meant to die, I'll die. I can only leave it up to fate." Zhang Xiuying of The Times' Shanghai Bureau contributed to this report.

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I know that some on this listserve do read the los angeles times (from which many of these postings come), but most are not -my apologies, and be that what it be, the two articles below are great! -read at least the second! -perryb

April 5, 2004 Los Angeles Times Rwandan Assails Global Inaction President Paul Kagame says the world failed to prevent his nation's genocide in 1994. From Reuters KIGALI, Rwanda — Rwandan President Paul Kagame accused the outside world Sunday of deliberately failing to prevent genocide in his nation, opening a week of events marking the 10th anniversary of the killing of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. The United Nations, the United States and European countries have all faced criticism for failing to intervene during the three-month genocide in Rwanda, which ended in July 1994 when Kagame, head of a Tutsi rebel army, seized the capital and ousted the extremist Hutu regime. The U.N. has estimated the death toll at 800,000; Rwanda's government puts it at 937,000. "We should always bear in mind that genocide, wherever it happens, represents the international community's failure, which I would in fact characterize as deliberate, as convenient failure," Kagame said at the start of a genocide conference. "How could a million lives of the Rwandan people be regarded as so insignificant by anyone in terms of strategic or national interest?" he told the meeting at a hotel used 10 years ago as a base by military planners directing the massacres.

Speakers opening the three-day conference said the world had compounded its lack of intervention to stop the slaughter by failing to help the survivors, many of whom were infected with AIDS by the militiamen who raped them during the massacres. "The international community still continues after the genocide to display total indifference to the survivors' unspeakable moral and physical suffering," said Francois Garambe, chairman of the Ibuka genocide survivors group. Kagame said he was so frustrated by world inaction during the genocide that he considered attacking the local U.N. mission and stealing its weapons to stop the mass slaughter of civilians. The overwhelmed U.N. mission in Rwanda, led by Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, did not have the mandate to intervene and stop the killing during the war even as Rwandans were being butchered at a rate of 8,000 a day. "Dallaire had soldiers, weapons and armored personnel carriers, and I confess for the first time that I contemplated taking those arms from him by force," Kagame said. His comments drew gasps and some applause from hundreds of government officials and diplomats. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was head of peacekeeping at the world body during 1994, accepted institutional and personal blame last month for not doing more to prevent the Rwandan slaughter.

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April 5, 2004 Los Angeles Times COMMENTARY Do You Know Your Place? Paying people to stand in line eases access to power for the few -- and undermines democracy By Brian Montopoli, Brian Montopoli, whose writing has appeared in the Washington Monthly, Slate and Legal Affairs, is a reporter with Columbia Journalism Review's media watchdog website: www.campaigndesk.org. Jim Keegan, reclining in a well-worn folding chair on the sidewalk, was casually flicking chicken salad off the front of his T-shirt. Down the street, a group of men played a nearly silent game of cards, while next to Keegan another man sewed a tear in his backpack. It was two days until a House Financial Services Committee hearing was scheduled to take place in the Rayburn Building around the corner, and the people lined up at Washington and D streets had settled into stasis for the 48-hour wait. They were in line for an event they would never see, counting the hours until well-heeled lawyers or lobbyists would show up, 15 minutes or so before the hearing began, and, with a nod, take their places. Place-holding, a practice that was once derided in the nation's capital, has over the years become an institution. Here's how it works: When

a congressional hearing is held, a limited number of seats is made available to the general public. These seats are highly coveted by Washington's army of influence peddlers — the lawyers and lobbyists whose job descriptions entail leveraging personal and professional relationships in order to affect legislation on behalf of their corporate clients. The desperation is so great to be present at everything from markups of mortgage bills to obscure but potentially lucrative changes in the tax code that one must get in line in advance, or have virtually no chance of getting in. But influence peddlers, of course, would never dream of spending two days in line on the street outside a congressional office building, particularly if it involves unrolling a sleeping bag at night on Capitol Hill. So they pay someone else to do it for them. Most of the place-holders aren't homeless, but some aren't far from it. Though they often characterize themselves as between jobs, place-holding is a career for a number of the mostly middle-aged men and women in the line. Most dress in ratty clothes, and, at least after the longer waits, they carry the smell of life on the street. For security reasons — and also, presumably, aesthetic ones — place-holders are only allowed inside in the hours shortly before a hearing is scheduled to begin. Most of the time, they are forced to wait on out-of-the-way sidewalks that get little pedestrian traffic.

Two companies control about 80% of the place-holder market: Congressional Services Co. and the CVK Group, which each maintains a list of on-call place-holders. Congressional Services, which was formed in 1993 by a former CVK employee, charges its clients $32 to $40 per hour for each spot in line, and then passes $10 to $15 an hour on to the place-holders. "We help maximize the time YOU spend on Capitol Hill, so you can spend your time meeting with the right people and attending the right events, instead of spending your time standing in line," says the Congressional Services website. "But don't just take our word for it: Compare our fees to YOUR billable hours." Most place-holders look out for each other, protecting spots in line if someone needs to get something to eat or use the bathroom, as long as he or she isn't gone too long. But the work isn't easy. Capitol Hill police sometimes enforce regulations prohibiting place-holders from sitting down on the public sidewalks, making it virtually impossible for them to get any real sleep for days on end. And when the rain or snow comes down, they have little or no protection from the elements. Students of American democracy know that place-holding is a rare find: a window into the workings of money in politics, something both ubiquitous and maddeningly difficult to pin down. Because ostensibly public hearings have been transformed into more-or- less private affairs, representatives of nonprofit organizations, protesters and average citizens have been effectively shut out of one of the few participatory aspects of the political process. And, sadly, it is Washington's most disenfranchised — those forced to find whatever work they can in a city racked by poverty — who make such a system possible.

That's particularly dispiriting because the place-holders represent the archetypal aspiring American. They help one another and endure demeaning work in harsh conditions in order to make ends meet. The companies that have sprung up around the practice reward reliable workers with management positions. The "by your bootstraps" mentality mythologized by Horatio Alger is more vital in the world of place-holding than it is in many other aspects of American life. But the unapologetic embrace of place-holding by lawyers and lobbyists reflects a nation very different from the one celebrated by Alger. The place-holders I've spoken to view their job as nothing more than a mutually beneficial exchange of dollars for services. They've become so accustomed to the pervasive influence of money in politics that they see nothing inherently objectionable about access to the democratic process — seats, almost literally, at the table — effectively becoming a salable commodity. Place-holding provides a stark reminder of just how far removed everyday citizens have become from the political process and how automatically wealth confers proximity to power. Eliminating the practice would be a small step in defense of democracy but a meaningful one, a message from legislators that they don't hold in contempt those constituents who lack means. Shouldn't access to the workings of public officials be in the public domain, available to whoever is willing to sacrifice his or her time? Unlike money, it's a resource we all share in equal measure.

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Below are two short articles, the first on animal testing for medical purposes, and the second (not unrelated) on one aspect of anthropology. Together, they reminded me of the Draize Ocular Test, so following those is a slightly longer but interesting one from a yahoo search 'pruned to text-only' -painful reading, but not all of which is really objective either. -perryb

April 2004 American Scientist news SCAN HIGH ANXIETY ON THE RAT SWIM TEST To test antidepressants on rats, scientists rely on a method called the forced-swim test. Rats in a closed container of water will try to escape for several minutes before giving up and merely treading water. Researchers call this quiescence a "depressed" state and have found that rats given chemical or electrical antidepressants swim, dive and attempt to climb the walls longer before treading water than untreated rats do. Different types of treatments affect different aspects of the escape behavior. April 3, 2004 Los Angeles Times (pA14) SCIENCE FILE Beads Shake Theories on Evolution of Thought From Reuters WASHINGTON -Ostrich egg beads and other artifacts from an ancient site in Tanzania suggest that humans started decorating themselves far earlier than once thought, and in Africa before Europe, U.S. scientists reported Wednesday.    The artifacts have not been properly dated but the scientists believe they are older than 40,000 years. If so, they would challenge two popular theories

-that humans did not develop symbolic thinking until about 35,000 years ago and that when it happened, it happened first in Europe.    The site, at the Serengeti National Park, is at least 40,000 years old and perhaps far older, dating to what is called the Middle Stone Age. Though Middle Stone Age humans were physically modem, there has been de-' bate about their culture and behavior.    The Middle Stone Age in East Africa began as early as 280,000" years ago. The Later Stone Age started about 45,000 years ago.    "This is very precocious," said John Bower, professor emeritus of anthropology at Iowa State . University, who helped lead the study. "The ostrich egg shell beads, the use ofbone, the abundant use of pigment -we found lots of ochre pencils, little bits of ochre that have been rubbed, presumably to make a pigment."    Bower described the findings , at the Loiyangalani River Valley in the Serengeti National Park to a meeting in Montreal of the Paleoanthropology Society.    Stone tools found with the beads and other unusual items are clearly Middle Stone Age in style, Bower said. "But this gives us very broad bracketing dates of 40,000 to 200,000 years ago."    "The beads are a tantalizing find and once we get some de1initive dating it could have a major impact on the issue of the evolution of symbolic thinking," said CUrtis Marean of Arizona State University, who led the study. "We hope that further digging at the site will yield more information."

'Safety' Testing of Products for Human Use: Irrefutable necessity or morally indefensible false sense of security? Virtually anything which is ingested by, injected into or applied onto human beings, or which may accidentally come into contact with them, is ‘safety’ tested using millions of various nonhuman animal species annually. This includes therapeutic agents such as antibiotics, personal hygiene preparations, cosmetics, household cleaners and industrial solvents, to name a few. The same holds true for products which are used in the environment such as pesticides, fertilizers and machine lubricants. There are several parameters used in testing these substances: chronic toxicity, carcinogenicity, teratogenicity and acute toxicity. In this paper, I will address only two of the methods used in the last category. Acute toxicity testing almost always is associated with extreme pain and suffering because of the very nature of the tests used. Anesthetics or	analgesics are not used. Two of the ways in which a substance is evaluated for its acute effects are the lethal dose 50% (LD50) and the eye irritancy (Draize) tests. Surviving animals generally are killed at the termination of the tests. The LD50 typically involves the administration, by injection or forced ingestion, of various doses of the material to groups of animals (62, 75). Two or more species of animals and as many as several hundred each may be used for every substance tested. The dose at which 50% of the animals die is called the LD50 and is expressed as the amount of the material per unit of body weight. Sometimes the material is not very toxic and the animals die from the volume of the material forced into their stomachs. The animals who die, often after agonizing illness, may be considered the lucky ones. Those who become sick and do not die suffer longer. Depending on the material being tested, the animals may have severe abdominal pain, muscle cramps, convulsions, vomiting, diarrhea, gastrointestinal ulcers with bleeding, loss of kidney function, or other painful or distressing conditions.
The problem with this test, besides one of inhumanity, is that the numbers generated essentially are meaningless. The LD50 is a statistical value which is valid only for the exact conditions under which it was derived and only for the animals in whom it was determined (41, 62, 75). Changes in ambient temperature, degree of stress, or amount of food or water, for example, can alter the LD50 by ten times or more. Furthermore, the LD50 changes drastically from one species to another or even from one strain to another of the same species. The LD50 of a substance in rabbits or rats in no way is an indicator of the acute toxicity of the substance in a human being. Drug interactions, a common problem in the clinical setting, are not addressed by this test. Moreover, a number indicating 50% mortality has minimal clinical relevance. A minimum lethal dose or a maximum tolerated dose, in human beings, would have much more meaning to the practicing physician. Data of this type can easily be obtained from various poison control centers (74). There are other alternatives for this and other types of toxicity tests, as well (9, 22, 26, 31, 37, 39, 42, 46, 50, 56, 57, 58, 66). In the Draize eye irritancy test, any compound which might intentionally or by accident gain access to the eye is tested by being placed onto the eyes of conscious, restrained rabbits. The animals are observed over a period of several days to see if there is an adverse reaction to the substance. There may be no reaction or there may be irritation ranging from minor to severe.	In the worst situation, the cornea may ulcerate and perforate. Because the cornea is one of the most sensitive tissues in the body, rich in nerve endings, irritation or ulceration produces considerable pain. The rabbits usually are restrained in stocks which hold the animals by the neck and prevent them from rubbing their eyes. Therefore, they cannot in any way mitigate the discomfort or pain produced by the material placed in their eyes. As an ophthalmologist and scientist, it is my professional opinion that the Draize test (30) has little, if any, relevance to human safety. It is fraught with technical and biological problems which make extrapolation of results to the human situation not only tenuous, but also dangerous. The rabbit is the primary animal used in the Draize eye test (13). The rabbit's eye and reaction to topical irritants often is considerably different from that of a human being's (13, 20, 36, 44, 63, 67). A compound found to be safe in the rabbit may actually cause great harm to a human being. On the other hand, a compound found to be toxic to the rabbit may actually cause no problems for a person while providing great benefits. From a practical standpoint, therefore, the tremendous suffering which some of the animals must endure in these tests is absolutely unnecessary. Their misery in no way guarantees the safety of human beings. Similar criticism can be made against the Draize skin test (13, 33, 67, 72).
There are numerous alternative methods to obtain data to predict whether a particular material will be safe for human use (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 29, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 60, 63, 64, 65, 68, 70, 71). These methods are more reliable and more humane than the Draize test. In some cases the methods only represent a refinement in the test or a reduction in the numbers of animals used. In other cases, however, there is evidence that a total replacement, using a number of in vitro tests, is possible. It often is stated that a proposed alternative to the Draize test must first be ‘validated.’ This means that the proposed alternative must be reasonably close in predicting what would be the result using the standard Draize test. There are at least two systematic errors with this approach. One, as mentioned, is that the data indicate the Draize test is not a reliable indicator of human reactivity. Another is that, to my knowledge, there has been no validation of the Draize test itself. It has been accepted as the standard with no rigorous attempt at verifying its reliability. Therefore, although it is true that new methods of determining irritancy should be ‘validated,’ the standard should be against known reactions to various categories of substances by the human eye. From a scientific and human safety perspective, results from the LD50 and Draize tests largely are irrelevant, unpredictable and potentially dangerous because people would tend to react differently from other animals to many	substances (6, 16, 20, 21, 25, 27, 28, 47, 49, 61). A good example is the case of paraquat (69). This chemical was introduced in 1960 as a herbicide. It was believed to have low toxicity because the LD50 in the rat was 120 mg/kg body weight. By 1972, however, more than 400 people had died from exposure to this chemical. From these tragic deaths, it was estimated that the lethal dose in human beings was as little as 4 mg/kg body weight. In addition, this type of testing cannot predict individual or familial tendencies for adverse reactions. For example, the antibiotic chloramphenicol is relatively safe in nonhuman animals, but causes illness and death from aplastic anemia in susceptible people. The amount necessary to do this in some individuals is so small that even the tiny amount applied through eye ointments can be fatal (32). Ironically, products still are manufactured and distributed for human use even though they are demonstrated to be toxic to nonhuman animals. For example, during 'safety' testing of the artificial sweetener saccharin, it was found that rodents developed cancer. Despite this, the test results were, in essence, ignored, and the product was marketed, albeit with a warning label. Perhaps thousands of animals suffered and were killed for a trivial, nonessential product, and the data generated were pre-empted by economic interests.
In another example, a nail polish remover containing acetonitrile, which was tested on nonhuman animals, was released for use and resulted in the death of a human child (18). The acute toxicity data with respect to this chemical's effects on rodents were reported in the article, but were of no use to the child who succumbed to the chemical. It would be far more pragmatic and reliable to gain data by learning from the numerous unplanned human exposures to various substances (74). Physicians deal daily with accidental poisonings or exposure of the eyes to various chemicals. The data generated by these observations are critical to our ability to predict what another person might expect and to develop treatment measures. What is the solution to the problem of safety testing? As with most complicated situations, there are no easy nor universally accepted answers to the question. Federal agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency, for example, have stated that they do not require nor encourage the LD50. There are no regulations which require the use of the Draize test (1). Many companies are modifying the LD50 and other tests so that the number of animals used is less (73). There are numerous 'cruelty-free' products readily available. These are safe and reasonable alternatives to those tested on nonhuman animals. Although some of the companies claiming to have discontinued testing their products on nonhuman animals buy their raw ingredients from suppliers who still test them on nonhuman animals, most such companies do not.	Much, if not most, 'safety' testing is done on products which are designed to be an 'improvement' over an existing one. Whereas this normally would be appropriate in a free enterprise system, the fact that nonhuman animals must suffer and die as a result makes it unconscionable. Companies also appear to be doing this type of testing to limit their liability for complications following the use of their products. This may be, however, to little avail. The data derived from nonhuman testing may not be admissible in court when a human being brings action against a company due to injury from a particular product (34). What can you do to reduce the pain and suffering involved in 'safety' testing? Alert others to the truth about the products they are using. When the facts are known, compassionate people will substitute so-called cruelty-free alternatives. Alert your local market to the facts and ask them to at least carry some of the alternative products. Whereas food co-ops traditionally have been open to this, many of the large grocery chains now routinely carry such products. Make the pledge to use 'cruelty-free' products whenever possible. Follow up by letting the producers of other products know that you have switched over and why. With increased economic pressure, there will be increased efforts by the large companies to develop cruelty-free products. From a moral perspective, toxicity testing using nonhuman animals cannot be condoned. The animals used are living, feeling creatures who are capable of suffering in ways similar to us. They have lives and interests independent of ours. There are no morally relevant differences between them and us which make it acceptable to use them for purposes to which we would not consider subjecting ourselves.

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ITEMS
Lots of good stuff in the below here -an argument for as much education as you can get regardless of how you end up making a living.

March 19, 2004 Science Magazine Vol 303 p1774 Nota Bene: Developmental Biology God Bless Us, Every One A [book] review by Monique Martineau Mutants On Genetic Variety and the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi Viking, New York, 2003. 447 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0-670-03110-0. Tognina Gonsalvus, born to a hirsute family that fascinated the 16th-century royal courts of Europe, reigns over the cover of Armand Marie Leroi's first book, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. She is pictured holding a piece of paper upon which a baroque script details her condition. The young girl peers out from her downy fur-covered body, bearing a half smile like Mona Lisa's; only the rims of her eyes, the tip of her nose, her lips, and her fingers remain bare.	Portrait of a Girl Covered in Hair by Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). Phocomelia. Skeleton of Marc Cazotte ("Pepin").
Gonsalvus is one of many abnormal individuals in Leroi's book, which not only explores examples of human development gone awry but also reports the science behind them and its history. The average human, Leroi estimates, is born with 300 mutations. These mutations alter an embryo's development, but their effects are of variable severity. The author likens our developmental process to a "mutational storm" from which there is no shelter. "We are all mutants," he writes. "But some of us are more mutant than others." Hairy people are not abundant in any population, now or in the past; the condition is rare, like all the congenital abnormalities that Leroi discusses. The author introduces each scientific topic with at least one example of how the condition affected a person in history or legend. He recounts the tale of a child apparently born a girl, inexplicably drawn sexually to other girls, who began to grow not only a beard in adolescence but also a small, functional penis. There's the story of a father-to-be who, cursed by a woman whom he had sent (in a moment of self-righteousness) to a drowning death among the river crabs, was soon borne a child with hands that each developed only two crablike fingers. These tales of monstrosity start out as mysteries, and then Leroi exposes what we know of the "wizard" behind the curtain.	The topics Leroi covers range from conjoined twins, to the development of properly proportioned skeletons and genitals, to how skin and appendages change through growth and aging. He draws our attention to the mutations in humans that reveal the most about the language of the embryo, trying to define the rules of its "grammar" by observing those nature has broken. His narratives hook the reader and build up to a climax, and the science supplies the denouement. Sometimes the seams show between the narrative and the lecture, but, as any science writer knows, discussions of developmental biology are extraordinarily difficult to keep light and simple. To follow the detailed science behind the storytelling, one needs either a college-level background in developmental biology or an unshakable interest in acronyms, abbreviations, signaling molecules, and enzymes. The book would make a fine companion to an undergraduate class in developmental biology, particularly one built around case studies. It should come, then, as no surprise that the author lectures at Imperial College London on developmental biology and the evolution of animal form.
To construct his fascinating account, Leroi has mined a vast literature and many folk histories. He identifies his sources only at the back of the book, where he offers some 650 references and a 30-page section of notes. (These notes are not cited in the main text, but they parallel it and are linked back to sentences on given pages.) Much of this background work may go unnoticed, however, as it is all too easy to get wrapped up in the cadence of Leroi's narratives without any awareness that he expands on his thoughts and sources in the end matter. A forthcoming television documentary modeled on parts of the book should be a welcome supplement to the book's black-and-white photographs and drawings. (The short series is scheduled to air on the United Kingdom's Channel 4 in May and should later appear stateside on the Discovery Channel.) It will be interesting to see this production; perhaps the use of animated graphics and photographs of embryos can help ease the understanding of the technical science. Images in the book, while sometimes gruesome, serve the reader well by illustrating individuals often almost too bizarre to imagine: the Brazilian aleijadinhos, who walk on their knees because their legs taper to a point instead of having long calf bones and feet; the Transylvanian Jewish family who, chosen by Auschwitz's Mengele for their small bodies, endured torturous experiments in the name of medicine; and one Harry Eastlack, a man	who died in his forties of a rare disease in which every insult to his body tissue became ossified until his very joints "froze" over, his skeleton consuming him. Leroi uses these descriptions not as cautionary tales of monsters, dwarves, or tin men--as his history of scientific inquiry shows they once were--but rather as points of interest on the way to understanding how to facilitate normal human development. It's a marvel that so many normal humans are born each day in light of all the errors that wait to derail the process. These stories of sometimes horrific deformities will inspire budding biologists or anyone interested in knowing how we get two eyes, two arms, and two legs but five different fingers and toes, one tongue, one set of genitals--and why our rather tall order of parts can sometimes get scrambled. Most of the people Leroi describes evoke sadness in the reader. Nevertheless, they are portrayed with an elegance that belies historical assumptions about their own responsibility (through divine punishment or perhaps karma) for their fate. Leroi's unveilings dissolve the mysticism and the freakishness associated with malformation. Although beauty is usually measured by the absence of mutation, Leroi shows us, through his scientific explanations of developmental abnormalities, a different sort of beauty: innocence.

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Anything that sells -'The economy has to grow'.

March 21, 2004 Los Angeles Times STYLE & CULTURE The new Avon ladies They wouldn't open the door for Grandma's saleswoman, but these teens are totally into pushing a new youth line -- at parties and on campus. By Deborah Netburn, Special to The Times At just before 5 o'clock on a Monday evening, 17-year-old Megan Ver Steeg, a perky blond with a sparkly pink pedicure, is perched on the edge of her living room couch anxiously awaiting her guests. The candles are lit, a maroon-and-pink striped ribbon is tied smartly around her waist in place of a belt, and her parents' old card table has been transformed into a shimmering display of beauty products. "I'm featuring a new product, Hollywood Pink, so I went with a Golden Globes theme," Ver Steeg says, referencing the awards ceremony of the night before. She covered the table with black plastic and taped gold fringe around the edges. She wound a string of white lights around the samples of De-Luscious Plumping Lip Pots, Electro-Lights Lip Vitagleam, Scanda-Lash Mascara, Starliner Hook Up Eye Glimmer and five different lines of fancifully titled lip glosses. On top, she sprinkled a handful of gold star confetti.	Soon the guests begin to arrive at Ver Steeg's family home in Artesia — friends of hers from Valley Christian, the private school where she is in her junior year, as well as friends of her younger sisters, Emily, 15, and Olivia, 12. "Oooh! Megan, can I smell?" asks a blond girl with a fuchsia sweater and a brand-new promise ring on her finger, walking directly to the display and taking a whiff of the fruit-flavored lip glosses. "Did you just get your eyebrows done?" Emily Ver Steeg asks a friend. "They were so bad you could tell?" the other girl squeals. Within 15 minutes the living room becomes a sea of blond hair and flip-flops. The girls gather around the table testing lip liner shades on their hands, experimenting with eye shadow combinations and asking Megan whether she thinks the light or dark blush would best complement their complexion. This was Ver Steeg's third "social beauty party" — a sort of Tupperware party for the belly-baring set — where young women get together to purchase products by Mark, a new line from Avon. Although the Avon brand is marketed squarely to middle-class women between 25 and 55, the company hopes that Mark, with its multitude of sparkly eye shadows and eyeliners and clever packaging, will be bought and sold by their daughters and nieces, women between 16 and 24. The line was launched in August and represents the first time in Avon's 118-year history that it has actively ventured into the teen market. "We had two clear objectives with the Mark line: to bring new customers to the world of Avon and to pass the baton to a new generation of sellers," says Deborah Fine, president of Avon Future, the business unit responsible for launching Mark. (continued >>>)
Mark is sold the same way Avon is, though the sales structure has been tweaked to fit more comfortably into a teenager's lifestyle. The start-up fee is the same, $10, but the Internet plays a central role. Mark reps do all their ordering online, and a full list of products also is available on Mark's pink and flowery girlie website. There is a lot of competition for the allowance and after-school job money of the roughly 17 million women in the United States who are in Mark's target age group, but Avon has high hopes. In 2004, the line's first full year of business, Avon expects Mark to make $100 million in sales. And because of the direct sales model, Mark can be sold in places its competitors can only dream of reaching — high school hallways, college classes and sleepover parties. Thanks to a sizable army of loyal Avon representatives (650,000 strong in the United States) and a comprehensive marketing campaign that includes a TV spot by Wes Anderson (director of "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums") and advertisements in Allure and Cosmopolitan, 20,000 women who had never worked for Avon signed up to sell the Mark line, and an estimated 10 million women have already flipped through copies of the catalog. Mark also has been well received in the tastemaking world of women's magazines. "I really, really like Mark," says Erin Flaherty, beauty editor of Jane magazine. "Their stuff is really cute and modern and fun to use. We've run them in the magazine several times, so that's my stamp of approval."	Ver Steeg, who has been a Mark representative since late August, was among the first teenagers to sign on to the campaign. "My aunt got a [Mark] catalog from a lady in my church who sells Avon," she says. "I've always been interested in hair and makeup and stuff, so when she saw it, she was like, 'Hey, that's totally you.' " Not that she was interested in selling Avon herself. Ever. "I had a couple of things from Avon, but it feels so like Mom and Grandma makeup," she says. "I don't think I would have ever sold Avon. Unless I got really old all of a sudden." Better than baby-sitting Mark's first television advertisement aired on the NBC and MTV networks late last summer. As the camera pans across a series of brightly colored rooms, a series of young women talk about what Mark has done for them. "Mark helped put me through college and taught me about body shimmer," says a white girl with blond hair in what appears to be a library. "Mark introduced me to my old best friend Sarah, who introduced me to my new best friend, Kristin," says a Latina about to brush her teeth in a pink bathroom. "Mark improved my social life and made my nails more beautiful," says an African American girl with a sizable Afro. "I met Mark in the girls' bathroom," says another young woman about to do her laundry. There isn't a single doorbell in it. (continued >>>)
The Avon brand has never quite been able to shake the kitschy image of the cheerful blond suburbanite in the once-ubiquitous "Ding-dong, Avon calling" television ads. (The campaign, which appeared from 1953 to the mid-1960s, was one of the longest- running in ad history.) But despite the lingering stereotype, Avon still is big business. The company is No. 280 on the Fortune 500 list, sales increased almost as much in metro L.A. last year as they did in rural Iowa, and Avon has stretched its well- groomed tentacles into all corners of the world. There are 4.4 million Avon sales representatives working in 143 countries, including South Korea, Uruguay, Malaysia and Lithuania. There are even women who risk their lives to sell Avon in the Amazon jungle. The decision to start recruiting younger women to sell for Avon was not a desperate attempt to revitalize the company or to reposition an aging brand. Although sales fell in the early 1990s because of management problems, the company has been doing a robust business in recent years. Avon's net sales have been steadily increasing, from $5.3 billion in 1999 to $6.8 billion in 2003, and in the United States alone the number of sales representatives increased 9.5% last year. Oddly enough, Avon's success is partly due to the slump in the economy. At a time when many women have lost their jobs or need extra money, direct sales is an inviting option. Angela Escoto, 16, a Mark representative from Bellflower, tried and failed to get a job at a mall during the holiday season. "Even at Christmas nobody would hire me," she says. "It's so competitive out there."	To make money to pay for presents, Escoto, who has been selling Mark since September, held her first social beauty party in early December. She says she is fortunate to have a large family with a lot of women, so most of the 10 people present were relatives. "I think it's more comfortable selling to your family because you can tell them you need the money right now," she says. "With friends it's more awkward. And my family always buys a lot. I have one aunt, and her last order was $200." The average price of an item in the Mark makeup line is about $8.50, and most of the shadows and lip glosses sell for $4 to $6, so that's a lot of makeup. Ver Steeg estimates she has made $1,400 selling Mark products to friends and family. The 16 girls who attended her third social beauty party bought at least two products each, and Ver Steeg's net sales were just over $500, 40% of which ($200) she got to keep for herself. It's more profitable than baby-sitting, but she admits she makes less money with Mark than she did waiting tables at Cortigiano, an Italian restaurant in Lakewood. "But there is so much drama that goes on at the restaurant, and selling Mark is so much easier," she says. "People just come to you, tell you what they want, and they get it. They aren't like, 'This is too cold.' " In between hosting parties, Ver Steeg does most of her selling at school, where she always keeps Mark catalogs and a few samples in her backpack. She uses the products herself, which she says is really her best advertisement. "People will be like, 'Oh, I like your eye shadow,' and I'm like, 'Oh, it's Mark, why don't I show you what color it is?' " She places an order for the products on the Mark website almost every Thursday and usually averages about $400 in sales a month. "It keeps my car full of gas," she says. (continued >>>)
Contemporary image Though Avon may seem passι to those unacquainted with the brand, those who have grown up with it don't hold such stereotypes. Avon's research has shown that 90% of the young women who signed up to sell Mark did so because of familiarity with the brand, and that the outdated Avon Lady in the old advertisements has been replaced by images of their very contemporary mothers, aunts and neighbors. "My grandma would sometimes bring home Avon books and there was an Avon Lady who lived behind me, so I definitely knew about the brand," says Arianna Merino, 19, a sophomore at Cerritos College and a Mark representative since September. "I know that some people think that the Avon Lady is like from the movies or something, just something they would make fun of, but I always liked everything I got from Avon." Merino first heard about Mark in August when logging onto her favorite website, http://www.makeupalley.com , an online community where makeup-obsessed users rate different products, ask and answer makeup questions, and swap lightly used products with one another. Avon has partnered with the website and runs ads and conducts market research through it. Merino, who lives in Norwalk with her mother, hasn't hosted her own social beauty party yet. She tried once, but the party kit that Mark sells — $35 for samples, applicators, preprinted invitations and display ideas — was so popular that it was sold out. Although she was disappointed, Merino says she has a lot of success selling at school.	"I sit in class and I see girls putting on lip gloss and I'll say, 'What is your favorite brand?' and then ask them how much they spend. Then I hand them some samples or a flier or a magalog [a Mark magazine/catalog hybrid that's heavy on the catalog] and tell them to look it over," she says. Merino, who has short curly hair and glasses, says selling Mark has helped her climb out of her shell. "I used to be really shy, but now I feel kind of empowered," she says. "Sometimes I get a little nervous, but everybody has been so receptive. And it helps with the social thing because you have something to talk about." On average Merino makes $100 a month selling Mark, and most of the money goes back to makeup. "It's funding my addiction," she says. Luvstruck At Ver Steeg's party, business is booming. Candice Grasmeyer, one of Ver Steeg's oldest friends, who already owns four Mark eye shadows, two lip glosses and a concealer, puts in an order for a big set of brushes, Moose I Sheer Creamy Shadow and a Starliner in Goldcrush. "Then I'll get Luvstruck eye shadow and I have to stop," she says. Twenty minutes later, she calls to Ver Steeg, who has moved on to customers across the room. "Can I get the Jet eyeliner? And I also want another eye shadow," she says.

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March-April 2004 American Scientist Magazine Volume 92 Scientists' Bookshelf Dirty Work In the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of London soared to 2.5 million, as thousands flocked to the capital to find work. Poor families often lived eight or nine to a single room. ...They cooked, washed, slept, and djfecated within these four walls, and as the population grew, so did the smell. Foul odors emanated from more than 200,000 cesspools across London, in alleyways, yards, even the basements of houses. ...    Traditionally, London's cesspools were cleared by the "nightsoil men" who carted sewage to outlying regions and farms. The nightsoil men worked in teams of four. After taking up floorboards or flagstones and placing large horn lanterns at the entrance to the cesspool, a "holeman" would descend a few feet into the pit to fill his tub. He would then be helped by a "ropeman" to raise the stinking cargo, hopefully without too much spillage, and the waste would be emptied into carts by two burly "tubmen," carrying well over 100 pounds of sewage. As work progressed, the holeman would have to climb deeper with each trip, stirring up the filthy

sludge to loosen it for shoveling out. It was an unbearably vile job for which the only compensation was a high wage, often up to two to three times the salary of a skilled man.    This system had worked well for many years, but as the city expanded, the journey to the outskirts of London became longer, and the nightsoil men's prices soared. At a shilling per cesspool, many Londoners could no longer afford the services, so raw sewage began to accumulate in the dwellings of the poor. The black suppurating cesspools hidden in the cellars were seldom emptied. Their contents were allowed to ooze through the floorboards or cracks in walls and flow at random through yards and ditches, fouling everything they touched. Dreams of Iron and Steel: Seven Wonders of the Nineteenth Century, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal Deborah Cadbury Fourth Estate, $25.95 Unshelved offers a glimpse of books recently received at the Bookshelf. A complete list of such books can be found at http:llwww.americanscientist.orgl NewBooksReceived.

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The following is not 'a pretty item' (read it thru), but if you can understand it for something of 'an underlying philosophy' (I will NOT say 'warped') or for its 'breadth of undertaking', you may have something of an aperture into 'the human (sapiens) condition' -Neanderthal man, for example, could neither have conjured up nor been able to pull off somthing like this.

March 13, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE A Killer Stalks the Zoo At least 62 animals have been poisoned in Brazil since Jan. 24. The staff is horrified and puzzled, but signs point to an inside job. By Henry Chu, Times Staff Writer SAO PAULO, Brazil — Tony was the first to die. They found his body early in the morning of Jan. 24, limp and lifeless, his face a mask of pain. Three days later, another suspicious death surfaced, with similar signs. By week's end, there were five more. Soon victims were dying in groups, poisoned by the same odorless, colorless, highly toxic substance. Desperate authorities have tallied at least 62 deaths but acknowledge that they are not close to making an arrest. Who is killing the animals at the Sao Paulo Zoo? Since Tony the chimpanzee died, an elephant, five camels, several tapirs, a pair of rare capuchins, an orangutan, some tiny golden lion tamarins and dozens of porcupines have been poisoned in a case that has baffled Brazilian police and horrified zoo officials and visitors. Law enforcement agencies have mobilized 50 officers — including nearly a fifth of the city's special operations unit — to hunt down the serial killer, while zookeepers scramble to beef up security, change feeding routines, install cameras and find ways to cope with a rampage nobody can make sense of.	"It's an unthinkable situation," said Jose Luiz Catao Dias, technical and scientific director at the zoo in South America's biggest city. "We have emergency protocols for escapes, for fires, for flooding, for walkouts and strikes. But the Sao Paulo Zoo had no protocol for insanity." Worse yet for Catao and his staff, signs point to an inside job, or at least assistance from within — meaning that a killer may be in their midst, somebody with knowledge of the park's operations and access to its food supply. Investigators are probing the possibility of a vendetta by a disgruntled worker or former worker, but some employees say they cannot think of anyone who left the zoo under a cloud or who would kill so many defenseless creatures to make a point. "If it's for revenge, then take it out on a person, not on the animals," zoo biologist Juliane dos Santos Soares said. "Cowards!" She and her colleagues have been dealing with the horror of seeing so many of their charges die painful, premature deaths. Many of the animals' handlers had worked with them for decades, like Baira the elephant's keeper, who knew her so well after 30 years together that he could tell she was blinking differently one day. He immediately informed his bosses, but the elephant died less than 24 hours later, leaving her keeper in tears. The man is still too devastated to talk about what happened. Lab tests have implicated sodium fluoroacetate, a rodenticide so lethal that a few specks dissolved in water can kill a large dog. A drop in the eye of a human being would cause an agonizing death within an hour or two. (continued)
The substance is banned for everyday use in Brazil. It can be bought abroad — Australia uses it to control its wallaby population — or manufactured by someone with a modest knowledge of chemistry. Whoever acquired or made the poison must have known its potency and considered its lack of odor or taste ideal for killing animals, such as monkeys, which refuse to eat anything with a bitter smell or taste, Catao said. Nobody suspected deliberate poisoning at first. When Tony died, about halfway into a normal life span of about 45 years, a necropsy showed pulmonary swelling in the former circus chimp's chest but no obvious malignant cause. The same symptoms appeared in a camel that died three days later, but because the two animals were of different species, lived more than half a mile apart, ate different food and had different water sources, no red flag popped up. But two days later, the zoo lost three Brazilian tapirs within a few hours, including a 3-month-old named Watermelon. Mere coincidence was impossible. The park's directors immediately choked off the supply of food, mostly vegetables and grains grown on the zoo's own farm, fearing it had been accidentally tainted. Bacterial infection was ruled out — nothing could jump between species like that — and toxicological tests came back negative for legal pesticides. Yet the carcasses kept piling up: another chimp, then Baira the elephant.	Nine days after the first death, the poison was identified. "We knew it was fluoroacetate," said a weary Catao, taking off his glasses and trying to rub six weeks of exhaustion and worry out of his eyes. "We knew there is no antidote. There's almost nothing that can be done once it's ingested." The zoo now knew what was killing the animals. But who was doing it? And how? "Our first [thought] was the public — some crazy person who came in and threw contaminated food," Catao said. With more than half a dozen animals dead by the beginning of February, the police were brought in. Catao and the chief investigator on the case, Clovis Ferreira de Araujo, sat down to piece together the scant clues. Araujo suggested a serial killer. In a twist worthy of Agatha Christie, he detected a possible alphabetical method to the madness: A for anta, the Portuguese word for tapir; B for Baira the elephant; C for chimpanzee; D for dromedary, or camel; E for elephant. They remained focused on the likelihood of a deranged outsider. But then the porcupines changed that. When the spiny creatures started dying Feb. 15, zoo officials had to face the unpleasant fact that an employee was almost certainly involved. The porcupines lived in the park's breeding sector, where visitors were not allowed. (continued)
The porcupines were decimated — all 43 in the breeding area died. Only the seven that are out on public display survive. "It's a disaster," Catao said. The rarest animals poisoned so far were a pair of endangered capuchin monkeys, also part of the breeding program. Three of the zoo's four chimpanzees have died, as well as five of its six camels and one of its two elephants. The death count, at 62, may rise after lab tests on more than a dozen more carcasses are completed. Especially hard was the loss of Karen, a female orangutan, one of a pair that came to Sao Paulo from Indonesia 30 years ago. She had recently survived a painful bout with bone cancer and the park had built a new enclosure for her. It was complete with cleverly placed feeding holes and other items to cheer her up, especially because her mate was in bad shape with spinal cord cancer. Karen was found dead in a sitting position, one hand clutching an iron bar of her enclosure, blood streaming from her nose, her face distorted. The zoo staff wept. "I had to pry her fingers off the iron bar because she was holding on so tightly," said zookeeper Aristeu Jose dos Santos. "I was very sad when I saw that. How could anyone do this? It's incomprehensible." The primate area is now heavily patrolled and the chimpanzee pen, with its lone survivor, is walled off from public view. A team of 15 security guards, up from nine before the killings began, provides round-the-clock security. They are backed up by six police officers, who have a substation in the 200-acre park. Security is especially tight around the zoo's rarest treasures, such as its seven blue-feathered Spix's macaws, of which only a few dozen survive, all in captivity.	Animal feeders now distribute food in pairs and must follow new sign-in and checkout procedures. Of the 19 kitchen employees who prepared the 452 animal menus required at the zoo, most have been reassigned to other jobs pending the results of the investigation. The extra precautions appear to be working: The last animal believed to have been poisoned, an anteater, died Feb. 20. Araujo, the chief investigator, said his team was working its way through a list of 40 suspects, all of them current or former employees. But a lack of physical evidence has prevented detectives from drawing any firm conclusions. "This case has become a priority for us," Araujo said. "It's a crime of great complexity." The Brazilian Congress set up a special commission recently to look into the poisonings as well. Zoo directors in other parts of the country are worried about the possibility of copycat crimes. Scientific director Catao is eager for the mystery to be cleared up, if only so that other zoos around the world will not balk at donating replacement animals. The Sao Paulo park, which opened in 1958, has the largest collection of creatures — about 3,900 from 450 species — of any zoo in Brazil. Many of the poisoning victims were showcase animals popular with visitors, another reason Catao doesn't think the killings were the random work of a psychopath. But zookeeper Dos Santos has trouble imagining that any of his fellow handlers could be involved. Many of them have worked at the park for years and are distraught over the loss of animals they tended so closely. "It's very sad to go back to their pens and see them empty," Dos Santos said, shaking his head. "We work eight hours a day and we have one day off a week. They're our second family."

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   "Such buildings often become "bird slaughterhouses," says Klem. In Chicago, for example, researchers have collected more than 26,000 dead birds over the past two decades from the footings of the McCormick Place Convention Center. New York City's Twin Towers and several Toronto skyscrapers also became infamous bird hazards. In all three cities the biggest kills typically occur at night during spring and fall migrations, when building lights appeared to lure the birds into deadly collisions. Light-dimming campaigns, such as those led by the Toronto-based Fatal Light Awareness Program, have helped reduce the problem. (See "The Dark Side of Light," Audubon, March-Apri12000.)"

March 2004 Audubon (p65) MILLIONS OF BIRDS PERISH EVERY YEAR FROM CRASHING INTO GLASS WINDOWS. AFTER DECADES OF INATTENTION, BIOLOGISTS, BUILDERS, AND ARCHITECTS ARE JOINING TOGETHER ON SOLUTIONS THAT WILL BENEFIT BOTH PEOPLE AND BIRDS. DARRAGH BRADY WOULDN'T HURT A FLY, much less a flycatcher. So the architect. was devastated recently when she discovered that a breathtaking, $10 million building she had helped design was a death trap for songbirds. "I was appalled," she says. "I'm a birder, and I had inadvertently created this building that was killing birds." The culprit is as clear as the day: A glittering glass entryway that guides visitors to the Maryland Historical Society in downtown Baltimore to an array of treasures, including a priceless original manuscript of Francis Scott Key's Star-Spangled Banner: It is, literally, a stunning piece of architecture. But some unsuspecting birds, it seems, simply don't see its transparent, unyielding walls and crash into them at full speed. Others may be fooled by a tempting reflection of trees or sky. Many are killed instantly. But even dazed survivors ... [end excerpt] BY DAVID MALAKOFF PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT McCAW [photo] When birds hit windows at high speed, the impact sometimes leaves an imprint on the glass. In this instance, a mourning dove in midflight, with its wings in an upstroke, struck a back-porch window. Fine powdery material from the bird's feathers left a record of the impact on the window's surface.

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Nor is animism/spiritualism any worse than the rest of the world's more institutionalized monotheism -which (not uncoincidentally :-) includes democracy among other 'isms'.

March 13, 2004; The Economist Magazine The power of witchcraft Presidents for life -and beyond Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. By Stephen ELlis and Gerrie Ter Haar. Oxford University Press; 263 pages; $60 and $19.95 (paperback). Hurst; £45 and £16.50 (paperback) OF ALL the prestige projects undertaken by Ghana's founding president, Kwame Nkrumah, the hydroelectric dam on the river Volta was the grandest, so he began it with a human sacrifice, to harness the power of the spirit world and thereby ensure success. Or so it was rumoured. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar do not believe the rumour, but a lot of Ghanaians did. That they believed their president capable of such an act was not a sign of popular opposition, argue the authors of this intriguing book, but .'an acknowledgment of his authority". Many Ghanaians saw their leader not only as head of the bureaucratic state bequeathed by Ghana's British colonists, but also as the heir of the pre-colonial Ashanti kings who, like many West African potentates, could order human sacrifices on important occasions. Nkrumah strenuously denied doing anything of the sort, but at the same time he encouraged people to believe that he was no ordinary mortal. He assumed the old Ashanti royal title of Osagyefo ('.Redeemer"), and sometimes likened himself to J esus, too.

The beliefs that affect African politics are neither well nor widely understood because they are rarely written down. A new book tries to fill that gap. Its main contention is that since many Africans see power as originating in the spirit world, it is impossible to understand African politics without studying the secret world of marabouts (witch-doctors} and magic. To maintain their grip on temporal power, African presidents try to convince people that they wield the spiritual sort too. One president of Benin made his spiritual adviser a minister, in charge of the secret service. This made him "truly formidable, for as well as being presumed to have a special relationship with the devil, he also controlled the torture chambers". So many of the African elite consult spiritualists that the spiritualists can become powerfully knowledgeable. If an army officer asks a marabout to tell him which would be the most auspicious day for a coup, the marabout may choose to leak that information to another client, thus enhancing his reputation for accurate prophesy. Given widespread faith in marabouts, even sceptical presidents find it useful to put one or two on the payroll. The authors also examine the relationship between religion and wealth. Those Africans "fortunate enough to have plenty of money have often acquired it by means that are unclear to the great majority of the population", they note. A vague sense that wealth is ill-gotten can lead to accusations of witchcraft, which can be fatal. This, the authors suggest, is one reason why rich Africans tend to dole out cash to their kin and build ostentatious tombs, churches or mosques in their home villages. The richer they are, the grander they build: Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Cote d'Ivoire's late president, erected a basilica modelled on, but larger than, St Peter's in Rome. There is much fascinating material in this book, but one wishes the authors had made the effort to write more concisely. .

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Below is an article from the Los Angeles Times that some may have read. I had not intended to post it, but second thought has convinced me otherwise -subtlety important material (I think) here. -perryb

March 8, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE No Safe Arbor in the City Trees are disappearing from urban areas. Most people don't realize the significance of the loss, but one man is fighting for a place in the shade. By John Balzar, Times Staff Writer Eric Oldar doesn't have to go far to find the alarming evidence. He lifts his sizable 6-foot-5 frame out of his office chair, walks 20 paces to the door, steps outside and glumly eyes the culprit: a spindly crape myrtle tree. A whole row of them bordering the Riverside parking lot. Actually, crape myrtles aren't trees. They are shrubs that grow to look something like trees in miniature. And that, in short, is the problem. That is what puts a knot in Oldar's jaw and leaves him muttering: "People want quality lives and communities — they say so. But subtly, all around them, they're losing one of the essentials." Our grand city trees are disappearing. The towering trees that provide us cooling shade and save on air conditioning; the trees that give roost to birds; the broad-shouldered trees that soak up the heavy rains before they gather into floodwaters; the trees that cleanse our air and muffle the roar of metropolitan life; the great trees that inspire the poet in our battered urban hearts; the trees that soften the sharp corners of crowded living and connect us to the majesty of nature — the trees are going away.	In their place: pygmy stands of crape myrtles, or clumps of even smaller bushes. Or just beds of redwood chips scattered atop plastic sheeting to make sure that even weeds don't grow. "We're eliminating trees," says Oldar with a deep sigh. "We're letting them become trivialized; without really paying attention, we're letting them disappear." Oldar is a forester and a pioneer in California's tiny urban forestry program, which is tucked away with firefighters in the state Department of Forestry. He has devoted most of his 27-year career to promoting urban forests, a concept that makes all the sense in the world if we think about it, which, let's agree, not many of us do. How many of us were even aware that Sunday was Arbor Day in California, the day for celebrating and planting trees? In our mind's eye, if not in reality, cities of the United States are made glorious by their trees, and always have been. In the imagination of entrepreneurs, the city groves are a vast, untapped and profitable stock of spectacular hardwoods and softwoods for furniture, floors and home architectural details. In truth, though, our cities are turning from green into gray — at an alarming rate and with surprisingly costly consequences: •  According to American Forests, the nation's oldest citizen conservation organization and self-proclaimed "voice of the trees," the nation's urban areas as defined by the Census Bureau have lost 21% of their tree cover in the last decade. Viewed over longer time spans, the news is even worse. For instance, Washington, a city renowned for its blossoming cherry trees, has sacrificed 60% of its heavy tree canopy in the last generation. (continued-)
•  Even before the recent wildfires, San Diego and surrounding communities had lost 27% of their green canopy in less than 20 years. In an extensive study using satellite imagery, scientists at American Forests calculated that the trend, if unchecked, could cost taxpayers $164 million to manage future storm-water runoff. Added pollution that trees would otherwise absorb could make it more difficult for the region to attain clean-air standards. •  A joint study by state and federal forestry agencies determined that California cities have about 177 million trees and 242 million empty planting sites. The potential savings is huge. Three good trees planted around your house can reduce air- conditioning costs 20% or more. •  In a project sponsored by NASA, meteorologists determined that clearing trees had made temperatures in Atlanta 5 to 8 degrees higher than in outlying areas. This has created an urban "heat island" that generates increasingly violent thunderstorms over the city and its suburbs, contributing to flooding. •  And the topper: Incalculable millions are spent to process valuable tons of trees as common garbage. According to studies by the U.S. Forest Service and the International Society of Arboriculture, more potentially usable wood fiber is produced in urban areas each year than is harvested from U.S. national forests —much of it sent into an already overburdened waste stream. The numbers grow mind-numbing. Potential energy savings run into the billions of dollars if we would only shade ourselves under more trees — $3.6 billion annually in California alone, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The savings from needless flood control is even greater. And global warming? Trees sequester epic amounts of carbon, which is the culprit in making our atmosphere a heat-trapping greenhouse. In other words, it's not just the size of the car we drive but the number of trees we plant that may shape tomorrow's weather.	To visit Oldar's cluttered, 10-by-12 office near the 91 Freeway is to tumble down a rabbit hole. The simple logic behind trees in our cities is inarguable; so too are the mindless forces that work against them. That makes Oldar a man of divided spirits. What other do-gooder state bureaucrat can so easily describe a painless, profitable, easily grasped solution for a broad civic problem? This is not poverty or racial prejudice or traffic congestion — troubles that seem to defy our capacity to envision workable solutions. Here, we can all save money and make daily life quieter, more beautiful, indeed more natural, for hardly any effort at all. Oldar's round face seems to light up. He is an unstoppable optimist. More than 80 years ago, Helen Hoyt put it this way in her poem "Ellis Park": I take your trees, And your breeze, Your greenness, Your cleanness, Some of your shade, some of your sky, Some of your calm as I go by. But then Oldar outlines the maddening obstacles in the path of shady, greener cities — all of them described in reports, videos, pamphlets, satellite photos and books that he piles up in a truly scary-large stack almost as high as his desk. Most of these documents contain some version of the old buck-passing excuse: I don't know, I don't care, it's not my responsibility. Oldar sags in his chair with an expression of impossibility on his face, a born-again pessimist. For what it's worth, California is a national leader in the campaign to save city trees. The state's 1978 law on the subject says this: "Trees serve as a vital resource in the urban environment and as an important psychological link with nature for the urban dweller. Trees are a valuable economic asset play an important role in energy conservation reduce air pollution increase property values attract business ." And so forth. (continued-)
Here and there — and it's pretty obvious where: Beverly Hills, San Marino, Claremont to name three — individual communities continue to promote and protect their tree-scapes. Other municipalities are awakening. San Diego has undertaken a 20-year replanting program. In the last few years, the city of Los Angeles has begun planting more curbside trees than it cuts down, and just last week announced that a $1-million federal- state transportation grant would be used to plant 3,500 more trees — utilizing crape myrtles only when planting space demands it. "We're planting trees greater than 40 feet whenever possible. It is extremely important for our environment to have a healthy urban forest of large-canopy trees," says Melinda Bartlett of the Los Angeles Environmental Affairs Department. Elsewhere, though, trees tend to occupy far lower rungs of the municipal priority list, notwithstanding common sense or the law. In Oldar's idealized vision of California's future, the challenge is not quite as simple as planting trees. But almost. It must be the right tree in the proper place — no single-species urban forest monocultures that are prone to attacks like Dutch elm disease or the insect assault that has killed 30,000 eucalyptus trees in Los Angeles in the last 18 months. Plantings need to be spaced out so that entire neighborhoods of trees don't reach maturity and begin to die off at once, as is happening now in post-World War II subdivisions. Municipal leaders and those higher up the governmental organizational chain must update master plans and ordinances to recognize the manifold value of trees, Oldar continues. Governments need to jump-start the budding enterprise of utilizing — and bringing to market — the wondrous woods produced by urban trees as they reach maturity and need to be replaced.	One example: Acacia trees by the hundreds, or even thousands, are chopped up and dispatched to California landfills at who-knows-what expense to municipal governments. It is not that different from city councils' hiring crews to "dispose" of underground oil reserves by pumping them into sewers. In Hawaii, by contrast, the sister tree to California's acacia is the imperiled koa, whose wood, increasingly rare, fetches from $17.50 to $50 per board foot, which is a chunk of tree smaller than a breadboard, only 12 inches square and 1 inch thick. From a briefcase under his desk, Oldar produces samples of 35 other exotic and valuable woods that are common hereabouts and now burdening landfills instead of being used for furniture, home building or even for fuel to generate energy. Stephen M. Bratkovich, a forester with the U.S. Forest Service in St. Paul, Minn., has drawn from published studies to calculate that cities produce about 3.8 billion board feet of usable logs each year due to natural mortality, disease, storm blow-downs and development — more wood than harvested from all of the country's 147 million acres of national forestlands. Much of it, probably most, is sent to landfills or turned into low-value products like wood chips. Bratkovich has calculated that if all these logs were sawed into 12-inch-wide boards and laid end to end, they would make 120 round-trip paths from Los Angeles to New York. (continued-)
Hoping to turn the situation around in California, the state now grubstakes entrepreneurs to try their hand at salvaging urban woods. The state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection sponsors an annual four-day Urban Forestry Academy for municipal officials. The state helps support a vast website, http://www.ufei.org , that guides consumers and government officials in what kind of trees to plant and, potentially, where the resulting wood can be sold and purchased. Last autumn, the group American Forests urged every city to establish the goal of increasing its tree canopy by 10%. Still, California remains headed down what Oldar calls "an insidious slope": Great shade trees are vanishing, leaving pygmy urban forests and gray-scapes. Why? Older rips into the topic with the zeal of a chainsaw: Municipal governments manage trees but have no incentive or requirement to promote energy conservation, storm-water management or pollution abatement. That's the chore of other agencies. On the other hand, local governments are required by law to reduce the volume of waste they send to landfills. They are charged with repairing sidewalks and curbs damaged by tree roots. As a consequence, trees have become a costly nuisance, not an asset to local officials. Who can blame them for the current trend to plant smaller shrubs, like the crape myrtle? As for the potential value of wasted lumber, cities consider this merely theoretical, if they consider it at all. The hidebound lumber distribution system in the U.S. is dominated by giant chain operations that have little interest in sundry lots of variety woods produced in urban forests.	Meanwhile, developers, trying to maximize densities, also are planting bushes instead of trees. Ditto homeowners with a mind to expand their houses to the property lines. Thus, the crape myrtle, Lagerstroemia indica, is now the most popular tree in urban California — an idea that strikes Oldar like a thumb in the eye. "I call them crap myrtles," he grumbles. "They have their place, but should we get carried away and say this is the only tree? What does that tell us about the future?" Standing outside his office, he surveys the skinny row of 12-foot-tall myrtles. "See any signs of birds there? Any nests?" He pivots 180 degrees and looks heavenward to the top of a shapely sycamore, where a large nest is silhouetted against the sky. In the summer, these trees would tell another important story — that the crape myrtles generate hardly enough shade to cover the bonnet of a compact car while one lone sycamore shelters the forestry department offices all afternoon. Added up block by block, the consequences can be startling. In the various studies of tree cover in Atlanta, scientists measured the downtown air temperature at 86 degrees, while comparative surface temperatures were 85 to 90 degrees in the shade of trees and 127 to 129 in direct sun. In one seven-house development built by Atlanta's Habitat for Humanity, scientists determined that homeowners would save $951 in energy and $268 in storm drainage charges each year if adequate trees were planted and allowed to mature. (continued-)
Meanwhile, Oldar says, municipal and regional park departments are increasingly preoccupied with recreational developments — tennis courts, softball fields, recreation centers and the like, not trees. These days, even homeowners cannot be counted on to keep their neighborhoods green — and the truth is that private citizens shoulder much of the burden as urban foresters. In Los Angeles, the city government owns 1.5 million to 2 million trees, while businesses and homeowners are responsible for perhaps 10 million. And while many citizens are happy to tell pollsters all the virtues of tree-lined streets, in practice a good many favor trees everywhere but on their own property, worried about storm damage or tree roots clogging their pipes or squirrels tangling with their house cats or the mess of leaves in autumn. More and more, they turn over yardwork to gardeners who are untrained in tree care. "I have one of the few homes on my block with any substantial number of trees left," Oldar sadly concedes about his neighborhood in Ontario. In arid climates like Southern California, the fresh water necessary for all types of vegetation is increasingly part of the civic conversation, or should be. In this, trees generally fare well — with many varieties requiring only about one-third the water of a lawn, and then, in turn, providing shade that conserves soil moisture for other plants.	Asked to look ahead, Oldar, the father of two, remains a man divided. It is entirely plausible, he says, for a common-sense turnabout. Once Californians begin to recognize what is happening, it would take only reasonable effort to increase the shade-tree canopy to 25% or 30% of our residential landscape. "That's realistic, and that's what I'd like to see," he says. "What I fear is the mind-set of doing nothing, that people won't appreciate trees generally." In that case, trees may wind up like covered bridges, a quaint part of America's past. Within a generation, perhaps only 6% of our cities will be shaded by trees — with the corresponding reduction in the quality of our lives. "That," Oldar says quietly, "is what I fear for my kids. They'll wake up in the future and wonder: Where did it all go?"

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Regardless of various, ostensible benefits, ethnicity and religion, among other 'institutionalized artifices', continue to be major sources of misery. They are, nevertheless, destined to vestigialize under globalization and intermarriage. Be that what it be then, following next is an absolutely fundamentalistic little piece in critical need of scientific illumination: much as the book's author front-pages Jewishness -'charity' and 'humanity' therein, might not a little less 'chosenness' and a little more intermarriage benefit all the people of the world?

March 6, 2004 Los Angeles Times BELIEFS New Book Explores the Meaning of Being Jewish The parents of slain journalist Daniel Pearl have put together a series of reflections by prominent Jews on their religious heritage. By Patricia Ward Biederman, Times Staff Writer Two years after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan, his family continues to mourn in private. In public, however, his parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, try to fulfill the ancient Jewish obligation of tikkun olam, "healing the world." The Pearls, who live in Encino, started the nonprofit Daniel Pearl Foundation and have undertaken a series of efforts to promote interfaith understanding, including an international music day named for their son and journalistic exchanges with the Islamic world. And now, they are involved in a new book project focusing on Daniel's Jewish heritage. Judea and Ruth Pearl are editors of the recently published book "I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl" (Jewish Lights). In the moments before Daniel Pearl was killed at the age of 38, he was videotaped saying: "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish." That moment inspired Alana Frey, a schoolgirl in Rockville Centre, N.Y. For her bat mitzvah, she asked friends and family to write down what	being Jewish meant to them. She planned to collect their responses, then send them to Adam, the son born to Daniel Pearl and wife Mariane after Daniel's death. Her purpose, Alana told the Pearls, was to help Adam understand his heritage and to make sure that "his father's words would always comfort him." Judea Pearl told Rabbi Harold Schulweis, of Encino's Valley Beth Shalom, about Alana's plan, and the rabbi suggested that the Pearls expand it into a book. The rabbi helped them fin d their Vermont publisher. Together, the Pearls and the publisher drew up a list of prominent Jewish figures in government, science, the arts and other fields whom they asked to contribute. Among the participants were a few the Pearls hadn't realized were Jewish, including TV journalist Mike Wallace and Kitty Dukakis, wife of former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. The resulting book contains brief meditations on what it means to be Jewish by 150 people, including actor Kirk Douglas, historian Martin Gilbert and the Pearl family. Many, including Daniel's parents and his sisters, Tamara and Michelle, describe themselves as secular Jews. Judea Pearl writes in the book: "I see Jews as the scouts of civilization — the ones who question conventional wisdom and constantly seek the exploration of new pathways." Pearl sees a long line of these Jewish "scouts," from Abraham challenging idolatry to "Marx, Herzl and Freud, down to Einstein, Gershwin and the civil rights activists of the 1960s." For centuries, Jews have also been "border-challengers, idol-smashers, and boat-rockers."
The Pearls asked that the mini-essays be personal reflections, not simply tributes to their son. Actor Richard Dreyfuss and former Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres rewrote their contributions to that end. Daniel Pearl was in Karachi, Pakistan, working on a story about Richard Reid, the convicted Al Qaeda operative who tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami flight with explosive-filled shoes. After the kidnapping, the Pearl family requested that Daniel's Jewishness be downplayed in the media in hopes of saving his life. Israeli-born Judea Pearl said that the family also feared it would "give ammunition" to the team defending his killers during their trial in Pakistan. But, more and more, the Pearls speak publicly about the pride Daniel took in his heritage, and they see him as a shining example of the best in the Jewish tradition. "Danny has earned respect on both sides of the East/West divide as a bridge-builder and a dialogue-maker," Judea Pearl said in a phone interview. That association is a powerful corrective to the demonized image of Jews, and especially of Israelis, as warmongers in much of the world, Pearl said. "It's time that our true image shines through," he said. In the book's dedication, the Pearls express their hope that their grandson Adam will "discover the garden where your father grew and where he bloomed in boundless love for you, to find freedom in his roots, and comfort in his words." In the book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman recalls his terror as a child, wearing his sweater inside out to hide his Star of David, when a sentimental SS man hugged him on the street. The Nazi	apparently missed his own son and didn't realize Kahneman was Jewish. "The complexity of evil and the fallibility of good are perhaps the first things I think about when I think of being a Jew," Kahneman writes. Hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, who fought as a 20-year-old with the Haganah militia in Israel's War of Independence, writes: "I am a Jew who believes that, though small in numbers, we have a powerful moral influence on the world, and in the words of Hillel, 'If not now, when?' " Larry King tells the joke about the Jewish grandmother who thanks God for saving her grandson from drowning, then looks at heaven and adds: "He had a hat." Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has a large mezuzah prayer scroll on the doorpost in her chambers, writes: "I am a judge, born, raised, and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition . I hope, in all the years I have the good fortune to serve on the bench of the Supreme Court, I will have the strength and courage to remain steadfast in the service of that demand." Proceeds from the book, which sells for $24.99, will go to the Daniel Pearl Foundation. "They were able to use the normal energies of anger and rage and construct them into something hopeful and positive, and this is very much part of the Jewish tradition," Schulweis said admiringly of the Pearls, who seem to have transcended the rage understandable in parents of a slain child. Schulweis explained that tikkun olam is "the responsibility of recognizing that the world is not complete. The fabric is torn, and we can mend it it has to be done here and now and by us, and not by escaping the world, but by sanctifying it."
The Daniel Pearl Foundation gives fellowships to journalists from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and North Africa — where anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are widespread — exposing them to American newsrooms. Recently, a Muslim reporter from a Pakistani newspaper did a weeklong internship through the foundation at the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles. Judea Pearl, who is president of the foundation's board, has begun appearing with former Pakistani diplomat Akbar Ahmed, a distinguished scholar in Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C., at public forums designed to foster interfaith understanding. In their first appearances, in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pearl said that about a third of the audience was Muslim: "That was unique — that Muslim organizations felt safe enough to include their members." Pearl wrote in a recent op-ed piece in the Jerusalem Post: "For the past two years I have found myself totally immersed in projects aimed at building trust between Muslim and Western communities. I see this process as a form of revenge and, compelled by the spirit of Danny, I try to channel all the positive energy and goodwill that the tragedy has evoked toward one aim: fighting the hatred that took Danny's life."	"I don't do it for comfort," Pearl said in the interview. "That's not the mission here. I'll get comfort when I see results." He explained that his instincts are scientific, not supernatural — he is a pioneering computer scientist at UCLA, and the Pearls did not belong to a temple when their children were growing up. Pearl and Ahmed will next appear in Virginia and then in London. Pearl is not yet ready to bring the forum to Israel: "I need to study how the Israelis and Palestinians view the idea of dialogue before I plunge into it." Other projects are in the works. Pearl said the foundation hopes to create a global network so that high school newspapers will be able to swap articles. "This is where you can make a transformation," he said. "This is where you can undo whatever fanaticism has been formed, by exposure and education. Put these two together, youth and journalism, and you have hope."

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Adding two 'pages' here, it's the longer one following this that's especially interesting for what it says about hard-edged capitalism -should be read completely through. -perryb

March 2, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE NATION Washington Officials Say Orcas Threatened Department seeks to protect 'one of the most enduring symbols of Puget Sound.' From Associated Press SEATTLE — The Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife proposed Monday that Puget Sound's orcas be added to the state list of endangered species "because the marine mammals are at critically low levels and are vulnerable to several continuing threats." The department made the recommendation based on a recent status report indicating that the population of resident killer whales in Puget Sound and nearby waters has declined 18% since 1995. "The solid scientific work reflected in this report gives us an excellent base on which to assess the health of our resident orca population and determine what the next steps should be to protect one of the most enduring symbols of Puget Sound and the Pacific Northwest," said Jeff Koenings, the department's director. The killer whales that swim in waters off Washington state and British Columbia include 84 orcas — down from a historical high of more than 120 in the 1960s, before the whales were captured in large numbers for display at marine parks. The L pod, one of three groups of resident whales, has seen both higher mortality rates and lower birth rates, particularly in the last decade, according to the department's status report.

Scientists point to a decline in salmon, the orcas' main source of food, as well as accumulations of PCBs and other toxic chemicals in the water and stress from whale-watching boats and other vessels. The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission, a nine-member citizens panel that sets policy for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, is expected to take action on Monday's proposal at its meeting April 1-3 in Spokane. A state listing would trigger a recovery plan that would guide efforts to protect the killer whales. Resident orcas are listed as "depleted" under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, which also requires a recovery plan for the species. "The state's roles and responsibilities would complement, not replace, those of the federal agencies," Koenings said. "We want to operate from a clear understanding of the science so as to not duplicate the federal recovery plan." Rocky Beach, a Fish and Wildlife spokesman, said the agency would also work closely with Department of Fisheries and Oceans officials in Canada, where the orca is listed as endangered. In June 2002, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service ruled that resident killer whales did not warrant Endangered Species Act protection because they were not a "significant population segment." Federal officials said they based their decision on the best available science, but environmentalists objected, saying the agency relied on a species classification that dates to the mid-1700s.

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March 2, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE No Gain, Know Pain Incentive-driven Countrywide Financial is a model of how to boost output. But some workers are unhappy -- and suing. By David Streitfeld, Times Staff Writer As corporate America carves more profit out of fewer employees, it relies on managers like Jaime Moncayo and Sean Reeves. Thanks to new technology, the two supervisors at the Simi Valley customer service center of mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. can, in effect, stare over the shoulders of their team members all day long. Moncayo and Reeves know who is on track to answer the daily minimum of 68 calls and who is going to miss the quota of eight referrals to the sales department. If someone's lagging, they encourage. If someone's leading, they congratulate and reward. At the end of every day, Moncayo passes out play money. The rep who answered the most calls gets $2. So does the one who made the most referrals. The dollars are redeemable for such trinkets as candy and candles. A few aisles away, Reeves promises pizza if his 13 reps score more referrals than another team.	The cash the supervisors are spending is their own. And why not? They have their incentives: as much as $350 a month in bonuses. By melding computer advances, updated management techniques and the sort of immediate reinforcement most people haven't seen since kindergarten, Countrywide is a model of how American companies are boosting worker productivity. As falling interest rates unleashed a massive demand for refinancings, Countrywide became more efficient. The Calabasas-based firm, one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders, made 165 loans per employee last year, up from fewer than 100 five years ago. A 2-year-old program to seek out productivity improvements has yielded $200 million in savings, according to internal audits. Among the other benefits: a near-tripling of earnings in 2003 and a stock price that doubled. The most determined and successful employees can share in the profit, with top sales agents earning six-figure incomes. But the hard work comes at a price, and the company's relentless efforts to cut costs hang over just about every worker. Sales agents in Countrywide's Rosemead office are suing the company, saying they regularly put in overtime without pay. Other Countrywide workers in California have been warned that their jobs are likely to be transferred to states with laws less favorable to employees.
Countrywide also is accelerating plans to move operations offshore. By the end of next year, it will have 250 employees at a call center in India, each of whom will represent a savings of $35,000 over a U.S. worker. Multiply Countrywide's example by thousands of hungry companies, and an explanation emerges for the nation's tremendous productivity gains in the last two years — as well as the toll on workers. Employee productivity rose 4.2% in 2003, a jump Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan labeled "stunning." That was on top of a 4.9% gain in 2002. Together they marked the best back-to-back growth in worker output in five decades. The gains stoked corporate profits, which rose 10.3% in the second quarter of 2003 and 9.9% in the third. Yet average wages barely budged. Many workers say they're pushed to put in additional hours without proper compensation. Some are retaliating in court. In 2002, Starbucks Corp. agreed to pay $18 million and RadioShack Corp. said it would pay $29.9 million to settle overtime cases. T-Mobile USA Inc. said in November that it would pay $4.8 million as the result of a similar action. Last month, the closeout retailer Big Lots Ltd. said it would pay $10 million to settle claims. The number of such overtime cases has nearly tripled over the last five years, to the point where they exceed employment discrimination cases. Craig Strah, a former sales agent in Countrywide's Rosemead office, wrote in a court declaration that "in order to meet production demands and pressures," he usually worked "at least 10 hours per day, five days per week without any meal breaks. Approximately three times per month, I worked an additional nine-hour day without any meal breaks."	Countrywide maintains that its sales agents are exempt from overtime laws because they are management. It is attempting to get the case dismissed. A trial is scheduled for September in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Linda Dardarian, a lawyer with Goldstein, Demchak in Oakland who is representing the agents, said it was an increasingly common tactic to give rank-and-file workers fancy titles to lull them into thinking they were executives and thus not entitled to overtime. "It's a way to get more juice from the orange," Dardarian said. "Companies are squeezing every drop they can." Although declining to discuss the specifics of the suit, Countrywide executives emphasized that there was no place for slackers to hide at the 34,000-employee company. Technology would root them out. Countrywide's 800 customer service reps, for example, are so closely tracked by computers that they generate a constant stream of data, which is analyzed and then used to upgrade their performance. "We can reach down from the executive level to see that Billie Sue isn't cutting it," said Steve Bailey, Countrywide's chief operations officer. "A poor performer can be more easily trapped and dealt with and trained or moved out. We pay for performance now." That training is often done by managers who have themselves been trained by a 70-person productivity department. Such departments have become standard at many companies. Bank of America Corp. has a "quality and productivity" unit; Washington Mutual Inc. has a technology solutions group.
Countrywide's performance management group has trained a thousand midlevel managers in the last two years. Participation is voluntary, although some divisions now require attendance before a manager can be promoted. The growing use of these techniques at service companies such as Countrywide is notable, because they have traditionally lagged behind other industries in productivity gains. Unlike factories, firms that deal directly with the consumer must depend on human beings, who tend to be a lot less malleable than a piece of equipment. Countrywide executives say they are mindful of this distinction. "It's more complicated than turning up the dial on a machine. People are not machines," said John Ardy, the executive in charge of the performance management group. Still, he calls Countrywide "a people factory" and says his work is made easier by the way there always has been "a sense of the factory floor" about the company. From its founding in 1969, the company has prided itself on using technology to seize market share. Agents talk about "manufacturing" a home loan. Productivity improvements aren't necessarily about going faster. One program tried to figure out why some of the salespeople in the Plano, Texas, office ended the day with more completed mortgage applications than others. In analyzing the top 18 agents, the productivity experts discovered they actually proceeded more slowly than their colleagues. These agents talked longer with would-be borrowers, explaining the nature of the different loan packages, trying to find one that fit. Prospective customers were less likely to be confused or disappointed at the end of the call, and bail out.	After retraining, the number of completed applications rose an average of 14%, above the target. Not all productivity enhancements result from big projects. Some steps are very simple: Give constant feedback. Make productivity into a game. Offer immediate rewards. Just as electricity keeps a factory running, the Simi Valley customer service room runs on recognition. It's practically instantaneous. It's transparent too in the sense that everyone in the call center knows how everyone else is doing. There are so many balloons in the huge windowless office that it has the aura of a children's birthday party. "Way to Go!" they exhort, and "Congratulations!" "We spend quite a few thousand a month on Mylar balloons," said Terry Tracy, first vice president of customer contact. "Every balloon means something." So do the awards. Some reps have so many of the paper proclamations that they're running out of places to post them in their cubicles. Adrienne Teems has one Spotlight, two People's Choice and nine Walk of Fame awards. Golden balloons in the shape of dollar signs float languidly overhead. Two-thirds of the people who contact Countrywide each month do so online or through automated phone systems. That still leaves 900,000 callers who want a live human being. Answering phones for Countrywide is "a hard job," acknowledged Victoria Kelly, who runs the Simi Valley center. And getting harder. The minimum number of calls to which the reps are supposed to respond each day has risen from 55 last summer to 62 in the fall to the current 68. No wonder, Kelly said, "we try to keep it light and fun."
Fun, in fact, is institutionalized. Everyone has pompoms on their desks, which they shake at celebratory moments. The workers get to vote on what clothes their supervisors wear. They recently competed to see who was best at rolling a frozen Cornish game hen down the aisles. Not all employees have been having such a jolly time. The lawsuit by three agents in the Rosemead office has mushroomed into a class-action case that includes 400 past and current agents in that call center. The suit gives examples of e-mail messages from Rosemead managers: "If you want to make it here put in lots of extra hours." Another says: "Work your tails off. That means 10 hour plus days." One reason for the heavy workload was the tremendous refinancing boom. But Countrywide wasn't just keeping up with the competition; it was gobbling up more market share. It now makes one out of eight home loans in the country, and is gaining on leaders Wells Fargo & Co. and Washington Mutual. Countrywide's goal: one in four. Marlene Veal, a former Rosemead agent, says she worked as hard as she could, missing years of watching her children grow up. "In order to meet production demands and pressures, I worked approximately 50 to 55 hours per week," Veal said in a court declaration. On the instructions of management, she regularly worked through lunch, eating the Chinese food or pizza the company supplied.	This was called a "lunch-in." On lunch-in days, sales agents said they needed special permission to leave the office. According to court papers filed last June, lunch-ins were ordered nearly every day from 2000 to 2003, with the exception of a few months. Veal, who now works in a Countrywide branch office in San Dimas, said she took off three months in late 1999 for stress-induced depression stemming from her job. Another Countrywide employee said Rosemead management viewed agents in purely utilitarian terms. "It's like using a desk," said the employee, who asked not to be named because the company has recently warned workers against talking to the press. "When the desk isn't good anymore, they get a new desk. And when the human isn't good anymore, they get a new human." Agents who have worked in Rosemead said every completed loan earned them a credit of about $100 to $150. But "dings" would subtract from that fee. A ding was an infraction of the rules. "Not reading a wrap-up script verbatim, that was a ding," the agent said. "There was an actual chart of dings — they cost anywhere from an eighth of a credit up to a whole credit. People viewed the dings with resentment, as the company trying to chip away at what they made." One way to get dinged was to close fewer loans than your colleagues. It was yet another way the company kept up the pressure.
If a Rosemead worker could avoid too many dings, and keep up with the rising pace of work, he or she could make more than $100,000. But the hours were so long that it was like working two jobs. "Weren't computers supposed to allow us to work less?" asked the agent, who said he was now much happier in a Countrywide branch office. "Instead, they're being used to make us work harder." A Countrywide spokeswoman, noting the company was "vigorously defending this case," said the company was lobbying to have the national overtime laws changed. Advocates for labor say the proposed revisions will greatly reduce overtime protection. When productivity levels first rose in the late '90s, economists attributed it to the hundreds of billions that had been invested in technology. But when they increased again in 2002 and 2003, some moved beyond amazement into disbelief. "Something looks fishy," Richard Freeman, director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, said after the third-quarter 2003 rate jumped 9.5%. It was the second-highest quarter since 1971. "Maybe white-collar workers are being squeezed," Freeman said. "Maybe their hours are being understated." Other economists wonder whether the sharp rise in productivity is sparked not so much by new technology as new attitudes. Corporate America lost its last shreds of paternalism in the 1990s and introduced something more ferocious, they say. According to this theory, competition for market share was intense, so companies couldn't raise prices. The only alternative was to cut costs. Bonus plans tied to performance became widespread.	"These incentives caused executives and lower-level managers to take risks, to work harder and to engage in the unpleasant personnel tasks associated with reorganization and staff reductions," Martin Feldstein, the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, wrote in a paper he delivered last year. These "unpleasant personnel tasks" can sometimes encompass uprooting entire divisions. In an August interview with CNBC, Countrywide Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo complained about the high cost of doing business in California. "Anything over eight hours a day, you have to pay overtime, even though it's less than 40 hours a week," Mozilo said. Fewer than half of Countrywide's employees remain in California. "Because we have to remain competitive, we continue to move them out of the state, principally into Texas and Arizona," Mozilo said. But Texas is not entirely problem-free for Countrywide. The company is facing two suits in federal court in Dallas for alleged overtime violations. Attorney Caryl Boies of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, who is representing both groups of plaintiffs, declined to comment. So did Countrywide. Perhaps this is why the company is looking farther afield and planning to rapidly expand its staff in India. Mozilo made clear in comments a month ago to the Mortgage Bankers Assn. that offshoring "will be a very important factor" in Countrywide's continued efforts to lower costs. One of the agents represented in the California suit acknowledged that any victory in the courts might come at a great cost. "The price we pay," he said, "is to potentially lose our jobs."

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These two articles ARE related (the short Amazon River one stuffed into the second-column top of the longer Disney/Eisner/Ovitz one); you don't have to be a mental giant to see 'American free-enterprise, capitalist excesses' manifest thruout the world (the Amazon, for example) -which reminds me, some scientists are beginning to think that we should be spending more time thinking about the realities of an asteroid strike.

February 28, 2004 Los Angeles Times : THE NATION As Spender, Ovitz Was $6-Million Man Documents in a lawsuit could hurt Disney Chairman Eisner before a key shareholder vote. By Michael Cieply and James Bates, Times Staff Writers Just five weeks after hiring Hollywood power agent Michael Ovitz as president of Walt Disney Co. in 1995, Chairman Michael Eisner believed his friend should be fired. But he hesitated out of fear that Ovitz would commit suicide. That version of events is contained in hundreds of pages of newly unsealed court documents detailing the stormy partnership between two of the most influential figures in Hollywood over the last 20 years. The documents, filed in connection with a Delaware shareholder suit against Disney's board of directors, provide a particularly unflattering view of Ovitz, whose stratospheric spending was extravagant even by Hollywood standards.During the 15 months he worked at Disney, Ovitz burned through $6 million on personal expenses, according to the records. But it's Eisner who stands to lose the most from the release of the documents. Their emergence comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Disney chairman, who next week faces a challenge by some shareholders to force him from the board. In recent days, a number of state employee pension funds and two influential shareholder advisory firms have recommended against voting for Eisner's reelection as a director. On Friday, pension funds from Ohio and North Carolina joined the list. (>>>)	February 28, 2004 Los Angeles Times (pA12) Amazon Fires Changing Continent's Climate Smoke from burning forests in the amazon is affecting the climate across South America -drying up rain and making storms that do develop much more violent, scientists reported Thursday.     Smoke, partly from agricultural and deforestation fires, rises to the clouds, delaying the release of rain and allowing clouds to grow taller than they otherwise would, the researchers said.     Higher clouds produce violent thunderstorms, and while less rain falls to the ground, it often comes in the form of hail and rainstorms instead of more nourishing, gentle rains, the international team reported in the journal Science. Although Eisner's election is assured because he is running unopposed, a significant protest vote at the company's annual meeting on Wednesday could weaken him to the point where the board would feel compelled to push him aside. Company officials are privately predicting that Eisner may fail to win as much as 30% of the vote. The documents in Delaware Chancery Court resurrect issues now being used to criticize Eisner's judgment and leadership. Shareholder advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co., for one, cited the legal papers in concluding that Eisner "failed to respect fully the separation of the company's interests from his own and those of his friends and personal business partners." (>>>)
The release of the court papers was coincidental and not timed to influence the shareholder vote. Indeed, two of the defendants — former directors Roy E. Disney and Stanley P. Gold — are now spearheading the anti-Eisner campaign. Ovitz did not respond to a request for comment. A Disney spokesman declined to comment. But in a legal challenge filed Friday, lawyers for Disney directors attacked as "one-sided" and "seriously flawed" one key filing: a report by Deborah A. DeMott, a Duke University law professor retained as an expert witness by the shareholders, who are contesting the circumstances surrounding Ovitz's hiring and firing. In her report, DeMott said Eisner decided to hire Ovitz as Disney president before consulting the company's board of directors. The two men decided during an August 1995 hike in Aspen, Colo., that Ovitz should join Disney. Before board approval, DeMott said, remodeling began on Ovitz's future office and appraisals were sought for his corporate jet. The board signed off in late September. Ovitz rose to overriding power in Hollywood during the 1980s, when he and his Creative Artists Agency dominated the film business with a roster of top stars and directors. After brokering such high-profile corporate deals as the sale of MCA Inc. to Matsushita, he abandoned the agency and became Eisner's understudy at Disney. But the partnership between the two strong-willed men went downhill quickly, leading to a controversial cash-and-stock severance package valued at nearly $100 million when Ovitz left. The package soon rose in value to as much as $140 million as Disney's stock price increased but later dropped as the shares tumbled. (>>>)	A specially commissioned review of Ovitz's expenses was quietly carried out after his departure. Dubbed "Project MSO" — for Ovitz's initials — it uncovered a level of spending that infuriated Disney executives. Ovitz, according to the study by an independent accountant, spent more than $2 million to remodel his office. At one point, he and his decorator proposed changes to the woodwork. The tab: $150,000. It wasn't his only capital improvement. Disney also spent $48,305 on Ovitz's home screening room and $14,055 on his home office. To ensure that Ovitz motored in style, the company plunked down $99,135 to buy his BMW from his former employer. Disney also spent nearly $80,000 on hundreds of gifts given by Ovitz to Hollywood players and others. Among the goodies: a $946 "firearm" for director Robert Zemeckis and a $200 cigar cutter for producer Al Ruddy. The multimillionaire sought reimbursement for even small gifts: $53 in Disney baby apparel for actor Tom Cruise; $65 for Disney clothing and a pen for Oprah Winfrey; $85 in Disney items for Madonna; and $68 in videos for David Letterman's birthday. A good many of Ovitz's expenses were compiled while he entertained at his home, according to the accountant's report. The bill was $348,445, with most of the charges exceeding company guidelines. Those charges included $179 for flowers for a breakfast with Variety Editor Peter Bart. (>>>)
But Ovitz seemed to live large outside too. He billed Disney $97,868 for Los Angeles Laker basketball tickets and $33,172 at restaurants such as Matsuhisa and Chez Panisse with the likes of Cruise, Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. At the time, Katzenberg was engaged in a legal fight with Disney over money he said he was owed. Questions about Ovitz's emotional stability are a central point in the report. Based on a deposition from Disney investor Sid Bass, DeMott wrote that Eisner considered firing Ovitz after five weeks. But he didn't "because he believed being fired would be devastating emotionally to Mr. Ovitz. Instead, he decided he should wait twelve months before bringing Mr. Ovitz's employment to an end." The report continued: "More specifically, Mr. Eisner believed that, if fired, Mr. Ovitz would commit suicide." DeMott said Bass opposed Ovitz's hiring. Eisner supposedly told Bass he also "harbored doubts" about Ovitz's suitability from the beginning. A key issue, according to DeMott, was the agent's "veracity." The law professor said Bass testified in the deposition that Ovitz had made a false statement to him "the first time they met." Eisner, the document said, also became concerned that Ovitz wasn't complying with company policy governing the reporting of gifts and other matters. Eisner asked Irwin Russell, a director and his personal lawyer, to keep track of Ovitz. (>>>)	In a note dated June 24, nine months into Ovitz's stint as president, Eisner told Russell: "(1) Michael is obviously not reporting gifts. (2) He told me some of his stock pickers are buying Disney. Please put on your list." Eisner upbraided Ovitz in a letter for meddling with a Variety story. Ovitz claimed he had been sent an advance copy for "corrections and tone and editing." On Friday, Bart said he had let Ovitz look at one of his Variety columns but only after it had gone to the printer. "I'm keenly aware that Ovitz always liked to boast of the degree to which he could manipulate the press," Bart said. Eisner apparently tired of what he too regarded as manipulation. "You played the angles too much, exaggerated the truth too far, manipulated me and others too much," he wrote in a November 1996 letter suggesting that Ovitz resign. Around that time, Eisner and Ovitz had a final encounter in New York to work out Ovitz's exit, according to DeMott's report. On Dec. 27, 1996, Disney officially declared Ovitz gone. (>>>)
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) Power spender A document unveiled in a Delaware court this week said Michael Ovitz cost Disney $6.3 million in expenses during his brief tenure in the mid-1990s. Here's where some of the money went, according to an independent accountant's report. Limousine, rental cars ...$76,413 Security services ...$149,391 Office supplies... $34,743 Aircraft usage... $654,200 Home X-ray machine... $6,100 (>>>)	Home screening room... $48,305 55 Lichtenstein prints... $23,650 Office remodeling... $2,061,237 Dinner with Janet Jackson... $2,139 Dinner with Sen. John F. Kerry... $137 Breakfast with the Rev. Jesse Jackson...$812 Videos for Billy Crystal...$22 Sugimoto print for Tom Hanks...$4,424 Christmas tips... $6,500 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences dues... $200 Phone bill... $34,910 Source: Pricewaterhouse

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(*d) March-April 2004 American Scientist Magazine p167
The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual
by Richard Sosis
[picture and caption excerpt -the author, notably, makes no comment in the body of the article about 'the negative influences of religion on society'; he merely observes that 'The more binding a religion is, the more it binds its people together!' -WOW!]

Figure 1. People across the globe engage in religious rituals that require a considerable amount of time or personal sacrifice. Ultraorthodox Jews spend hours every day worshiping at the Western Wall in Jerusalem (upper left). Vegans of Phuket, Thailand, perform various acts of self-torture, including bathing in hot oil, fire walking and piercing themselves with sharp implements during their annual vegetarian festival (upper right). Shiite Muslims in Karbala, Iraq, beat their backs with chains to mark the killing of one of their saints, Imam Hussein (lower left). And young Christian men in Bulgaria dive into icy waters to retrieve a crucifix to mark the feast of Epiphany Monday (lower right). From an evolutionary perspective these behaviors seem maladaptive, prompting anthropologists to ask why natural selection would favor a psychology that engages in such acts. It turns out that the answer can be found by studying the ecology of animal communication.

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I just can't imagine myself on the new QUEEN MARY 2, not even for free -perryb

February 22, 2004 Los Angeles Times SPECIAL CRUISE ISSUE: QUEEN MARY 2 Promise of elegance in an era of anything goes On the Queen Mary 2's first Caribbean voyage, the gorgeous ship lives up to its billing as the grand dame of ocean liners, but the service and food don't always hit their marks. By Beverly Beyette, Times Staff Writer But would the Duchess of Windsor have sported a Queen Mary 2 baseball cap? That thought ran through my mind as I perused the ship's photo gallery of the grand and gracious era of Cunard ocean liners. There were the Duke and Duchess, who had brought their pug and perhaps 150 pieces of monogrammed Louis Vuitton luggage. There, too, was Noel Coward, who asked, famously, "Why do the wrong people travel and the right people stay at home?" What would he have made of golf shirts at dinner? Cunard — which coined the slogan "Getting there is half the fun" — had been hyping this ship as the "largest, longest, tallest, widest and grandest liner ever built."	Would it live up to the hype? To find out, I joined about 2,550 other passengers, mostly Americans, on the QM2's second voyage, an 11-day journey that sailed Jan. 31 from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (I skipped the maiden voyage, a Jan. 12 transatlantic crossing from Southampton, England, to give ship and crew time to work out the kinks.) I came home with an official maiden voyager certificate (it was the maiden Caribbean cruise), some QM2 souvenirs (made in China) — and mixed feelings. The ship is beautiful, stunningly so. But some things just weren't up to snuff. The food in the main dining room was uneven, not the promised "gustatory celebration," and the service, although it improved as we went, was not the impeccable, seamless pampering many had expected with a crew-to-passenger ratio of about 1 to 2. Trying to get a seat, or a drink, in one of the main bars before dinner was an endurance test. (continued)
As for glamorous evenings with women in beaded gowns sweeping across the ballroom floor, we had only two formal nights in 11 nights at sea, but five informal nights and four casual nights, the last category being, in my view, an abomination. Somehow, foie gras on Wedgwood china just wasn't the same when some diners looked as though they were dressed for a dash to 7-Eleven. Were those who showed up on informal nights dressed to the hilt — bless them — making a statement? (Cruise director Ray Rouse said Cunard would be "revisiting, rethinking" casual nights.) All of which poses the question: Can the QM2 sell elegance in an era of inelegance? Or must it cater to lowered standards? Must there be slot machines blinking and clanging just off the wide, red-carpeted promenade leading to the Britannia dining room, a magnificent two-tier space with sweeping staircase and vaulted backlighted glass ceiling? And must the Wish-Bone dressings be served straight from the bottle at the salad bar in the Kings Court buffet? There is much to love about the QM2, from bow to stern on all 14 passenger decks. The public rooms are grand. The 8,000-volume library has cozy corners for reading. I loved the smart, nautically themed Commodore Club bar and the Winter Garden, where, as a harpist played, we sat in wicker chairs under a trompe l'oeil ceiling, sipping tea served by white-gloved waiters. The social staff was terrific, jollying up passengers, injecting fun into bingo, horse races and team trivia. Cruise director Rouse, who long ago sailed with Cunard as half of a dance duo, had such infectious enthusiasm that he could have talked me into doing a tango.	Pomp and circumspect As we embarked at Fort Lauderdale's Port Everglades, four trumpeters dressed like Buckingham Palace guards heralded us. We walked up a red-carpeted ramp and into the grand lobby with its curving twin staircases and soaring six-deck atrium. Before returning to Port Everglades the morning of Feb. 11, we would drop anchor in Puerto Rico; St. Kitts; Martinique; Barbados; St. Lucia; Dominica; and St. Thomas. A split of champagne was cooling in my category B3 deluxe balcony room on Deck 8. ( For this category, the price was $3,749 per person. Standard inside rooms started at $1,999 per person, before taxes, deluxe balcony rooms with better views at $4,629 per person. Single surcharges were as much as 100%.) Soon the buy-your-own-champagne sail-away party, driven undercover by rain, was underway in the pavilion pool area, with musicians in island shirts playing calypso. We eased away from the dock and, just offshore, were treated to a splendid fireworks display in the night sky. I had chosen late meal seating, so at 8:30 I made my way to the Britannia room, eager to meet my table companions. I was in luck, soon joined by four fun-loving people who "adopted" me. (continued)
The QM2 boasts of having "the largest wine collection at sea," but we almost had to trip the wine steward to get any. Martinis arrived, inexplicably, in margarita glasses. Although we were five at a table for six, the extra setting was never cleared. Back in my stateroom, I found that Nelson, my steward, had turned down the king-size bed, pulled the draperies across the glass wall opening to my balcony and left bedside chocolates. I ordered breakfast in bed for the next morning and snuggled under the fluffy duvet. The room was lovely, in soft gold and burgundy with black-accented blond wood. There were a sofa and table and a desk with mini-refrigerator. Piquι robes with Cunard's lion and crown logo hung in one of the two closets. The bath, with stall shower, was well designed. My view: an orange lifeboat, with glimpses of ocean to either side. The TV had CNN and BBC, movies and an interactive system enabling us to send e-mail, book pricey shore excursions ($29 to $149 per person) and other things I never quite got the hang of, though I did manage to order breakfast electronically. (Is this really easier than check marks on a door hanger?) One channel featured Dan and Ivan, the ship's shopping gurus, talking about diamonds and rum cake buys ashore. (QM2 voyagers descended with purpose on those island jewelry shops.) Our second night on board was formal. At the captain's cocktail party under the crystal chandeliers in the Queens Room, the crowd was huge, the hors d'oeuvres scarce. The men were like a sea of penguins, the women attired in everything from thrown- together bits to sequins and feathers.	Two days out, we anchored off San Juan, Puerto Rico, and piled into the ship's tenders to go ashore. As it would be at each of our seven ports of call, our arrival was an event, with costumed dancers and free rum punch. Even with three full days at sea, time flew. There were talks on subjects ranging from maritime archeology to scarf tying. The latter was standing room only, cruise hostess Maureen Ryan said, adding, "Not everybody wants to listen to a lecture on 18th century pottery." There were interactive language classes, computer and dance classes, music in three bars, a nightclub, a ballroom with orchestra, movies under the stars. And, in Illuminations, the first seagoing planetarium, a dome that lowered to give us virtual stars in a virtual sky. My bedtime reading was a big history of the QM2 placed in my stateroom. There I learned the lovely story about the naming of the first Queen Mary. (See Page 4.) The ship was to have been the Victoria — until Cunard asked permission of King George V to name it "after England's greatest queen" (his grandmother). Said the king, "My wife [Mary] would be delighted." The Southampton-based Queen Mary 2, the first true ocean liner in more than three decades — the last was Queen Elizabeth 2, which made its debut in 1969 — is a bold and expensive (nearly $800-million) venture for Carnival Corp., which owns Cunard. The vessel was designed, Cunard says, not as a ship of times past but as a ship of its time: more hip, less stuffy, with high-tech amenities and the grace and grandeur of a classic liner. Can these two concepts find happiness together? (continued)
Gone are the miles of open deck found on earlier luxury liners, replaced by outdoor bars, sports courts, five pools (no topless sunbathing, please) and a wildly popular $40-an-hour golf simulator. One always felt a bit superior, standing high on the QM2 decks, looking down on cruise ships in port. One day, as we returned a whistle salute from another ship with a blast of our mighty whistle (which came from the first Queen Mary), a woman on our ship yelled, "Take that!" The QM2 cruises, but it is not a cruise ship. It is an ocean liner, sleeker and sturdier, designed to tame rough seas. (We had none.) It's prettier too. As we put into ports, passengers on cruise ships lined the rails to gawk. Helicopters circled. We were an A attraction. (As one cruise ship glided by, one of our crew sniffed, "That's not a ship. That's a block of flats.") Solely in the interest of research, I booked one day at the lavish Canyon Ranch SpaClub for a 50-minute massage ($99, including tip). As I slipped out of my Cunard robe and slippers in the treatment room, therapist Jennifer, an Aussie, sprayed crisp sheets with lavender. Gregorian chants played. Divine. Passing on the aromatic steam room and crushed ice rubdown, I met my dinner companions for lunch in Todd English. There was no surcharge to eat in the 156-seat restaurant on my trip, but Todd English has proved such a hot ticket that a charge of $20 for lunch and $30 for dinner is being introduced. It overlooks a pool area aft and is smartly done up in gray and burgundy. Food and service were superb. When Stephen, a young Irish waiter, offered madame his arm, I told him that hadn't happened below in Britannia. "But this is Todd English," he said.	Passengers cast a critical eye On board this ship were 850 members of the Cunard World Club, repeat passengers who seemed less forgiving of lapses than the newcomers. They grumbled about everything from the absence of palate-cleansing sorbet between dinner courses to having to tote their beach towels from room to deck. The multinational crew of 1,241 was young, willing and friendly but largely inexperienced; a third of them had never before been to sea. "That's probably the biggest challenge of all," said Ronald Warwick, the ship's commodore. Jan and Jerry Shriber, a retired Utah couple, were among Cunard repeaters. She loved the QM2's dιcor but wished for more decorum. "The cruise ship is practically the last bastion of civilization," she said. He thought the ship needed "fine-tuning" but liked its potential. "I have a feeling they were in too much of a hurry to get it afloat and have it start paying for itself," he said. World Clubber Thomas Deucker, a Palm Springs real estate investor, said the ship "has a lot more drama and is more beautiful" than the QE2, but "we had more personalized service on the QE2. Here, we have to wave people down." Carlos Menendez, a Miami bank president, and his wife, Teresa, frequent cruisers, were on their first Cunard ship and, she said, "probably our last." There were kinks to be ironed out, but, she said, "We didn't pay for kinks. The lack of elegance is a real disappointment. The ship doesn't set high standards. They need to give guidance to people who do not have these standards." (continued)
Her husband said, "They've been running big ships for a long time and they should have a formula." The ship itself? "There's nothing better," but poor service and mediocre food "erase everything else." The crew seemed aware of the shortcomings. A wine steward said, "For fine service, we need double" the staff. "We do our best, but we are always a little late." That's for sure, said Ron Smith, a Glasgow, Scotland, wallpaper entrepreneur. "I like a long meal," he said, "but I don't want to spend the night." My steward said the ship's sheer size presented a problem. A simple errand could take too much time away from routine chores. He was tending 14 cabins, changing sheets every three days. But there were many aboard who thought it was idyllic. At least one couple were so enchanted that they had hoped to stay on for the 12-day Rio de Janeiro cruise but couldn't get accommodations. Jesse and Peggy Booth, both 80, of Sun City Center, Fla., were happy voyagers who loved the ship so much they never went ashore. They met in London during World War II and were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, having marked their 50th on the QE2.	Entertaining the guests At night in the Queens Room, unattached women were whirled around the dance floor by the six gentlemen hosts, including the courtly George Sexton, a 72-year-old Atlanta widower. "Have tuxedo, will travel," said Sexton, who is not paid and pays $28 a day to his booking agency. The lure? World travel. Rules are strict. "We don't dance with the same lady until all the ladies have been danced with," he said. Although hosts must be good dancers, showing off is bad form. "The idea is to do what the lady can do and look nice doing it," even if it's a samba and the lady has two left feet. And no hanky-panky. "I've had them try to get me into their cabin," Sexton said. "You have to act like it didn't happen. Night, night. Sleep tight." Each day's daily "programme" offered something for everyone — an art auction, perhaps, or an acting workshop by graduates of London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. One day there was a reunion of about 60 passengers from the first Queen Mary, including several men who had sailed as guests of Uncle Sam during World War II, when it was a troop transport. With 15,000 troops aboard, one recalled, "We slept in pup tents strung from poles in the hold." Reunion-goers included Elaine Peters of Pacific Palisades, who crossed on the Queen Mary — second class — as a student in 1957. "We'd sneak up and play bingo in first class and sneak down to the disco in tourist and dance all night." She was happy with the QM2. (continued)
Unlike the Queen Mary that she remembered, the QM2 is not strictly a multi-class ship. Passengers in the most costly accommodations have separate dining rooms — the Princess Grill and Queens Grill — but mix with the bourgeoisie in the public rooms, including the Royal Court Theatre. There, sitting on red plush chairs, we watched nightly stage shows of varying quality, but without name talent. Headliners "want the best cabins for themselves" and freebies for their entourages, Rouse explained. His biggest challenge, he said, is keeping passengers awake for the shows. "These people are walking the decks at 6:30 in the morning. By evening, they're nodding off in the Royal Court." (The demographic is decidedly older.) The QM2 promises to be kid- and pet-friendly. Although the kennel was not yet operational, British nannies — a complimentary perk — were on board. In the Play Zone, nanny Helen Brown, 29, showed me the nursery, the Minnows pool and the soft play area for safety in rough seas. Nannies had baby-sat 20 of the 22 kids on board, amusing them with games on the kiddie deck where, Brown pointed out, the railing is padded "so they can't pop overboard." High up on the bridge, I stood with Commodore Warwick as the QM2 was anchored in the turquoise waters off Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. The white-bearded skipper, 63, is a Cunard man tried and true; he and his father were masters of the QE2. The QM2, he said, performs "beyond all expectations. A very maneuverable ship, considering its size, quite incredible. It's easier to handle than the QE2." Although he was standing before an impressive bank of computers, he was quick to point out that "computers aren't driving the ship." That's done by humans, using computer data to maneuver the "joysticks" on the giant console. The skipper smiled and said, "We didn't even have calculators when I started." I asked him about security, which was tight. Our ship-issued ID cards were scanned coming and going, our bags X-rayed. No visitors were allowed. "In this day and age, everything's vulnerable," Warwick said. "In some ways this ship is an attractive target, but not if you compare it with the World Trade Center. This ship's always on the move." For now, he commands the queen of the seas. It's a ship, he said, that "reflects changing lifestyles." In 30 years, maybe 40, he knows that it, too, will be passe.	(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) Getting on board with the Queen Mary 2 BOOKING THE QM2: Cunard Line, 6100 Blue Lagoon Drive, Suite 400, Miami, FL 33126; (800) 7-CUNARD (728-6273), http://www.cunard.com , or see a travel agent. PRICES: Fares for the QM2 vary widely, depending on the itinerary and the length of the sailing. For example, for a grand duplex on the ship's maiden Southampton-to-New York transatlantic six-day crossing in April, brochure rates range from $1,869 for a standard inside cabin to $27,499. Discounts and airfare-cruise packages are available. Basic cruise prices do not include such extras as bar drinks, bingo and horse-racing games, or shore excursions, which can be costly, up to $149 a person on the Caribbean maiden voyage. Each passenger is assessed $121 to cover staff tips, but it is customary to tip the waiter and cabin steward extra for good service. ITINERARIES: Through the end of the year, the QM2 will make transatlantic crossings between England and New York and sail to Brazil, Europe, Canada, New England and the Caribbean. DRESS CODE: Cruises have casual (shirt sleeves for men, skirts or pants and blouses for women), informal (jackets for men, dresses or dressy pantsuits for women) and formal nights (tuxedos or dark suits for men, evening dresses or evening pantsuits for women). DINING: The QM2 follows shipboard dining tradition, and passengers can choose between an early dinner seating at 6 p.m. and a late seating at 8:30 p.m. in the Britannia, the main dining room. Beverly Beyette February 22, 2004

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I always tell people to read the various Dear Abby and Ann Landers columns for what they say about what voter knowledge in our American democracy -read those columns, and weep, for what they say is that 'Everyone has a chance to vote (his ignorance)' -and a chance to be manipulated by those that know better. (Which reminds me, why is Iraq Dubya's to 'correct'?) Be that what it be, the below is fun and should be, but it is also not too far off from what many voters 'know'. -perryb

February 21 2004 The Economist Obituary Eddie Clontz, master of tabloid journalism, died on January 26th, aged 56 The relationship between truth and reporting has ever been a tricky one. No scene remains undistorted as it passes the eye of the beholder, and none reaches the page exactly as it was. But while living with this discrepancy, many journalists struggle with a much baser temptation. What they really want to put into their copy is that extraordinary "fact", that jaw-dropping story retailed by a single source down a crackling telephone line, which would earn them a banner headline if they could only stand it up. Eddie Clontz felt this more than most, and he never resisted the temptation. As the deviser and, for 20 years, the editor-in-chief of Weekly World News, his delight was to run the wildest stories he could find. He described himself not as an editor but as a circus-master, drawing readers into his tent with an endless parade of fantasies and freaks. The News had, and has, an unassuming look, a black-and-white tabloid with blurry graphics that sits at supermarket checkouts across America, among the chewing gum. But its headlines, in inch-high sans serif, are another matter. "ARCHEOLOGISTS FIND MIDDLE EARTH IN NEW JERSEY SWAMP!" "SEVEN CONGRESSMEN ARE ZOMBIES!" "TINY TERRORISTS DISGUISED AS GARDEN GNOMES!" ("These guys are typical al-Qaeda operatives,' says a top CIA source, 'with beards down to their belt buckles'.") Such stories, all from one recent issue, would have made Mr Clontz proud. The News for which he was hired, in 1981, was a sorry affair, a dumping ground for stories that failed to make the National Enquirer. It had been started mostly to make use of the Enquirer's old black-and-white presses after the sister-tabloid had gone to colour. Mr Clontz soon shook it up. Out went the tired celebrity gossip; in came space aliens, dinosaurs, giant vegetables, and a "Psychic" column in which his brother Derek would find readers' car keys. Circulation soared. In a good week, it can reach well over a million. Two stories in particular got Mr Clontz noticed. In 1988, his organ revealed that "ELVIS IS ALIVE! (King of Rock 'n' Roll Faked his Death and is Living in Kalamazoo, Mich!)". A few years later, the News reported that a bat boy, with huge ears and amber eyes and 'eating his own weight in insects each single day', had been found by scientists in a cave in West Virginia. Both items were followed up for years. Elvis went on appearing; Bat Boy escaped, was recaptured by the FBI, fell in love and endorsed Al Gore for president. Readers wrote in with their own sightings, bolstering whatever truth the nation believed was there. In 1993, Mr Clontz dared to kill the resurrected Elvis ("ELVIS DEAD AT 58!") only to reveal some time later that this death, too, had been a hoax. Scallops to scoops Sheer chance seemed to bring Mr Clontz to this strange outpost of journalism. After dropping out of school at 16 and trying his luck as a scallop fisherman, he became a copy boy on his local paper in North Carolina. He moved next to a Florida paper, and from there to the disreputable corner office in the Enquirer building, in a run-down resort near Palm Beach, from which he was to entertain and terrify America.

His own politics were mysterious. Under the pseudonym "Ed Anger", he wrote a News column so vitriolically right-wing that it possibly came from the left. Anger hated foreigners, yoga, whales, speed limits and pineapple on pizza; he liked flogging, electrocutions and beer. No, Mr Clontz would say, he had no idea who Anger really was. But he was “about as close to him as any human being." Mr Clontz also always denied that his staff made the stories up. It was subtler than that. Many tips came from "freelance correspondents" who called in; their stories were "checked", but never past the point where they might disintegrate. ("We don't know whether stories are true," said Mr Clontz, "and we really don't care.") The staff also read dozens of respectable newspapers and magazines, antennae alert for the daft and the bizarre. When a nugget was found, Mr Clontz would order them to run away with it, urging them to greater imaginative heights by squirting them with a giant water-pistol. Yet he also showed care for authenticity. If a story resisted tracking down, he would give it the dateline "Bolivia". If it relied on "scientific research", he would make sure the scientists were Bulgarian. Writers who made up the names of Georgia natives terrorised by giant chickens would be asked to check in the telephone book to make sure they did not exist. Loving editorial attention was given to the face of Satan when he appeared in a cloud formation over New York. The result of this was that many readers appeared to believe Mr Clontz's stories. Letters poured in, especially from the conservative and rural parts of the country where Ed Anger's columns struck a chord. If a sensible man like Anger kept company with aliens and 20-pound cucumbers, perhaps those stories too were true. When the News reported the discovery of a hive of baby ghosts, more than a thousand readers wrote in to adopt one. But the saddest tale was of the soldier who wrote, in all seriousness, offering marriage to the two-headed woman.

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As the people of New England migrated towards the Mississippi, what they found were huge growths of great chestnut trees -edible nuts(?) perhaps, but incredibly beautiful, hard wood that they turned into homes and furniture. Those trees were so 'harvested' in time into eventually isolated stands -disease later following that, that the average American today knows absolutely nothing about their existence. Be that what it be, the French (below) generally have a little more sensitivity to ecology than we do because they've had more time and situation of fleshed-out land to learn, but it seems that 'economic growth and competition' can overcome that too (American 'free-enterprise capitalism' now driving the entire world). -'Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do' (poetic license :-)

February 14, 2004 The Economist France's Environment The Killer Trees A wrong-headed campaign against roadside trees The tree-lined roads painted by Alfred Sisley and his fellow impressionists are emblematic of France. Yet they are vanishing fast. Forty kilometres (25 miles) of 200-year-old plane trees, in their neat twin rows, have just been cut down near Levignac, in the south-west, to make way for a convoy of components for Airbus's A380 superjumbo, being built in Toulouse. According to a survey by the French forestry commission, 20,000km of roadside trees (some 3m trees, or almost 90% of the total) have gone in the past 30 years. Although they are often said to be a legacy of Napoleon, who wanted to give shade to his soldiers, France's roadside trees actually date to the 16th century, when Henri IV ordered the building of straight roads flanked by arbres d'alignement on both sides. Planted to provide firewood and building materials, as well as shade, to passing armies, the plane trees later became loved for their beauty, eulogised by such writers as Balzac and Colette and, later, by film directors such as Jean-luc Godard. Now their numbers have dwindled to a mere 250,000. Road improvements and concerns about road deaths are to blame. "lateral obstacles", usually trees, account for nearly two-fifths of the country's fatal car accidents. In most cases, a drunken driver veers off the road and hits a tree. Camus was killed in 1960 when his publisher drove into a tree, as was Coluche (a comedian fond of a bottle of wine at lunch) in 1986. Yet, as Chantal Fauche. a 50-year-old trees teacher, sagely observes, "if you hit a tree, it is not the fault of the tree." She is the founder of Arbres et Routes, an association for the protection of roadside trees, based in the department of Gers. The doughty Mme Fauche has managed to save several thousand trees in the past few years, by painstaking negotiations with local councils. The number of road deaths in France has fallen by over 20%, to below 6,000 a year, since the government cracked down on speeding last year. A campaign has begun against drunk driving. Yet the tree massacre continues, at the rate of 100 a day. The government is offering to plant two trees to replace everyone lost to the A380. But, as Mme Fauche notes, "it takes 100 years to grow a plane tree but just five minutes to cut it down."

February 14, 2004 Los Angeles Times (pA14) Most Fertile Soil in U.S. Is Covered by Cities U.S. cities have been built on the most fertile soil in the country, lessening the contributions of these lands to the food web and human agliculture, accordingto a NASA study. Though cities account for just 3% of U.S. continental land area, the land they occupy could produce as much food as the 29% of land area now used for agriculture.    The loss of fertile soil increases the pressure for production on less fertile soil, leading to overuse of fertilizers and other detrimental effects, the study said. February 15, 2004 Los Angeles Time The ugly fruit of racist roots Book Reviews [first paragraph only -more than enough -perryb] by Daniel Levitas A Hundred Little Hitlers The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America Elinor Langer Metropolitan Books: 386pp.,$26 Gods of the Blood The Pagan Revival and White Separatism Mattias Gardell Duke University Press: 440 pp., $23.95 paper Ore. Seraw was returning home from a party with two companions, who also were beaten by his assailants. The attackers were atllliated with a local skinhead group, East Side White Pride. Kyle Brewster, 19, a heavily tattooed former high school homecoming king, pummeled Seraw while one or more skinhead girls screamed "Kill him, kill him!" from the sidelines. Kenneth Mieske, 23, the burly lead singer of a death-metal rock band, blindsided Seraw with a baseball bat. Steve Strasser, 20, drove his steel-toed boots into Seraw's crumpled body as he tried to crawl away .Mieske then delivered the fatal blow, pulverizing Seraw's skull, leaving him prostrate in a pool of blood and vomit. ...

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The below is excerpted from the linguistics magazine, Verbatim -both fun and more than a little informative on the breadth of material many of us are not even aware of (if you have time for that sort of thing). - perryb

The Case For Small Words Richard Lederer San Diego, California ... You don't have to be a great author, statesman, or philosopher to tap the energy and eloquence of small words. Each winter I asked my ninth graders at St. Paul's School to write a composition composed entirely of one-syllaable words. My students greeted my request with obligatory moans and groans, but when they returned to class with their essays, most felt that, with the pressure to produce high-sounding polysyllaables relieved, they had created some of their most powerful and luminous prose. Here are submissions from two of my ninth graders: What can you say to a boy who has left home? You can say that he has done wrong, but he does not care. He has left home so that he will not have to deal with what you say. He wants to go as far as he can. He will do what he wants to do. This boy does not want to be forced to go to church, to comb his hair, or to be on time. A good time for this boy does not lie in your reach, for what you have he does not want. He dreams of ripped jeans, shirts with no starch, and old socks. So now this boy is on a bus to a place he dreams of, a place with no rules. This boy now walks a strange street, his long hair blown back by the wind. He wears no coat or tie, just jeans and an old short. He hates your world, and he has left it. -Charles Shaffer For a long time we cruised by the coast and at last came to a wide bay past the curve of a hill, at the end of which lay a small town. Our long boat ride at an end, we all stretched and stood up to watch as the boat nosed its way in.

The town climbed up the hill that rose from the shore, a space in front of it left bare for the port. Each house was a clean white with sky blue or grey trim; in front of each one was a small yard, edged by a white stone wall strewn with green vines. As the town basked in the heat of noon, not a thing stirred in the streets or by the shore. The sun beat down on the sea, the land, and the back of our necks, so that, in spite of the breeze that made the vines sway, we all wished we could hide from the glare in a cool, white house. But, as there was no one to help dock the boat, we had to stand and wait. At last the head of the crew leaped from the side and strode to a large house on the right. He shoved the door wide, poked his head through the gloom, and roared with a fierce voice. Five or six men came out, and soon the port was loud with the clank of chains and creak of planks as the men caught ropes thrown by the crew, pulled them taut, and tied them to posts. Then they set up a rough plank so we could cross from the deck to the shore. We all made for the large house while the crew watched, glad to be rid of us. -Celia Wren You too can tap into the vitality and vigor of compact expression. Take a suggestion from the highway department. At the boundaries of your speech and prose, place a sign that reads "Caution: Small Words at Work." [Richard Lederer's two most recent books are Sleeping Dogs Don't Lay and The Bride of Anguished English. His next book is A Man of My Words, from St. Martin's Press. Visit his website at .]

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-no comment-

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-an add-on found after the stuff below-
perryb

Oh, the futile nuttiness of it all!
The first picture we all recognize; the second is 'some London bobbies' from The Economist February 7 -latimes blurb below both-

February 11, 2004 Los Angeles Times French Assembly OKs Ban on Head Scarves in Schools The measure restricting religious apparel and symbols is expected to be approved by the Senate next month and take effect in September. By Sebastian Rotella, Times Staff Writer PARIS — French legislators voted Tuesday to ban Islamic head scarves, Jewish yarmulkes, large Christian crosses and other religious symbols in public schools, all but ensuring passage of a proposed law intended to reaffirm the country's secular tradition. In a display of unity across ideological lines, 494 deputies in the National Assembly voted for the measure and 36 voted against it. The legislation now goes to the Senate, where it is expected to pass next month. The ban would go into effect in September and prohibit "conspicuous" religious apparel and symbols while permitting smaller items. French leaders called the vote a victory for the religious neutrality of the state and the rights of women and, in the words of Education Minister Luc Ferry on Tuesday, against "a spectacular rise in racism and anti-Semitism in the last three years" that troubles schools in ethnically mixed neighborhoods. "Such unanimity in the heart of the National Assembly is a very strong moment in the political life of the republic because this is about stopping a drift and clearly defining things vis-a-vis fundamentalism," said Bernard Accoyer, a parliamentary leader of the center-right ruling coalition of President Jacques Chirac. The measure has been of particular concern in France's Islamic community, the largest in Western Europe with about 5 million people. However, the response Tuesday among Muslims was mixed and generally muted. Attempts at nationwide protests appeared to fizzle. Sounding cautiously optimistic, a prominent Muslim leader praised an amendment that would require that the effect of the ban be evaluated a year after its enactment. The amendment was added after negotiations with the Socialist legislative opposition and mainstream Muslim groups.

French Muslims "were right to be prudent" during the recent political debate because of "the national determination to move toward this law," said Dalil Boubakeur, president of the French Council of the Muslim Creed. He praised the Islamic community "for not permitting itself to fall into the emotional and the irrational." Nonetheless, the decision provoked criticism here, in the Arab world and in a few Western countries. Critics fear the measure would stifle religious freedom and stigmatize Muslim communities that are already angry and alienated. "This is a dark day for the republic," said Fouad Alaoui, secretary-general of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France. "The will to exclude has been made concrete by a vote on which the right and left agreed. It's hard to talk about an open and tolerant republic with this law." The head scarf debate is seen as a gambit by Chirac to appeal to conservative voters. The far-right National Front, which blames immigrants and Islam for France's socioeconomic problems, remains a potent force in regional elections set for next month. But the president has cultivated popularity among French Muslims and in the Arab world, especially after his dogged opposition to the war in Iraq. He proposed the measure at the recommendation of a commission of distinguished experts who said a rise in aggressive Islamic extremism is affecting public institutions such as schools and hospitals. The measure would address behavior identified by the commission's report, such as Muslim students refusing to take sex education and gym classes that they consider "immodest" and disrupting classes about the Holocaust with anti-Semitic diatribes. Enforcing the law would be trickier than getting it passed. At the demand of the Socialist opposition, the government has agreed to engage in consultations before imposing punishment of those who violate the ban. Despite meager turnout at protest marches last weekend, backlash on France's "Arab street" is still a possibility as well. French leaders are especially concerned about the potential reaction among young Muslims, whether hard-core religious extremists or youths of Islamic descent who see their cultural identity under attack.

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February 7, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Young Sentinels of Peril A decades-long study of Nordic children reveals the damaging effects of prenatal exposure to mercury from tainted seafood. By Marla Cone, Times Staff Writer TORSHAVN, Faroe Islands — Bjoerg Petersen knits her brow and chews her lip as she tries to navigate a mind-frazzling maze. She pushes her blond bangs from her forehead, rubbing it with such vigor that she seems determined to reach deep into her brain and yank the answer out. When she succeeds, her face lights up with a wide, gap-toothed grin. When she fails, she frowns, turning to the next page of the test. At the age of 7, Bjoerg is a typical first-grader in all but one way: Her brain has been probed by scientists since she was 2 weeks old. Bjoerg and about 1,700 other Faroese schoolchildren are the subjects of one of the longest and most intensive environmental experiments ever conducted on humans. Ongoing for nearly 20 years, the tests strongly suggest that a mother's consumption of mercury-tainted seafood — whale in the case of the Faroe Islanders — damages her fetus' brain as it grows in the womb, impairing her child's intelligence in subtle ways.	Once a year, Bjoerg has electrodes fastened to her head, measuring in milliseconds how rapidly her brain receives signals. She has been asked, countless times, to recall lists of numbers and shopping items. She has searched the crevices of her mind in vocabulary tests, tapped computer keys to measure her reaction time, arranged and rearranged blocks in patterns, and copied drawings more times than her parents can remember. She has been surrendering samples of her hair and blood since she was born. And she will probably continue to be examined by neuropsychologists until she reaches adolescence. The children of these remote North Atlantic islands, just below the Arctic Circle, have become sentinels for the rest of the world, warning of the dangers of mercury. The 7-year-olds most highly exposed in the womb lag behind their schoolmates in some skills — particularly short-term memory, vocabulary and attention spans — by as much as a school year, comparable to a decline of five or six IQ points. A physical change also has been detected: a slight slowing of the brain's responses to signals. The latest evidence, the results of tests on these children at 14 years published Friday, suggests that at least some of the neurological effects are long-lasting, perhaps permanent.
The findings, although partly contradicted by another large study, have had worldwide repercussions, prompting the U.S. government since 2001 to warn women of childbearing age to limit the amounts and types of fish they eat. Children born in the Faroe Islands, part of Denmark, are highly exposed because the Faroese eat the blubber and meat of pilot whales, which contain mercury concentrations 100 times greater than fish. Pilot whales accumulate mercury by eating fish contaminated with the metal, which builds up in the ocean from emissions from power plants and other industrial operations. The typical American carries one-tenth the mercury found in the mothers of children tested in the Faroes. But in many regions, including California's coast, people who frequently eat ocean fish absorb as much mercury as the islanders, sometimes more. One San Francisco physician reported last year that excessive levels of mercury were common in upper-income women and children among her patients, particularly those who regularly ate swordfish. "The available data indicate that mercury is present all over the globe, especially in fish, in concentrations that adversely affect human beings," the United Nations Environment Program stated in its 2003 Global Mercury Assessment. 'Mad Hatter' Syndrome Proof that mercury damages the brain dates back at least 200 years, to 19th century "mad" hatters poisoned by the chemical used to cure felt. But it wasn't until the 1950s that the dangers to fetuses became known.	At Japan's Minamata Bay, where a chemical factory dumped tons of mercury, thousands of children were born with mental retardation and other severe problems. Similar poisoning occurred in Iraq in the 1970s, the result of contaminated grain. Toxicologists say mercury ranks among the most dangerous and widely dispersed contaminants. It is one of a few found to harm humans at doses commonly encountered in the environment. Mercury is a natural element in the Earth's crust, but its levels in the environment have increased threefold since preindustrial times and, in some areas, are still rising. Every year, coal-burning power plants and waste incinerators worldwide spew about 1,500 tons into the air, more than half in Asia, according to the U.N. report. In the United States, power plants emit about 3% of the global total. The Bush administration in December backed reducing the annual U.S. output from 48 tons to 15 by 2018, but environmentalists are calling the proposed regulations inadequate. In humans and animals, mercury turns into methylmercury, the most toxic form. "What makes mercury a concern is that it is ubiquitous in fish," said John Risher, a mercury specialist at the toxic substances agency of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fish and other seafood offer an array of health benefits for adults and children, including omega 3 fatty acids that reduce heart disease. Nevertheless, adults who eat large amounts of seafood that contains mercury can experience memory lapses and increased risk of heart attacks, according to studies of fish-eaters in Finland and Brazil. The babies of mothers who eat a lot of seafood face the most risk, scientists say, because the developing central nervous system is mercury's most vulnerable target.
Passing through the placenta, the metallic substance attacks brain cells, dispatching them to the wrong places and disrupting the brain's architecture. It seems to target the growing brainstem as well as other areas, causing "widespread effects on cerebral function" that reduce a child's memory, language and motor skills, according to Drs. Philippe Grandjean and Pal Weihe, the scientists directing the Faroe Islands studies. Lower test scores were detected in the Faroese children at what previously had been considered safe levels of prenatal mercury exposure — between 1 and 10 parts per million in mothers' hair during pregnancy. Such levels are prevalent worldwide. In the United States, one of every six babies — about 630,000 a year — is born to a mother with more than the EPA's recommended 1 part per million, according to a new EPA analysis that doubled its previous estimate. Although the effects at that level typically are mild, Weihe and Grandjean say, a worrisome pattern has shown up in the Faroes: The more mercury a child got in the womb, the lower the test scores and the slower the brain's responses to signals. In most cases, the effects are subtle, so parents wouldn't notice. In essence, a highly exposed child is a bit younger mentally. "The bottom line is that IQ is affected," said Grandjean, a professor at both Harvard University School of Public Health and the University of Southern Denmark who is renowned for his mercury research. "Each doubling of mercury takes you back one or two months at the age of 7 years, when development is particularly rapid. There's a definite risk that these kids are not capable of catching up."	Land of Seafarers Descendants of 9th century vikings, the Faroese are among the world's best fishermen. The islands, halfway between Norway and Iceland, rise from the Atlantic in cliffs so sheer they look as though they were sliced by a razor. All 47,000 inhabitants of the 18 islands live within three miles of the ocean, and most of what they eat lives there. In traditional slaughters called grindabod, islanders drive pods of pilot whales toward beaches and slit their throats. The free meat and blubber are shared. In 1985, soon after his youngest child was born, Weihe began to worry what this whale diet meant for his homeland's children. Weihe approached Grandjean, who at the time was known for his studies of another heavy metal: lead. They recruited 1,023 pregnant women — 80% of the Faroese women who gave birth in 1986 and 1987. "My first assumption, was that we would not find any effects, that we have adapted to our diet over hundreds of years," said Weihe, medical director of the Faroese Hospital System. He was wrong.
Probing a Child's Brain To the blind eye of science, Allan Hansen is Subject No. 2 in Cohort 2. Like most of his classmates, Allan has hair the color of straw and eyes of crystalline blue. He lives in a village of 300, where his father is a fish farmer, a lucrative profession on the islands. Sociologists say the islands' homogeneous genetics, affluence and low rates of family instability and alcoholism make it ideal for studying neurotoxins because such social factors would have little influence on the children's intelligence. Since infancy, Allan, Bjoerg and the 180 other children of Cohort 2 — the second of three groups assembled in the Faroes — have undergone tests to measure specific brain functions. Allan, who performs well on the tests, listens intently to the instructions of clinical neuropsychologist Frodi Debes. The boy's tennis shoes swing in the air, only the tips of his toes reaching the floor — a reminder that Subject No. 2 is a mere 7-year-old. Flashing black-and-white images, Debes asks Allan to name them in his native Faroese. He sails through the first dozen or so — tree, house, scissors, flower, helicopter. He struggles with others, some unknown in the Faroes — pretzel, igloo, unicorn. His score is high, indicating a vocabulary larger than most of his schoolmates'. This is a critical test, one in which mercury seems to have its largest effect. For every doubling of prenatal exposure, there is a two-month delay in vocabulary, comparable to a 1.5-point drop in IQ. Those exposed to a tenfold increase had a seven- to eight-month delay, almost an entire school year. Next, Debes recites a shopping list of 15 foods, toys and clothing items. On the first try, Allan recalls five, slightly above average. This test is another in which mercury is linked to performance, in this case reduced memory. Other tests, using computers, drawings and blocks, judge his attention span, reaction time and fine-motor skills.	Then, a web of red, green and yellow wires is strapped onto Allan's head. In a darkened room, he stares at a screen flashing checkerboard patterns. He then dons headphones, listening to clicks while a computer records electrical signals sent to his brain from his eyes and ears. In the studies, the ears' messages were received at a slightly slower pace in children who had double the lowest prenatal exposure to mercury. A little more than three hours into the testing, with two more hours to go, Allan looks exhausted. His mother, Winnie Hansen, kisses his head. "It takes a long time for such a young child," Hansen says with a sigh. The scrutiny began before Allan was born, when Hansen was pregnant and gave hair samples to measure the mercury she was passing to her baby. Children like Bjoerg and Allan — whose mothers ate low to moderate amounts of whale, a half-dozen or so meals during pregnancy — generally get higher marks than peers exposed to more mercury. More than 850 of the children in the original 1986 group were tested until they reached 14. Weihe had hoped that the effects would disappear with age. But initial results from the teens, published Friday in the Journal of Pediatrics, show that at least some of the damage most likely is irreversible. As was the case when they were 7, their brains at the age of 14 responded less quickly to signals from their ears if they had been exposed to elevated levels of mercury in the womb.
Also, the teens with higher exposure had neurological changes that made them less able to maintain a normal heart rate, a condition that increases the risk of heart attacks later in life, according to Grandjean and Weihe. "Here we have actual effects on humans," Weihe said, "not based on factory accidents but on humans who are living their normal way, as they always have." School Work Suffers Joseph Jacobson, chairman of the cognitive and social psychology department at Wayne State University in Detroit and a member of the National Research Council's mercury committee, said the more heavily exposed children "might have deficits that are severe enough to markedly affect their day-to-day function." The National Research Council concluded that the effects detected in the children "are likely to be associated with increases in the number of children who have to struggle to keep up in a normal classroom or who might require remedial classes or special education." The societal impacts of mercury "can be tremendous," according to a report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives co-written by Deborah Rice, formerly with the EPA. A universal drop of five IQ points would double the number of U.S. children with IQs under 70 who require remedial help at school, the report said. Scientists are now investigating whether mercury in seafood, and a type of mercury called thimerosal formerly used in childhood vaccines, might also contribute to autism and other neurological disorders.	So far there is no "convincing evidence," said Dr. David Bellinger, a Harvard Medical School neurologist who also served on the national mercury committee. But several large studies, including one in California, are "just getting underway, so I think we'll have better answers to this question in the next few years," he said. Some medical experts, citing a study conducted in the Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean, question whether the Faroe Islands findings are applicable worldwide. A study of nearly 800 children in the Seychelles found no link between mercury exposure and neurological performance. Seychelles mothers eat 12 meals of ocean fish a week — so much that their mercury levels are similar to those in the Faroese women. Dr. Gary Myers of the University of Rochester, lead scientist for the study, wrote that the results "do not support the hypothesis that there is a neurodevelopment risk resulting solely from ocean fish consumption." Nevertheless, the EPA relied on the Faroes results in setting advisories on how much fish is safe to eat, and the National Research Council agreed. The Faroese studies have been under "extensive scrutiny" and "the weight of evidence of developmental neurotoxic effects is strong," the National Research Council panel's 2000 report said. Also, tests on children in New Zealand and Brazil detected similar effects linked to fish consumption. Scientists say the contradictory results could reflect discrepancies in how the tests were conducted or social disparities between the island cultures. Bellinger said nutrients and minerals, such as selenium, might reduce susceptibility to mercury.
Children as Messengers A few years after Allan and Bjoerg were born, the Faroese government began advising women of childbearing age to stop eating whale. "The pilot whale has been the backbone of our culture and very important for our people's diet throughout the centuries," Prime Minister Anfinn Kallsberg said in an interview. But, he added, he was "quite convinced" of the neurological results. Faroese women have mostly heeded the instructions. Today, they contain one-tenth as much mercury as in 1986, when the children in the first study were born. They are now on par with people in the rest of Europe and the United States. Yet elevated exposures persist worldwide, particularly in Greenland, where the Inuit eat marine mammals, and in Amazonian and African villages near mercury-tainted gold mines. Even in the United States, there are extremes in exposure, depending on how much and what kind of fish are eaten. One San Francisco-area woman who ate commercially sold swordfish 14 times a month suffered memory lapses and her hair began to fall out. A toddler regularly fed salmon and sole had mercury levels more than twice the recommended amount, said their physician, Jane Hightower. Though the youngsters of Kallsberg's homeland are in a unique position to chronicle mercury's hazards, he stresses that they are merely messengers of a global threat to children. "We are victims of the pollution that other nations create," the prime minister said. "Once it's released, it's not anymore their problem. It becomes ours."	* (BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX) A Guide for Landing Safe Seafood Because of seafood's many nutritional benefits, medical experts say the best protection for women of childbearing age is to avoid fish with high contaminant levels, not to avoid all fish. The highest mercury concentrations are in large predatory species, particularly swordfish, king mackerel, shark, tilefish and opah. Medium to high levels are found in fresh and canned albacore tuna, grouper, red snapper and orange roughy. Among the safest fish in terms of mercury are salmon, shrimp, crab, light canned tuna, sea bass, herring, catfish and tilapia. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration advises women of childbearing age and children to stop eating swordfish, king mackerel, shark and tilefish. But it says that eating up to 12 ounces a week of a variety of other fish is safe. A 6-ounce serving is equivalent to a can of tuna. But some health officials and environmental groups say the advisory does not sufficiently protect babies and children, so they want it extended to other fish with medium to high mercury levels. Using an FDA formula, the Environmental Working Group said women should eat no more than 6 ounces per week of 13 other fish: fresh tuna, canned albacore tuna, grouper, red snapper, lobster, marlin, opah, orange roughy, saltwater bass, freshwater and seawater trout, bluefish and croaker.

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February 5, 2004 Los Angeles Times California Prisoner's Gruesome Death Probed Officials want to know if Corcoran guards, who were watching the Super Bowl, were negligent. By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer FRESNO — All through the night, the howls kept coming from the cell of inmate Ronald Herrera. More than one guard at Corcoran State Prison thought something was terribly amiss. Herrera wouldn't stop screaming late Sunday, and he had covered his cell window in a curtain of toilet paper soaked in blood. One guard had seen Herrera, a dialysis patient suffering from hepatitis, pull out the medical shunt from his arm, corrections officials said. But when the guard later tried to check on the inmate, his sergeant told him not to bother, they said. "He's not dead," the sergeant was quoted by officials as saying. "Just keep an eye on him." The next morning, the howls had given way to silence. As a new shift made its checks, a guard saw what he said looked to be "raspberry Kool-Aid" streaming out from the cell. Inside, he found Herrera slumped over on the floor, lifeless. Much of the blood had drained from his body, corrections officials said. Blood filled the toilet bowl and washed over the concrete floor of the 8-by-10-foot cell. On Wednesday, Kings County and state investigators began a probe to determine if Herrera's death resulted from criminal negligence by prison staff too busy watching the Super Bowl. The probe comes on the heels of state Senate hearings and other revelations that have shone an unflattering light on the state's vast prison system, challenging the new administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. On Monday, he promised to make reforms and to "clean the place up." A coroner's autopsy of Herrera had not been completed by early Wednesday, but corrections officials said there were signs that Herrera, a 60-year-old mentally ill burglar and rapist, had been trying to staunch the bleeding with a wad of toilet paper. It was unclear if Herrera was trying to commit suicide and then changed his mind or if something more sinister happened, corrections officials said. His desperation, they said, played out for nearly 10 hours without any intervention from staff. Of all the horrors that have taken place at Corcoran State Prison over the last decade, one official said, the death of Herrera was particularly ghastly — and preventable. Fearing retaliation for breaking the prison system's pervasive code of silence, the officials requested anonymity. "Corcoran has seen a lot," one said, "but for an inmate to literally bleed out his body, it was one of the goriest crime scenes." A media spokesman for the prison said he could not comment on the case because of an ongoing investigation. Steve Fama of the watchdog Prison Law Office said he doubted whether the Kings County district attorney's office would hold staff accountable. He noted that Dist. Atty. Ron Calhoun had been elected in 1998 partly on the strength of financial support from the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., the union representing state prison guards. "When it's this serious, you want an aggressive, independent investigation," Fama said. "I'm not sure if the district attorney in Kings County is capable of that given the significant role that the CCPOA played in his election." Patrick Hart, Kings County's chief deputy prosecutor, acknowledged that his office had a "fairly good working relationship" with the guards union, but he said it would not hinder the independence of the probe. "We're not satisfied with the written reports we've gotten so far

from staff," he said. "One of the things we're looking at is whether staff knew he was in trouble and failed to take the proper steps." Herrera's case is only the latest in a series of inmate deaths at Corcoran that have raised questions about the correctional system's care of mentally ill patients and its response to suicide attempts. In December 1998, a Corcoran inmate who had been taken off suicide watch was seen hanging in a dark corner of his cell. But rather than pop open the cell door and determine if he was alive, guards remained outside for 18 minutes while 32-year-old Michael van Straaten dangled from a noose made of bedsheets and shoelaces. When officers finally did enter and cut him loose, he was dead but his body was still warm, according to prison reports. Two years later, on Christmas Day, an inmate with three suicide attempts succeeded in killing himself in the prison's Security Housing Unit. A lawsuit filed by the family of 26-year-old Thomas Mansfield alleged that staff negligence had allowed the suicide and that guards tried to cover up the incident by doctoring the record of cell checks. Last year, the state settled the case out of court. And just a week before Herrera's death, corrections officials said, three inmates in the Security Housing Unit entered into a suicide pact to protest what they called brutality by Corcoran guards. One inmate, "Tiny" Walton, went through with the pact and hanged himself. "What I've found is the so-called suicide watch is a joke," said Bob Navarro, a Fresno attorney who represented Mansfield's family and has filed suit in a recent suicide at the women's prison in Chowchilla. "The cells are not being checked according to written procedure." A detailed account of Herrera's medical condition and death was provided by two corrections officials. Herrera was taking mood-altering medication at the time, but had not been seen by a psychiatric case manager since December. They said that violates prison policy, which dictates a one-on-one clinical evaluation every 30 days. Herrera, who was not on suicide watch, began "ranting and raving" around midday Sunday, they said, and medical personnel examined him near halftime of the Super Bowl. It is not unusual for guards and inmates to watch football on weekends. At the time, the shunt that allowed him to hook up to a dialysis machine was still in place. But Herrera's howls continued, the officials said, and he began to cover the one window in his cell with toilet paper. He used his blood to adhere the toilet paper to the glass. That alone, corrections officials said, should have prompted a team of officers to enter his cell. "When your view into the cell is obstructed and you don't know what's going on inside, you initiate a cell extraction," one official said. "This wasn't done. In fact, there are several notations from staff indicating concern for Herrera. But the superior officers never let them check on him." One officer became so alarmed he called his sergeant, who took a quick look from outside the cell. "This is the same female sergeant who told the officer not to bother," the official noted. Third watch began at 2 p.m. and ended at 10 p.m. During at least some of that time, Herrera could be heard kicking at his cell door. After the Super Bowl game ended and the first watch took over, Herrera was still making a fuss, officials said. It wasn't until shortly after 6 a.m. the next day — when the second watch began its shift — that an officer who knew Herrera decided to check in on him. "The closer he got to the cell, he could see this pool of 'raspberry Kool-Aid,' " said one corrections official. "They popped open the door and he was lying on the ground with the shunt on the top bunk. He was pronounced dead five minutes later." A corrections spokesman said Herrera had a long rap sheet that included convictions for burglary and rape in San Bernardino County. Because of his status as a sex offender, he was housed in the prison's administrative-segregation unit. In recent months, he had been the victim of an inmate assault.

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There is a some pettiness in posting this item; it's just more evidence about our democracy (aristocracy): all of us are equal, but some are more equal than others

February 4, 2004 THE NATION White House Counters Attack on Bush's Military Service The reaction indicates officials are sensitive to questions about the National Guard. By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — White House officials lashed back Tuesday at Democrats who have accused President Bush of going AWOL from his Vietnam-era service in the National Guard, decrying the allegation as "outrageous and baseless." The sharp response suggested that the White House is sensitive about the charge, which first arose during the 2000 presidential campaign. The presence of two decorated veterans among the Democratic presidential candidates — Sen. John F. Kerry and retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark — has brought new attention to the president's military record. "It is really shameful that this was brought up four years ago, and it's shameful that some are trying to bring it up again," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "I think it is sad to see some stoop to this level, especially so early in an election year." The charges date to 1972, when Bush was in the fifth year of his six-year commitment to the Texas Air National Guard. Like many well-connected young men, Bush avoided active duty in Vietnam by enlisting in the National Guard, where he skipped to the top of a lengthy waiting list, was trained as a pilot and, like all members not on active duty, was required to report for duty one weekend a month. From May 1972 to May 1973, National Guard officials have no records that Bush attended required drills or performed his weekend duty rotations. From May to November 1972, Bush was in Alabama working on the unsuccessful Senate campaign of Winton M. "Red" Blount, a family friend. During that time, Bush applied to perform "equivalent" service with an Air National Guard unit in Montgomery, Ala. Bush's superior officers in Texas approved the substitute service in September 1972. However, the head of the Alabama unit at the time told the Boston Globe in 2000 that Bush never reported for duty. No records of Bush's service in Alabama have surfaced, despite searches conducted by the Bush campaign and rewards offered by veterans' groups. That period of Bush's life also raised eyebrows for another reason — in December 1972, Bush had a confrontation with his father after taking his 16-year-old brother, Marvin, out on a drinking spree in Washington and

crashing through a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home. Bush resumed his regular National Guard duties in Houston in the summer of 1973, putting in 36 days of active duty in a three-month period, and received an honorable discharge in October of that year — more than six months early — so he could enroll at Harvard Business School. White House officials argue that the honorable discharge proves the president fulfilled his obligations. "The president was honorably discharged," McClellan said. "He fulfilled his duties. It is really sad that people are now stooping to this level once again. And people should condemn this." Democrats point to the gap in Bush's service record as evidence that he was skipping out on his duties. Filmmaker and author Michael Moore went so far as to call Bush a "deserter," an allegation that Republicans want the Democrats — especially Kerry — to repudiate. Kerry has tried to both stay above the fray and capitalize on it by highlighting his military career — he received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts for his Vietnam service — without directly attacking the president. "It's not up to me to talk about them or to question them at this point," Kerry said Monday in Arizona. "I don't even know what the facts are. But I think it's up to the president and the military to answer those questions." But Republicans inside and outside the White House took aim at Kerry for those comments, treatment usually reserved for the nominee. "President Bush served honorably in the National Guard. He was honorably discharged," Bush campaign chairman Mark Racicot said in a statement Tuesday. "To suggest, as Sen. Kerry has, that the military should answer questions about President Bush's honorable discharge is an outrage. The furtherance of these charges is despicable." Andrew Kohut, a public opinion expert and director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said Bush has a good chance of emerging from the dispute without serious damage. "That stuff's been out there. It was out the last time. Now he has the stature of being president. So it's not as if he comes as a blank state," Kohut said. "On the other hand, in this post-9/11 environment, having the bona fides of military service is more important than back then." One reason the question of Bush's National Guard service was less of an issue during the 2000 election is that it compared favorably with the record of then-President Clinton, who actively sought to evade the draft. Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this report.

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February 3, 2004, Daily Breeze (Los Angeles, California) Preschoolers reportedly trained to watch less TV By Lindsey Tanner CHICAGO - Preschoolers put "No TV" signs on their television sets and got rewards for not watching in a study that reduced their viewing by almost a quarter.    The attempt to prevent kids from becoming couch potatoes involved seven 20-minute weekly sessions at 16 preschools in upstate New York near Cooperstown.    Kids made lists of fun activities besides television, including reading; parents received stickers to reward their children for each TV-free day; and the schools held parties to celebrate survivingwithout television.    The 43 youngsters, ages 2 to 5, watched a weekly average of about 13 hours of television and videos before the study -at the upper limit set by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which advises no more than two hours daily. By the end of the study, they were watching less than 10 hours a week.    A comparison group of 34 children who did not undergo the sessions increased their TV viewing by more than an hour, to about 15 hours a week.    The findings were published in February's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Other research has shown similar programs work in older children, but this study is significant because it demonstrates success at an early age before the TV habit becomes firmly entrenched, said Dr. Barbara Dennison of the Bassett Healthcare Research Institute in Cooperstown, who led researchers.    Too much television has been found to lead to weight gain and obesity. [completely unrelated, but interesting-] ... There's even a ripsnorting denunciation of "greed at the top" of the US business world, where Easterbrook finds a "lack of character" among corporate executives who have been paid "preposterous sums" and have engaged in widespread "stealing" from shareholders and employees. Take John W Snow, the former head of CSX who became Treasury secretary. "When he left the company in 202 to join the George W Bush administration, Snow awarded himself $2.5 million annually for life as a pension, even as CSX was cutting pension benefits for working-class retirees"... (-from a February 1, 2004 Los Angeles Time book review of Gregg Easterbrook's 'The Progress Paradox' by Dave Denison)

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January 28, 2004 Los Angeles Times BOOK REVIEW Bush's White House from the inside, outside Ron Suskind details what it's really like; Ron Phillips gives his view. By Todd Gitlin, Special to The Times Ron Suskind's compelling, disturbing account of the Bush White House as seen (mainly) by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is already famous, or notorious, so incandescent was the burst of publicity that accompanied the book's publication. (Overnight, O'Neill's "60 Minutes" interview triggered a government investigation into his possession of a document marked "secret," compared with the 73 days it took to launch one into the administration's leak naming a former ambassador's CIA operative wife.) As with many a current movie, many of the book's best lines and most garish scenes were given away in the trailer. Yet "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill" is still revelatory above and beyond the publicity because of the sheer weight of tales told out of school, few of them disputed by the White House. Among them: • At the first meeting of the National Security Council's principals, 10 days after inauguration, President George W. Bush had already decided to disengage from the Arab-Israeli conflict and unleash Ariel Sharon. ("Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things," Bush said.) • The same meeting made it clear to O'Neill that "getting [Saddam] Hussein was now the administration's focus." • "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.' " • A year later, CIA Director George Tenet told Bush at a National Security Council meeting that it was still only speculation whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or was starting any weapons-building programs. Says O'Neill: "Everything Tenet sent up to Bush and Cheney about Iraq was very judicious and precisely qualified. The President was clearly very interested in weapons or weapons programs but Tenet was clearly being careful to say here's the little that we know and the great deal that we don't. That wouldn't change and I read those CIA reports for two years." Mainly, Suskind's book shines a light on the process by which Bush goes about White House business. O'Neill was a demon for rational argument about policy. Even when his mind was made up — for instance, he favored privatizing Social Security — he thought opposing positions should face off. That wasn't the way Bush operated, according to Suskind: • "O'Neill was watching Bush closely. He threw out a few general phrases, a few nods, but there was virtually no engagement . O'Neill had been made to understand by various colleagues in the White House that the President should not be expected to read reports. In his personal experience, the President didn't even appear to have read the short memos he sent over. That made it especially troubling that Bush did not ask any questions . 'This meeting was like many of the meetings I would go to over the course of two years,' [O'Neill] recalled. 'The only way I can describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection.' " • President Bush "was caught in an echo chamber of his own making, cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that's tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything . " • O'Neill concludes about the president's belief in his authority to use force against Iraq to protect national security: "With his level of experience, I would not be able to support his level of conviction." Then there's the firing itself: • At an economic policy meeting in November, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney finally abandoned the sphinx-like posture he'd maintained for almost two years to tell his worrywart, about-to-be ex-friend O'Neill that although he said that tax cuts would result in fiscal crisis, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Not long thereafter, Cheney called to fire O'Neill — surely an oddity in the history of the U.S. government. Talk about delegating authority. To O'Neill, the overriding impression was of a president who lacked curiosity, deprecated dispute and remained disengaged. Honest brokers need not apply for high positions. Global warming? Fuggeddaboutit. Former Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, another of Suskind's major sources, says she was reduced to making "blind stabs at deducing the mind of the President." Bush "doesn't offer explanation, even to his most senior aides," Suskind writes. "O'Neill

knew that Whitman had never heard the President analyze a complex issue, parse opposing positions, and settle on a judicious path. In fact, no one — inside or outside the government, here or across the globe — had heard him do that to any significant degree." On Nov. 26, 2002, Bush is telling his top economic and political advisors, "The economic uncertainty is because of [Securities and Exchange Commission] overreach," a remarkable claim that O'Neill says went unquestioned. In all of Suskind's account, there is but one moment when Bush encourages a substantial unscripted exchange among his top advisors; at the same meeting he also asks a serious question about flagging wage growth. Suskind's book is smoothly, sometimes delicately, written and offers many insights. Bush's well-known propensity to assign nicknames, he says, is more than a cute ingratiation maneuver, for "nicknaming was a bully technique. I've given you a name, now you wear it." It is, in a way, a weakness of the book that Suskind gives O'Neill a free pass — thus, his efforts (with Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan) to include "triggers" with tax cuts, so that they become conditional on tax revenue, goes virtually without criticism. O'Neill's naivetι also goes unquestioned in Suskind's account, starting out boundless and dwindling with every passing day. It's striking that a well-connected Fortune 500 chief executive with considerable experience in the government's executive branch could be so surprised by the leader of his party. On the other hand, had it not been for O'Neill's naivetι, we would not have this extraordinary inside account. Kevin Phillips' new book, on the other hand, couldn't be more of an outsider's account of Bush fils et pθre, but this is not to say that Phillips is ignorant of what makes the Republican Party tick. His 1969 book "The Emerging Republican Majority" spelled out the "Southern strategy" that had just elected Richard M. Nixon and since then has elected three more Republican presidents, two of them named George Bush. He is a demographic wizard steeped in U.S. presidential history. But Phillips likes his Republican Party small-town, middle-class and more or less egalitarian, and in a series of recent books he has been thundering away at plutocracy. In general, these days, the shelves groan with a surplus of memoirs, but some day, Phillips should write one tracking his own evolution over the last 35 years. "American Dynasty" is not that book, but it is interesting aside from the fact that Phillips has written it. Where conventional Bush commentators are struck by dramatic differences between the administrations of pragmatic "41" and fundamentalist "43," Phillips is struck by the continuities, going back to the previous two generations, especially to the present president's great-grandfather George Herbert Walker, a well-wired financier (Phillips calls him a "wheeler-dealer") and his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, international banker par excellence, oilman, U.S. senator and longtime U.S. representative for German companies during the Hitler era. The Bushes, he argues, are not only wealthy, they are a pivotal family operating at the busy intersection of investment banking, oil, arms, global dealing and clandestine activity. He calls the two Georges beneficiaries of "crony capitalism" whose oil-drilling careers — the incumbent's was a far less than brilliant success — would have been inconceivable without investments corralled by Wall Street broker Jonathan, the brother of George Herbert Walker Bush. Phillips argues, persuasively, that for four generations the Bushes have been central to U.S. power and global connections. Phillips has compiled many fascinating facts but not always rigorously assessed them. Mixed in are too many speculative scraps. Phillips loathes the Bushes so thoroughly that he sometimes lets what-if and who-knows run away with him. He muses aloud about intelligence connections for which he has no evidence. Selectively, he compiles data on what has been called "the October surprise," the unproven surmise that during Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign, vice presidential nominee George H.W. Bush participated in a deal to convince the Iranians, who were holding American hostages, to keep holding them on the promise that they'd benefit more from a Reagan victory than Jimmy Carter's reelection. One too often hears, in Phillips' account, the sound of barrel bottoms being scraped. More important than the lumps of undigested fact and surmise, though, is Phillips' keen eye for the bright thread that runs thickly through a century of Bushes and Walkers: what Phillips calls a "presumption of entitlement," a blithe assumption that they were born to rule. Cockiness is an overachiever's abiding sin. It generates pride in one's errors accompanied by a failure to admit what one doesn't know — in other words, precisely what appalls O'Neill and fills Suskind's book, making it perhaps the most mordant White House account in recent history. * The Price of Loyalty; George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill;Ron Suskind;Simon & Schuster: 348 pp., $26 * American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush;Kevin Phillips;Viking Press: 398 pp., $25.95

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January 31, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD German Cannibal Gets 8½-Year Sentence for Manslaughter German defendant gets 81/2 years in prison for killing and eating a man. By Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff Writer BERLIN — In a case that has tested Germany's legal system and horrified the public, a computer technician was found guilty of manslaughter Friday and sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison for killing and eating a man he met in an Internet chat room.    The verdict against Armin Meiwes underscored the legal complexity that unfolded during the two-month trial in the town of Kassel. The victim, Bernd Brandes, consented to be killed and cannibalized in March 2001. The court rejected the prosecution's argument that the 42-year-old defendant murdered Brandes for "sexual gratification."    Judge Volker Muetze said Meiwes' twisted fantasy was "viewed with repulsion in our civilized society." But he added that "seen legally, this is manslaughter — killing a person without being a murderer."    The ruling dismissed the defendant's contention that he was culpable only of "killing on request," which carries a sentence of less than five years in prison.    The trial of Meiwes — a meticulously dressed computer repairman with thinning hair and a ready smile for television cameras — offered a lurid glimpse into the dark side of cyberspace. It took the public into the mind of a man who built a death chamber in his half-timbered farmhouse and dined on parts of Brandes while sipping South African red wine.    A videotape showing Meiwes stabbing his 43-year-old victim was shown to the court. The footage reveals that Brandes, a Berlin engineer with a history of depression, numbed himself with sleeping pills and schnapps and willingly chose to die and be eaten.    Prosecutors characterized the defendant as a "human butcher" and sought a life sentence for murder.

The case fascinated and sickened this staid nation. Images of Meiwes flickered across TV screens. He became a kind of macabre celebrity, seen grinning in court and whispering intently to his lawyer.    Newspapers and magazines gave pulp fiction accounts of Meiwes as a forlorn child who had long dreamed of eating a friend so he would never be alone. Brandes was portrayed as a disturbed son still mourning the death of his mother decades earlier and surfing Internet chat rooms dedicated to cannibalism.    The two men met in the anonymity of cyberspace. Meiwes, who confessed to the killing and was found legally sane to stand trial, had posted an ad seeking a young man wanting "to be eaten." He received more than 200 replies, including one from Brandes. Days later, the two met at Meiwes' home and each ate a piece of Brandes' flesh before Meiwes stabbed his victim in the neck and beheaded him.    Meiwes carved Brandes into pieces and put them in a freezer. He ate 44 pounds of flesh and organs over several months, sometimes sauteing them in oil and garlic.    The crime alarmed the small town of Kassel as people discovered that Germany had no law against cannibalism. The bloody saga opened a window onto the fetishes and perversions lurking on websites and chat rooms.    Meiwes said he was repeatedly drawn to the Internet. "If I hadn't been so stupid as to keep looking on the Internet," he testified, "I would have taken my secret to the grave."    In his closing statement to the court, Meiwes, who noted that he was writing a book, said: "Bernd came to me of his own free will to end his life. For him, it was a nice death . I had my big kick, and I don't need to do it again. I regret it all very much, but I can't undo it."    Muetze, the judge, said of the crime: "We have opened up a door, which one is inclined to close again immediately."

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The human condition: "One of them was his mother, who he testified — wrongly, he said — had sex with him when he was 6 years old."

January 13, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE STATE Testimony in Child Abuse Case Recanted Two men who were alleged victims in the 1980s say their boyhood reports of molestation were the result of coercion by authorities. By John Johnson, Times Staff Writer BAKERSFIELD — Two alleged victims in one of the nation's biggest child molestation investigations from the 1980s took the stand Monday and tearfully said the grotesque abuse stories they told two decades ago were lies. Instead, the two men said, accounts of molestation they described in 1984 were the result of coercion and threats by Kern County law enforcement, which apparently believed it had stumbled onto a massive set of interlocking child molestation and pornography rings in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The alleged victims recanted their childhood testimony in the opening day of a hearing to determine whether the alleged mastermind of one of the Bakersfield rings, John Stoll, was wrongly convicted. Both said the lies they told have haunted their adult lives and made them hesitant to show love to their own children for fear it could be misinterpreted. Victor Monge, a 27-year-old salesman, said investigators in the Stoll case made him feel that if he didn't cooperate and testify the way they wanted, his mother, an illegal immigrant, might be deported. Sobbing on the witness stand, he said he finally agreed to testify against Stoll because "I didn't want anything to happen to my parents." The other alleged victim, Donald Grafton, a 26-year-old factory worker in Salmon, Idaho, broke down as he read a poem he had written in the seventh grade about the trauma of helping send Stoll and three other alleged members of the ring to prison. One of them was his mother, who he testified — wrongly, he said — had sex with him when he was 6 years old. "My mother in prison innocently for seven years, here come the tears," he read, crying as he did. Courtroom observers, and even court personnel hardened to tales of violence and victimization, dabbed at their eyes. Stoll, 60 and nearly bald, dressed in a jail uniform of brown and green, put his face in his hands. He has been imprisoned for 18 years. In the mid-'80s, scores of people were investigated, and 40 were convicted and sent to prison in Bakersfield on charges they had subjected children to bizarre sexual rituals. It was one of the first and most sweeping prosecutions of alleged child molestation rings in the country at the time, predating the McMartin prosecution in Manhattan Beach. In recent years, however, at least 18 Bakersfield defendants have been released after appeals court judges found errors, including prosecutorial misconduct and unreliable techniques in the questioning of the alleged child victims.

The state attorney general's office also harshly criticized the Kern County investigators for failing to, among other things, seek medical tests showing the molestations actually occurred. Stoll, then a divorced carpenter, was arrested in 1984 and accused of running a child-abuse ring out of his rented house on Center Street. Two of his co-defendants, Margie Grafton, Donald's mother, and her second husband, Tim Palomo, were later released from prison. The hearing that began Monday is in response to a petition filed by Stoll's new attorneys, the Northern California Innocence Project in Santa Clara, which took on the case after looking at the original trial and coming to the conclusion that Stoll was innocent. Of the original six alleged victims, five are expected to testify this week that they don't recall ever having been molested. Their testimony is likely to last most of the week. The sixth victim, however, presents a problem because it is Stoll's estranged son, Jed, now 25. Jed Stoll is expected to testify that the stories he told on the witness stand were true. Innocence Project attorneys say Jed's insistence that he was molested doesn't shake their confidence in their client. Jed, they say, was the youngest and the most vulnerable to the manipulations of social workers and sheriff's deputies. Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Green, in trying to show that prosecutors in 1984 were not on a witch hunt, raised questions about why the men had come forward now. She pointed out that transcripts of the original trial showed that no one was sitting at their elbows feeding them information. She also said they seemed to have good memories when insisting they lied but couldn't remember other things, such as what they told investigators in old police reports. Superior Court Judge John Kelly said his ruling will focus on three issues: whether law enforcement interview techniques resulted in unreliable testimony, whether the conviction was a result of false testimony, and whether a tape recorder was used in the questioning. At least three of the former victims recall investigators using a tape recorder, but law enforcement officials deny any tapes exist. Grafton's poem could turn out to be a key piece of evidence, because it appears to show that he knew he lied long before Stoll's attorneys began trying to release the convict. An attorney for the Innocence Project, Linda Starr, asked whether Grafton had had any contact with Stoll in prison. He said he hadn't. Asked why, he replied, his voice cracking, "I should have apologized." If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

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The Economist January 17 (p35) Drug Addiction In Afghanistan KABUL Returnees are bringing bad habits with them QUIVERING with heroin craving, Asadullah stabs at his withered arms with a loaded syringe, prospecting for a vein. He closes his eyes, and wiggles the needle under his skin.     After 40 minutes, he finds a vein and sighs as the opiate enters him. As his veins collapse, these daily infusions are getting harder for Asadullah,one of Afghanistan's thousands of new heroin addicts. Soon, he says, he will have to start injecting his testicles.     Afghanistan has been the world's biggest opium producer for over a decade, but until recently had surprisingly few addicts. Two factors have wrought the change. Since the fall of the Taliban two years ago, 3m refugees have returned home from Iran and Pakistan, including thousands of addicts. Second, Afghanistan's drug barons have     become more sophisticated, refining more opium into heroin. According to a recent estimate, Afghanistan may suddenly have gained lm habitual drug users, equivalent to 4% of the population. Refugee life lent itself to drug abuse. Afghanistan's 23 years of war, against the Soviet Union and then between Afghans, gave many fugitives sorrows to forget. Supply, of course, was no problem. Pakistan and Iran, along with the former Soviet Central Asian countries, consume around 90% of Afghan opium. To pay for his habit, Asadullah found work in the construction industry. Since returning to Kabul three months ago, he has been jobless. Now he has $80 left to support his $4 a day habit.

Asadullah said he would do anything to be off heroin, but his prospects for this look dim. The Nejat Centre in Kabul is the country's only one for drug rehabilitation. It has ten beds for male addicts, and offers out-patient counselling for women. According to one doctor, 70% of the clinic's in-patients are weaned off drugs through a combination of counselling and medicine: anunusually high success rate. But though medical drugs are in short supply, narcotics are not.     Over the past two years, Afghanistan's government has exercised little control outside Kabul,and opium production has soared. Last year's crop earned Afghan opium farmers and traffickers $2.3 billion, or around 50% of GDP. This year's harvest, due in April, is expected to be the biggest in the country's history.     A dozen heroin factories were dismantled last year, including one in the back garden of a provincial police chief. A dozen caches of acetic anhydride, a chemical whose only plausible use is to turn opium into heroin, were also seized.     Production continues anyway. Kabul's heroin addicts have no trouble getting a fix. According to Asadullah, the local heroin is of poorer quality than he was used to in Iran. But it is much cheaper.

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January 13, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic The Arctic's Inuit are being contaminated by pollution borne north by winds and concentrated as it travels up the food chain. By Marla Cone, Times Staff Writer QAANAAQ, Greenland — Pitching a makeshift tent on the sea ice, where the Arctic Ocean meets the North Atlantic, brothers Mamarut and Gedion Kristiansen are ready to savor their favorite meal.    Nearby lies the carcass of a narwhal, a reclusive beast with an ivory tusk like a unicorn's. Mamarut slices off a piece of muktuk, the whale's raw pink blubber and mottled gray skin, as a snack.    "Peqqinnartoq," he says in Greenlandic. Healthy food.    Mamarut's wife, Tukummeq Peary, a descendant of famed North Pole explorer Adm. Robert E. Peary, is boiling the main entree on a camp stove. The family dips hunting knives into the kettle, pulling out steaming ribs of freshly killed ringed seal and devouring the hearty meat with some hot black tea.    Living closer to the North Pole than to any city, factory or farm, the Kristiansens appear unscathed by any industrial-age ills. They live much as their ancestors did, relying on foods harvested from the sea and skills honed by generations of Inuit.    But as northbound winds carry toxic remnants of faraway lands to their hunting grounds in extraordinary amounts, their close connection to the environment and their ancestral diet of marine mammals have left the Arctic's indigenous people vulnerable to the pollutants of modern society. About 200 hazardous compounds, which migrate from industrialized regions and accumulate in ocean-dwelling animals, have been detected in the inhabitants of the far north.    The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth — levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.    Nearly all Inuit tested in Greenland and more than half in Canada have levels of PCBs and mercury exceeding international health guidelines.    Perched atop a contaminated food chain, the inhabitants of the Arctic have become the industrialized world's lab rats, the involuntary subjects of an accidental human experiment demonstrating what can happen when a heaping brew of chemicals builds up in human bodies.    Studies of infants in Greenland and Arctic Canada who have been exposed in the womb and through breast milk suggest that the chemicals are harming children. Babies suffer greater rates of infections because their immune systems seem to be impaired, and their brain development is altered, slightly reducing their intelligence and memory skills.    Scientists say the immune suppression could be responsible, at least in part, for the Arctic's inordinate number of sick babies. They believe the neurological damage to newborns is similar in scope to the harm done if the mothers drank moderate amounts of alcohol while pregnant.    The tragedy for the Inuit is that they have few, if any, ways to protect themselves. Many Arctic natives say that abandoning their traditional foods would destroy a 4,000-year-old society rooted in hunting.    In this hostile and isolated expanse of glacier-carved bedrock and frozen sea, survival means that people live as marine mammals live, hunting like they do, wearing their skins. No factory-engineered fleece compares with the warmth of a sealskin parka, mittens and boots. No motorboat sneaks up on a whale like a handmade kayak latched together with rope. No snowmobile flexes with the ice like a dog-pulled sledge crafted of driftwood.    And no imported food nourishes their bodies, warms their spirit and strengthens their hearts like the flesh they slice from the flanks of a whale or seal.    "Our foods do more than nourish our bodies. They feed our souls," said the late Ingmar Egede, a Greenlandic educator who promoted the rights of indigenous peoples. "When many things in our lives are changing, our foods remain the same. They make us feel the same as they have for generations.    "When I eat Inuit foods, I know who I am." Unexpected Poisons In 1987, Dr. Eric Dewailly, an epidemiologist at Laval University in Quebec, was surveying contaminants in breast milk of mothers near the industrialized, heavily polluted Gulf of St. Lawrence when he met a midwife from Nunavik, the Arctic portion of Quebec province. She asked whether he wanted to gather milk samples from women there. Dewailly reluctantly agreed, thinking it might be useful as "blanks," samples with nondetectable pollution levels.    A few months later, the first batch of samples from Nunavik — glass vials holding a half-cup of milk from each of 24 women — arrived by air mail at the lab in Quebec.    Dewailly soon got a phone call from the lab director. Something was wrong with the Arctic milk. The chemical concentrations were off the charts. The peaks overloaded the lab's equipment, running off the page. The technician thought the samples must have been tainted in transit.    Upon checking more breast milk, the scientists soon realized that the peaks were, in fact, accurate: The Arctic mothers had seven times more PCBs in their milk than mothers in Canada's biggest cities.    Dewailly contacted the World Health Organization in Geneva, where an expert in chemical safety told him that the PCB levels were the highest he had ever seen. Those women, the expert said, should stop breast-feeding their babies.    Dewailly hung up the phone, his mind reeling. He knew that mother's milk is the most nutritious food of all, and that Nunavik, located on Hudson Bay, is so remote that mothers had nothing else to feed their infants. As a doctor, he couldn't in good conscience tell them to quit breast-feeding. But he knew he couldn't hide the problem, either.    "Breast milk is supposed to be a gift," said Dewailly, who today is among the world's leading experts on the human health effects of contaminants. "It isn't supposed to be a poison."    Nearly a generation has passed since those first vials of breast milk arrived in the Quebec laboratory. The babies Dewailly agonized over are now 16 years old, about to pass to their own children the chemical load amassing in their bodies. Top of the World From ice-clinging algae to polar bears, the Arctic has a long and intricate ladder of life. An estimated 650,000 indigenous people inhabit the top rung, and their population is steadily growing. About 90,000 are the Inuit of Eastern Canada and Greenland — a territory of Denmark under its own home-rule government. Others, spread across eight nations and speaking dozens of languages, include the 350,000 Yakuts of Siberian Russia, Alaska's Inupiat and Yup'ik, and Scandinavia's Saami.    Environmental scientists suspect that industrial chemicals first hitched a ride to the Arctic in the 1940s.    The chemicals, such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, originate in the cities of North America, Europe and Asia. They travel thousands of miles north via winds, ocean currents and rivers. In the Arctic, the sea is a deep-freeze archive, storing contaminants that are slow to break down in cold temperatures and low sunlight. Ingested first by zooplankton, the chemicals spread through the food web as one species consumes another.    Scientists say the Arctic's water and air are much cleaner than they are in urban environments. PCBs and DDT in the fish and mammals of such areas as the Great Lakes, the Baltic and the North Sea are 10 to 100 times higher in concentration than in the Arctic Ocean.    But most urban dwellers consume food from a host of sources, eating comparatively limited amounts of seafood and no marine mammals or other top predators high on the food web. Instead, they consume mostly land-raised foods with low contaminant levels.    lnuit, by contrast, eat much like a polar bear does, consuming the blubber and meat of fish-eating whales, seals, walruses and seabirds four or five links up the marine food chain. Contaminants, which accumulate in animals' fat, magnify in concentration with each step up, from plankton to people.    In newborns' umbilical cord blood and mothers' breast milk, average PCB and mercury levels are 20 to 50 times higher in remote villages of Greenland than in urban areas of the United States and Europe, according to a 2003 report by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, or AMAP, a scientific consortium created by the eight Arctic nations, including the United States.    In far northern villages such as Qaanaaq, where the Kristiansens live, one of every six adults tested exceeds 200 parts per billion of mercury in the blood, a dose known to cause acute symptoms of mercury poisoning, according to a 2003 United Nations report.    "That's a huge amount of mercury," said John Risher, a mercury specialist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's toxic substances agency. "At that level, I would really expect to see effects, such as paresthesia, an abnormal sensation, tingling or numbness, especially in the hands."    Few details are known about Russia's Siberia, but AMAP scientists are expected to soon release data showing that residents of the region are more contaminated than Greenlanders. In contrast, Alaska's Inupiat carry low concentrations because they eat bowhead whales that are low on the food web.    PCBs and DDT, the so-called legacy chemicals banned three decades ago in most developed nations, peaked in the Arctic in the 1990s and since then have declined, although they remain at substantially higher levels in people there than elsewhere.    Other compounds are increasing, including mercury and brominated flame retardants called PBDEs. Much of the mercury comes from coal-burning power plants, largely in Asia, while the United States is the major source of the flame retardants, used in plastics and polyurethane foam.    Evidence has emerged recently that the contaminants are threatening the health of Inuit infants and young children.    "Subtle health effects are occurring in certain areas of the Arctic due to exposure to contaminants in traditional food, particularly for mercury and PCBs," according to a 2002 AMAP report.

Building up over a lifetime, chemicals stored in a mother's body cross into the womb, contaminating a fetus before birth. Then the newborn gets an added dose from breast milk.    A study in Arctic Canada, soon to be published, has shown for the first time that the risks of traditional foods seem to outweigh their benefits, said Gina Muckle of Laval University's Department of Social and Preventive Medicine in Quebec, who directed the study.    In Muckle's study, 11-month-old Nunavik babies were repeatedly shown a picture while researchers recorded how readily the children recognized images they already had seen. The infants with high amounts of PCBs in their bodies were 10% less likely to recognize the images than infants with low PCB levels.    A separate, smaller study also linked PCBs with slight neurological effects in older children in Qaanaaq. The studies confirm similar neurological effects detected in children elsewhere, including the Great Lakes region.    Also in Nunavik, infants exposed in the womb to high levels of DDT and PCBs suffered more ear and respiratory infections, particularly in the first six months of life, according to a study by Laval University's Frederic Dallaire, also about to be published.    Dewailly said the increased infection rate is the most serious of the known threats because Arctic children suffer extremely elevated rates of ear infections, which often lead to hearing loss, and respiratory infections.    "Nunavik has a cluster of sick babies," he said. "They fill the waiting rooms of the clinics." No Cows, Pigs, Chickens A year-round icy shield — thicker than a mile in some places — covers 85% of Greenland. The island has no trees, no grass, no fertile soil, which means no cows, no pigs, no chickens, no grains, no vegetables, no fruit orchards.    Instead, the ocean is Greenland's food basket.    Sandwiched between Canada and Scandinavia, Greenland gets the brunt of the world's contaminants because it is in the path of winds from both European and North American cities.    In the remote parts of Greenland, such as the Kristiansens' village of Qaanaaq, people eat marine mammals and seabirds 36 times a month on average, consuming about a pound of seal and whale each week. About one-third of their calories come from traditional foods.    "We eat seal meat as you eat cow in your country," said Jonathan Motzfeldt, who was Greenland's premier for almost 30 years and is now its finance minister. "It's important for Greenlanders to have meat on the table."    The Inuit say their native food strengthens their bodies, warming them from within like a fire glowing inside a lantern. When they eat anything else, instead of fire inside, they feel ice.    "We are living in a place that is very cold, and it's not by accident we eat what we do. We are not able to survive on other food," Lars Rasmussen, a 52-year-old hunter from Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, said through a translator. "Hunting is so important to us, so fundamental, that we will not be able to survive without it."    Everything else, from tea to bread, must be imported. In remote villages, stores stock processed and canned food that is expensive, frequently stale and not very tasty or nutritious. In Nunavut, across Baffin Bay from Greenland, store- bought food for a family of four would cost $240 per week, more than one-third of the average family income there, according to a report by Canada's Northern Contaminants Program.    Jose Kusugak, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the organization representing Canadian Inuit, said he can buy "lame lettuce" and "really old oranges" and "dried up apples" in Nunavut, or he can eat fresh and nutritious beluga, walrus, fish and caribou. "There is really no alternative," he said.    In some respects, the marine diet has made the Inuit among the world's healthiest people. Beluga whale meat has 10 times the iron of beef, twice the protein and five times the Vitamin A.    Omega 3 fatty acids in the seafood protect the Inuit from heart disease and diabetes. Seventy-year-old Inuit men have coronary arteries as elastic as those of 20-year-old Danes, said Dr. Gert Mulvad of the Primary Health Care Clinic in Nuuk.    Although heart disease has increased with the introduction of processed foods, especially among Greenlandic young people, it remains "more or less unknown," Mulvad said.    Public health officials are torn over whether to encourage the Inuit to continue eating their traditional diet or reduce their consumption.    "The first goal of medicine is to do no harm, so I'm not absolutely convinced we should restrict beluga fat. It has a huge, huge beneficial effect on cardiovascular disease," said Dewailly, who heads public health research at Laval University Medical Research Center.    Government officials and doctors fear that Inuit will switch to imported processed foods loaded with carbohydrates and sugar, risking malnourishment, vitamin deficiencies, heart disease, diabetes and obesity.    "The level of contamination is very high in Greenland, but there's a lot of Western food that is worse than the poisons," Mulvad said.    Greenland's home-rule government and doctors have issued no advisories. Many Greenlanders are aware of the contamination, although they know few details. In Canada, however, there has been extensive outreach to indigenous people, including trips by Dewailly and other scientists to explain their findings in detail. But public health officials there still struggle, after 16 years, with what dietary advice to give.    Last year, Nunavik leaders initiated an experiment in three communities that gives women free Arctic char, a fish high in fatty acids but low in PCBs, to encourage them to eat less beluga blubber, the main source of contaminants there.    Most Inuit have not altered their diet in response to the contamination, according to dietary surveys in Canada. In Arctic cultures, people rely on the traditional knowledge of hunters and elders, and with no visible signs of pollution or people dying, many are skeptical that the chemicals exist. Some even suspect talk about chemicals is a ploy to strip them of their traditions.    Moreover, health officials point out that the risks of contaminants are greatly outweighed by other societal problems, including smoking, suicide, domestic violence and binge drinking, which have a severe and immediate impact on life and death in the Arctic. For example, more than half of pregnant women in Greenland smoke cigarettes.    Those who are aware of the dangers of the toxic chemicals say their meats are too nutritious and important to give up.    "People say whale and seal are polluted, but they are still healthy foods to us," said Ujuunnguaq Heinrich, a minke whale and seal hunter in Nuuk.    Anthropologists warn that efforts to alter Inuit diets can unwittingly cause irreversible cultural changes. If hunting is discouraged, people quickly would lose their traditional knowledge about the environment and their hunting skills, as well as material items such as tools and clothing, said Robert Wheelersburg, an anthropologist at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who specializes in Arctic cultures.    Their art, their spirituality, their celebrations, their storytelling, even their language would suffer. Inuit dialects are steeped in the nuances of nature that their national languages — English, Danish and French — ignore.    Wheelersburg said the most important damage would be to Inuit "values and attitudes." In the Arctic's subsistence economy, people share prey among neighbors and relatives, even strangers. The best hunters are leaders in the village, and they are generous with their wealth. If the Inuit switch to a cash society, that communal generosity would disappear, Wheelersburg said.    "It's more than the food you are changing," Wheelersburg said. "It's the actual catching and hunting of it that really generates the cultural characteristics." Even skipping one generation would impair hunting skills, he said, and "once they are lost, I don't see how you can regenerate them." Survival of the Fittest Like everyone else in Qaanaaq, the Kristiansens remain mostly oblivious to the scientists and political leaders fretting about how many parts per billion of toxic chemicals are in their bodies.    They simply don't have the luxury to worry about dangers so imperceptible, so intangible. Instead, hunters worry about things they can hear and see: thinning ice conditions, the whereabouts of whales, where their next meat will come from. Anxiety about chemicals is left to those who live in distant lands, those who generated the compounds, those whose bodies contain far less.    About 850 miles from the North Pole, Qaanaaq, an isolated village of about 600, is the closest on Earth to the archetype of traditional polar life. Inuit there hunt seal, beluga, walrus and narwhal in the icy waters of a fjord.    Every spring, when the midnight sun returns, the Arctic's treasures, long locked in the ice, are within reach again. On a freezing-cold June afternoon, narwhal season has begun. Gedion and Mamarut head out on their sledges, their dogs racing 35 miles across the glacier, toward the Kristiansens' ancestral hunting grounds, a narrow strip of sapphire blue in the distance.    The Kristiansen brothers learned to hunt narwhal from their father, who, in turn, learned from his own relatives. It won't be long before Gedion's son, Rasmus, now 6, will be paddling a kayak beside his father.    Gedion jokes that he lassos narwhals from his kayak like the American cowboys he has seen on television. A little over a century ago, the people of Qaanaaq had little contact with the Western world. Today, they can buy salami and dental floss and Danish porn magazines in their small local market, and watch "A Nightmare on Elm Street" in their living rooms on the one TV station that beams into Qaanaaq.    The Kristiansens also know that other elements travel to their homeland, riding upon winter winds.    They learned a little about the contaminants — the akuutissat minguttitsisut — from listening to the radio. But they have not changed their diet, and no one has advised them to. Virtually every day, they eat seal meat and muktuk. With every bite, traces of mercury, PCBs and other chemicals amass in their bodies, to be passed on to their children.    "We can't avoid them," Gedion said in Greenlandic. "It's our food."    Since 2000 BC, the Inuit legacy has been passed on to generations of boys by generations of men. Their ancestors' memories, as vivid as a dream, mingle with their own, inseparable.    "Qaatuppunga piniartarlunga," Mamarut said.    As far back as I can remember, I hunted.

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January 12, 2004 THE WORLD War College Study Calls Iraq a 'Detour' Institute's report warns anti-terror campaign may launch 'open-ended and gratuitous conflict.' By Chuck Nubbier and Ken Silverstein Times Staff Writers WASHINGTON — A report published by the Army War College criticizes the Bush administration's global war on terrorism as "unfocused" and contends that the war in Iraq is "unnecessary" and a "detour" that has diverted attention and resources from the threat posed by Al Qaeda. The report warns that the administration's global war on terrorism may have set the United States "on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States." The report by Jeffrey Record, a visiting research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, calls for downsizing the war on terrorism and focusing instead on the threat from Al Qaeda, the terror network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as well as other sites around the world. "The global war on terrorism as presently defined and conducted is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security," Record wrote, concluding his 56-page monograph. "The United States may be able to defeat, even destroy, Al Qaeda, but it cannot rid the world of terrorism, much less evil."

Record calls the war in Iraq "an unnecessary preventative war" that has "diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable Al Qaeda." The Iraq war was a "detour" from the war on terrorism, he said. The Army War College, located in Carlisle, Pa., trains military and civilian officials in the theory and application of military strategy using land-based forces. The report contains a disclaimer stating that it does not necessarily represent the views of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government. In the foreword to the report, found on the Internet at http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.pdf, Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., the institute's director, said the monograph was offered "as a contribution to the national security debate over the aims and course of the war on terrorism." Record, a former staff member for the Senate Armed Services Committee, has written six books on military issues. He also teaches at the Air Force's Air War College in Montgomery, Ala. Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based research organization that focuses on military affairs, said: "There's no question that Iraq has diverted U.S. attention from the war on terrorism. However, [the U.S.] invaded Iraq to resolve a potentially more serious threat that American intelligence indicated was quite urgent — that being the threat of weapons of mass destruction . All intelligence estimates pointed to an urgent threat." Daniel Benjamin, a member of the National Security Council staff in the late 1990s, said, "The criticism does not seem out of line with many of the conversations I have had with officers in every branch of the military."

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An earlier excerpted book review quote(bolded -*2) identified Dubya Bush as a man with a large megalomaniacal complex. Following immediately below are relative proofs of earlier cited 'civilizational' problems with him aside of his 'not too bright'edness: (a) his hidden-from-the-public 'holy war righting what Dad was unable to properly complete', and (b) the matter of aristocracy, dynasty, oil and 'American free-enterprise, capitalist democracy and the right to make as much money as you can and spend it any way you choose -as long as there's no law against it'. -perryb

January 11, 2004 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD Iraq Plans Made Before 9/11, O'Neill Says Early in his term, Bush wanted to oust Hussein, the former Cabinet member asserts. By Maura Reynolds, Times Staff Writer CRAWFORD, Texas — The Bush administration was determined to oust Saddam Hussein long before the Sept. 11 attacks, former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill told CBS News in an interview to be aired tonight. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said in the interview with "60 Minutes." The interview is being broadcast amid publicity for a new book by journalist Ron Suskind called "The Price of Loyalty," for which O'Neill was a primary source. The book is published by Simon & Schuster, which is owned by Viacom, the parent company of CBS News. The book quotes O'Neill as saying he was surprised that at one meeting of President Bush's top advisors, no one questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it," the book quotes O'Neill as saying. "That was the tone of it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.' " In the CBS interview, O'Neill also faults the Bush administration's declared policy of preemptively attacking other nations before they can attack the United States. "For me, the notion of preemption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," he said. O'Neill headed the Treasury Department from January 2001 to December 2002, when he was forced out as a result of policy disputes. An administration official dismissed his allegations Saturday, saying, "No one listened to his wacky ideas when he was in office. Why should we start now?" Critics have accused the administration of using the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse for invading Iraq and of implying that there was a link between Hussein and the attacks, which has never been proved.

In his book about the Bush administration, "Bush At War," author Bob Woodward said top officials raised the issue of targeting Hussein as soon as four days after the Sept. 11 attacks. O'Neill's assertion dates to the early days of the administration, long before Sept. 11. But it is unclear from the remarks attributed to O'Neill in Suskind's book whether the administration was actively preparing to oust Hussein or was just making contingency plans. On Saturday, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began planning for a war with Iraq early in Bush's term. "The fact of the matter is that the international community viewed Saddam Hussein as a threat before Sept. 11 and that threat became even more of a threat after Sept. 11," McClellan said from Texas, where Bush is spending the weekend. "It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," McClellan said. Like the Clinton administration before it, the Bush White House was on record with warnings aimed at the Iraqi leader well before Sept. 11. Earlier in 2001, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice warned after an Iraqi missile attack that "Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration." After the attacks, senior administration officials, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that it had become imperative to prevent "rogue nations" such as Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction and transferring them to terrorists. O'Neill, a former chief executive of aluminum giant Alcoa whose comments on various economic issues had caused problems for the administration, was asked to resign in a shake-up of Bush's economic team after he opposed a plan to reduce taxes on corporate dividends.

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January 11, 2004 Los Angeles Times The Barreling Bushes Four generations of the dynasty have chased profits through cozy ties with Mideast leaders, spinning webs of conflicts of interest By Kevin Phillips, Kevin Phillips' new book, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," has just been published by Viking Penguin. WASHINGTON — Dynasties in American politics are dangerous. We saw it with the Kennedys, we may well see it with the Clintons and we're certainly seeing it with the Bushes. Between now and the November election, it's crucial that Americans come to understand how four generations of the current president's family have embroiled the United States in the Middle East through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links. As early as 1964, George H.W. Bush, running for the U.S. Senate from Texas, was labeled by incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough as a hireling of the sheik of Kuwait, for whom Bush's company drilled offshore oil wells. Over the four decades since then, the ever-reaching Bushes have emerged as the first U.S. political clan to thoroughly entangle themselves with Middle Eastern royal families and oil money. The family even has links to the Bin Ladens — though not to family black sheep Osama bin Laden — going back to the 1970s. How these unusual relationships helped bring about 9/11 and then distorted the U.S. response to Islamic terrorism requires thinking of the Bush family as a dynasty. The two Bush presidencies are inextricably linked by that dynasty. The first family member lured by the Middle East's petroleum wealth was George W. Bush's great-grandfather, George H. Walker, a buccaneer who was president of Wall Street-based W.A. Harriman & Co. In the 1920s, Walker and his firm participated in rebuilding the Baku oil fields only a few hundred miles north of current-day Iraq. As senior director of Dresser Industries (now part of Halliburton), Walker's son-in-law Prescott Bush (George W. Bush's grandfather) became involved with the Middle East in the years after World War II. But it was George H.W. Bush, the current president's father, who forged the dynasty's strongest ties to the region. George H.W. Bush was the first CIA director to come from the oil industry. He went on to became the first vice president — and then the first president — to have either an oil or CIA background. This helps to explain his persistent bent toward the Middle East, covert operations and rogue banks like the Abu Dhabi-based Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which came to be known by the nickname "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International." In each of the government offices he held, he encouraged CIA involvement in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, and he pursued policies that helped make the Middle East into the world's primary destination for arms shipments. Taking the CIA helm in January 1976, Bush cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider. After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book "False Profits," Bush "traveled on the bank's behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions." Once in the White House, first as vice president to Ronald Reagan and later as president, George H.W. Bush was linked to at least two Middle East-centered scandals. It's never been entirely clear what Bush's connection was to the Iran-Contra affair, in which clandestine arms shipments to Iran, some BCCI-financed, helped illegally fund the operations of the anti-Sandinista

Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But in 1992, special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh asserted that Bush, despite his protestations, had indeed been "in the loop" on multiple illegal acts. Much clearer was Bush's pivotal role, both as vice president and president, in "Iraqgate," the hidden aid provided by the U.S. and its military to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its high-stakes war with Iran during the 1980s. The U.S. is known to have provided both biological cultures that could have been used for weapons and nuclear know-how to the regime, as well as conventional weapons. As ABC-TV broadcaster Ted Koppel put it in a June 1992 "Nightline" program after the 1991 Persian Gulf War: "It is becoming increasingly clear that George [H.W.] Bush, operating largely behind the scenes through the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy." During these years, Bush's four sons — George W., Jeb, Neil and Marvin — were following in the family footsteps, lining up business deals with Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini moneymen and cozying up to BCCI. The Middle East was becoming a convenient family money spigot. Eldest son George W. Bush made his first Middle East connection in the late 1970s with James Bath, a Texas businessmen who served as the North American representative for two rich Saudis (and Osama bin Laden relatives) — billionaire Salem bin Laden and banker and BCCI insider Khalid bin Mahfouz. Bath put $50,000 into Bush's 1979 Arbusto oil partnership, probably using Bin Laden-Bin Mahfouz funds. In the late 1980s, after several failed oil ventures, the future 43rd president let the ailing oil business in which he was a major stockholder and chairman be bought out by another foreign-influenced operation, Harken Energy. The Wall Street Journal commented in 1991, "The mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding Harken Energy may prove nothing more than how ubiquitous the rogue bank's ties were. But the number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken — all since George W. Bush came on board — likewise raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son." Other hints of cronyism came in 1990 when inexperienced Harken got a major contract to drill in the Persian Gulf for the government of Bahrain. Time magazine reporters Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, in their book "The Outlaw Bank," concluded "that Mahfouz, or other BCCI players, must have had a hand in steering the oil-drilling contract to the president's son." The web entangling the Bush presidencies was already being spun. Second son Jeb Bush, now the governor of Florida, spent most of his time in the early and mid-1980s hobnobbing with ex-Cuban intelligence officers, Nicaraguan Contras and others plugged into the lucrative orbit of Miami-area front groups for the CIA. But he too had some Middle East connections. Two of his business associates, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya and Camilo Padreda, both indicted for financial dealings, were longtime associates of Middle Eastern arms dealer, BCCI investor and Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi. Prosecutors dropped the case against the two, and a federal judge ordered Padreda's name expunged from the record. But a few years later Padreda, a former Miami-Dade County GOP treasurer, was convicted of fraud over a federally insured housing development that Jeb Bush had helped to facilitate. Jeb Bush also socialized with Adbur Sakhia, the Miami BCCI branch chief and later its top U.S. official. Neil Bush, most famous for the scandal surrounding the corrupt practices of Colorado's Silverado Savings & Loan, where he served as a director during the 1980s, also picked plums from Persian Gulf orchards. In 1993, after his father left the White House, Neil went to Kuwait with his parents, brother Marvin and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. When his father left, Neil stayed to lobby for business contracts, and after returning home evolved a set of lucrative

relationships with Syrian-American businessman Jamal Daniel. One of their ventures, Ignite!, an educational software company, also included representatives of at least three ruling Persian Gulf families. The Bush family's Middle Eastern commercial focus is further exemplified by Marvin, the youngest brother of the current president. From 1993 to 2000 he was a major shareholder, along with Mishal Youssef Saud al Sabah, a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, in the Kuwait-American Corp., which had holdings in several U.S. defense, aviation and industrial security companies. George H.W. Bush's own Persian Gulf relationships kept expanding. While serving in the Reagan White House during the 1980s, he was known in the Middle East as "the Saudi vice president," and a New Yorker article last year described the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. as "almost a member of the [Bush] family." Indeed, many saw the 1991 Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait as an outgrowth of Bush's close ties to the oil industry and to Persian Gulf royal families, who felt threatened by Saddam Hussein's expansionism. After losing his bid for a second term as president, Bush joined up in 1993 with the Washington-based Carlyle Group. Under the leadership of ex-officials like Baker and former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, Carlyle developed a specialty in buying defense companies and doubling or quadrupling their value. The ex-president not only became an investor in Carlyle, but a member of the company's Asia Advisory Board and a rainmaker who drummed up investors. Twelve rich Saudi families, including the Bin Ladens, were among them. In 2002, the Washington Post reported, "Saudis close to Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister were encouraged to put money into Carlyle as a favor to the elder Bush." Bush retired from the company last October, and Baker, who lobbied U.S. allies last month to forgive Iraq's debt, remains a Carlyle senior counselor. If the 1991 war with Iraq and its aftermath cemented the Bush ties with oil elites and royalty in the Middle East, it angered Islamic true believers and radicals. By the late 1990s, many of the Islamic insurgents who had been mobilized by the CIA and others to chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan were becoming increasingly anti-American. They found a kinship with Osama bin Laden, the renegade of his billionaire Saudi family, who was outraged at the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia. When the U.S. launched a second war against Iraq in 2003 but failed to find weapons of mass destruction that Hussein was purported to have, international polls, especially those by the Washington-based Pew Center, charted a massive growth in anti-Bush and anti-American sentiment in Muslim parts of the world — an obvious boon to terrorist recruitment. Even before the war, some cynics had argued that Iraq was targeted to divert attention from the administration's failure to catch Osama bin Laden and stop Al Qaeda terrorism. Bolder critics hinted that George W. Bush had sought to shift attention away from how his family's ties to the Bin Ladens and to rogue elements in the Middle East had crippled U.S. investigations in the months leading up to 9/11. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) complained that even when Congress released the mid-2003 intelligence reports on the origins of the 9/11 attack, the Bush administration heavily redacted a 28-page section dealing with the Saudis and other foreign governments, leading him to conclude, "There seems to be a systematic strategy of coddling and cover-up when it comes to the Saudis." There is no evidence to suggest that the events of Sept. 11 could have been prevented or discovered ahead of time had someone other than a Bush been president. But there is certainly enough to suggest that the Bush dynasty's many decades of entanglement and money-hunting in the Middle East have created a major conflict of interest that deserves to be part of the 2004 political debate. No previous presidency has had anything remotely similar. Not one.

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January 9, 2004 - Interesting little excerpt on some higher-up thinking during our Revolution -the second column in particular-

January 2004 Smithsonian Magazine p63 Divided Loyalties Descended from American Colonists who fled north rather than join the revolution, Canada's Tories still raise their tankards to King George. by David Devoss ...     Anti-Tory sentiment was especially intense in Massachusetts. When 1,000 Loyalists fled Boston along with British general William Howe in March 1776, Colonists sang: The Tories with their brats and wives Should fly to save their wretched lives.    Though neither side was blameless when it came to gratuitous cruelty, probably no combatants suffered more than those in Loyalist regiments. British, Hessian and American officers all loosely adhered to an accepted code of conduct that held that soldiers were prisoners of war who could be exchanged or released on parole if they promised to refrain from further fighting. But Tories were viewed as traitors who, if caught, could be banished to the frontier, imprisoned indefinitely or executed. "In this war," one Tory sympathizer would write, "only those who are loyal are treated as rebels."

After the October 1780 battle at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, in which nearly 200 Tory militiamen died, victorious patriots lynched 18 Loyalists on the battlefield, then marched the remaining prisoners north. After a week on the road, the starving, ragtag procession had traveled only 40 miles. To speed up the pace, patriot officers summarily convicted 36 Tories of general mayhem and began stringing them up three at a time. After nine Tories were hanged from the limb of an oak tree, the killing was halted, to the distress of one colonial who remarked, "Would to God every tree in the wilderness bore such fruit as that."    Curiously; Tories suffered even at the hands of British officers who, for the most part, dismissed them as ignorant provincials. The British especially distrusted Loyalist militia regiments, claiming that they were slow to follow orders and often went off on their own to seek revenge against those who had destroyed their property.    This contemptuous attitude may explain why Lord Cornwallis, when he surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, yielded to Washington's demand that Tories be turned over to victorious Continental soldiers as prisoners of state, not war, thus allowing them to be executed as traitors. As the British sloop Bonetta set sail from Yorktown, hundreds of Tories frantically rowed after the departing ship. All but 14 were overtaken and brought back to shore. ...

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If nothing else, read my bolded quote by Dubya Bush in the below, a short excerpt from a January 4, 2004 Los Angeles Times book review by Stanley Kutler. The book is 'The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic' by Chalmers Johnson.

President Bush rightly has condemned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein for their tyranny, brutality and oppression. But the president neglected to mention how readily Americans tend to measure moral behavior in others for our convenience. Johnson shows no such reluctance, and his book is replete with many instances. Donald H. Rumsfeld heartily supported Iraq in its 1980s war against Iran, ignoring the gassing of Kurds, Iraqis and Iranians. But U.S. officials needed Hussein then, if for no other reason than that he fought our great Persian enemy. And now Bush entertains and rewards President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, President Askar A. Akayev of Kyrgyzstan, President Nursultan Nazabayev of Kazakhstan and President Saparmurad A. Niyazov of Turkmenistan because they allowed our troops to use their bases and fly over their territories. Democracy in these countries? The word is unknown. Their leaders are Stalinist relics of the old Soviet Union, hardly paragons for liberty, democracy, freedom and an open society. But they do know how to flatter us. Johnson dryly notes that Kyrgyzstan's president allowed the United States to name a new base in that country after the highest-ranking New York City firefighter to die in the World Trade Center attacks.    Since World War II, Americans have witnessed the growth of the "imperial presidency," with ever-expanding presidential powers, especially in foreign policy. The largely symbolic War Powers Resolution of 1973 eventually satisfied congressional egos as long as presidents made some gesture toward shared decision-making in matters of military action.

Johnson seeks to hoist the "neo-conservatives" with their own petard. They love, he writes, to breathe the air of "originalism" in the Constitution, yet they openly reject the framers' wisdom. James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," wrote in 1793: "In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not the executive . The trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man."    Yet President Bush unilaterally declared a long war against terrorism. Johnson notes that a White House spokesman at the time remarked that the president "considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason." (*2 - )Treason? In his campaign, Bush joked in October 2000, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." After Sept. 11, he told a reporter: "I'm the commander — see, I don't need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." So much for James Madison.

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December 3-9 2003 The Economist Fishing industry Heavy seas EDINBURGH Why the cost of fishing subsidies is rocketing as the industry disappears THE deal on fishing quotas hammered out between European fisheries ministers just before Christmas was stringent enough to make fishermen angry but not to solve the problem of declining fish stocks. Nor will it resolve the paradox of fishing subsidies: while the number of fishermen working is falling, the amount of British taxpayers' money being spent on them is going up. Fishing is disappearing. The shoals of white fish such as cod and haddock caught by British boats shrank from 457,000 tonnes in 1998 to 243,000 tonnes in 2002. The value of the British catch has fallen from about £690m ($1.1 billion) in 1994 to £550m in 2002. Boats have dwindled from 10,300 to 7,000 and the number of fishermen from 20,700 to 12,750.

Yet, while in 2003 supporting fishing cost British taxpayers £110m, in 2004 the bill is liable to be about £165m ($290m). That amounts to about £12,950 per fisherman, rather more than the £9,500 per farm worker that farming subsidies cost. That's partly because the government is trying to reduce the number of fishermen by buying boats and licences: £56m is being spent on bribing skippers to quit. But it is also because bureaucrats' numbers do not fall alongside those of fishermen. Britain has four fisheries ministers and about 950 bureaucrats and researchers for an industry producing 0.06% of GDP. And even though the number of boats is still falling, the government still has to pay to keep an eye on the state of fish stocks and to police the fishermen to make sure they don't break the rules. Not that it has much effect. Illegal fishing, along with the warming of the North Sea, is causing the fish to disappear. Twice as much illegal as legal cod may have been caught in 2001. According to the Downing Street strategy

unit, if the North Sea gets colder (a big if) and the cod return, catches will, at best, expand by about 30% by 2013. More likely, they will shrink by a further 20%. Fishermen seem to agree: the Scottish Fishermen's Federation says that a good many boats cannot put to sea because crewmen have gone to better-paid offshore oil work and skippers are discouraging sons from taking on the family boat. Given that there are plenty of alternative jobs in the areas where fishing is concentrated, the social cost of a dying trade need not be too high. And there will be something to catch: a warmer North Sea means more prawns and sole. Nor have the fishermen's troubles had much impact on consumers. The price of cod has risen, but thanks to salmon farming and imports, Britons are eating 10% more fish than they were ten years ago. Now cod farming is about to take off. The Norwegians claim that by 2013 their farms will be churning out five times more cod than the British fleet now catches. Fish farming is a lot cheaper to police as well.

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January 2, 2004 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Unkindest Cuts Scar Indonesia As illegal logging eats away at the archipelago's land, the animals whose habitat is sacrificed bite back at the hand that wields the chainsaw. By Richard C. Paddock, Times Staff Writer PELINDUNG, Indonesia — At the end of a busy day cutting trees with chainsaws, the four timber thieves camped in the Sumatran jungle. Three of the loggers rested on a raised wooden platform, while Siadul, the fourth, prepared food below. He was sitting on the ground eating his dinner when a hungry Sumatran tiger, driven from its habitat by the relentless logging of the rainforest, leaped out of the darkness onto Siadul's back, ripped out a chunk of flesh and began dragging him away. Nature had taken its revenge. "It was like a cat catching a rat," said Siadul's friend Ponimin, a fellow illegal logger who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name. The Sumatran tiger — one of only about 500 left in the wild — would have succeeded in taking Siadul but for a felled log that blocked its path. The tree cutters fired up their chainsaws and scared the animal away, but it was too late for Siadul. He died within hours. To locals, who believe the tiger is the enforcer of proper human behavior in the jungle, the killing was punishment for some unspecified violation of the forest people's code, which includes prohibitions against adultery and sharing food from the same cooking pot. But to environmentalists, the attack was the inevitable result of a timber harvest that is wildly out of control. Across Indonesia, loggers have struck on a massive scale, destroying vast tracts of rainforest, selling the timber overseas and turning much of the jungle into farms and palm oil plantations. Government officials acknowledge that Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, is losing an expanse of forest nearly the size of Switzerland annually, and with it the habitat of endangered tigers, rhinoceroses, orangutans and elephants. Scientists believe that hundreds of plant and animal species are going extinct each year, even before they can be discovered and identified. Plants that might hold the cure for deadly diseases, they fear, are being lost forever. At least 75% of the logging is illegal, said Environment Minister Nabiel Makarim, but the weak central government, plagued by graft, is powerless to stop it. "If this goes on for seven or eight years," he said, "we won't have any more forest." Even the country's 376 national parks and conservation areas have fallen victim to the illegal harvest. Nearly every park has been assaulted by chainsaws, officials say, some so severely that they are no longer viable as nature preserves. The rate of logging has escalated dramatically since President Suharto was forced to step down in 1998. The authoritarian leader made a practice of rewarding his cronies with profitable logging concessions but kept some forests off-limits. The new central government under Megawati Sukarnoputri has granted greater autonomy to regional officials, and some have opened forests to logging, reaping the profits themselves. "Since we got democracy in 1998, the deforestation has become much faster," the environment minister said. "So people are asking the question, is democracy bad for the environment?" The pace of destruction is highest on Sumatra, an island larger than California that straddles the equator. Experts warn that Sumatra's lowland forests — the richest in biodiversity — could disappear outside national parks by 2005. Tigers are not the only creatures fighting back. In southern Sumatra, villagers have been cutting trees and planting coffee for years in the Bukit Rindingan protected forest. The adjacent South Bukit Barisan National Park is home to as many as 700 elephants, but about 50,000 people have moved into the preserve, clearing the jungle and building villages. "It is forbidden to conduct any activities in the protected forest, but in fact it has become a settlement," said Tamen Sitorus, director of the national park. "The villagers think: 'Why don't we kill the elephants? They are useless.' " In the squatters village of Sinar Harapan, residents chopped down trees on a route traveled

by a herd of 13 elephants. On the evening of Nov. 28, the elephants appeared at the edge of the jungle and began eating the farmers' coffee bushes. Waving torches and banging on wooden drums, the villagers drove them back. The next day, most villagers fled, but one stayed behind: Mistad, a 50-year-old farmer who had helped cut down the trees. At midday, the elephants entered the village and crushed him. "One man dead, trampled by the elephants because he farmed in the protected forest," Sitorus said. "If the elephants' habitat is shrinking, the elephants will come out of the forest. That is the law of the jungle." Last year, the number of elephant attacks on humans skyrocketed. According to forestry authorities, 16 attacks were reported from 1998 through 2002. In the first five months of 2003, there were 48, at least three of them fatal to the humans. Apart from animal attacks, officials say illegal logging contributed to floods and landslides that killed more than 140 people in 2003. Makarim predicted that the number will jump this year as the illicit harvest continues. "It's so blatant," he said. "Any time floods or landslides happen, we go uphill and find that people have been cutting." The Indonesian Forestry Department has reported that 5 million to 9 million acres of rainforest were lost each year from 1997 to 2000. Since then, the destruction has clearly soared, but the department's monitoring is so lax that it has no estimate of how much forest is being destroyed. The Indonesian Forum for the Environment estimates that trees are being cut at more than 10 times the sustainable-harvest rate. Indonesia has some of the world's largest tropical rainforests and ranks with Brazil as home to a great diversity of animal and plant species. But the nation is also renowned for corruption, and timber is one of its most corrupt industries. Indonesia is wealthy in timber, oil and minerals but suffered for three decades under Suharto, who enriched his family and friends but did little to develop the country or its people. Since the Asian economic collapse of 1997, Indonesia has struggled to recover. By the official count, nearly 40 million people are unemployed among a total population of more than 225 million. Some citizens long for a return to the stability of dictatorship, and others advocate a government based on conservative Islam. But many observers believe that for now, graft is what makes the country run. Much of the illegal logging is carried out by large concerns in cahoots with officials in government and the military. Loggers such as Siadul are usually employed by syndicates that provide the chainsaws and tell them where to log. Officials accept cash to issue permits or to look the other way as log-laden trucks rumble down the highways. Despite a ban on the export of raw logs from Indonesia, dozens of ships with timber cargo sail daily to Malaysia, Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries with no questions asked. By some estimates, Indonesia is losing $1 billion a year in tax revenue from the trade. "Illegal logging is not just a few people with a few chainsaws," said Mike Griffiths, who helps manage the Leuser conservation area in northern Sumatra. "It is backed by people with money and power. The cause is greed. It's not need." Environmentalists say the governments of Malaysia and Singapore allow millions of tons of illegal Indonesian logs to be cut into timber and sold as legal products to third countries, including the United States. Indonesian officials say they have asked the United States and Europe to ban the import of wood products not certified as legal. But timber certification, a costly and cumbersome process that requires tracking each log from harvest to manufacture, has been slow to catch on. The environmental forum urges Americans to boycott all products made of tropical wood, such as teak and ramin, because of the likelihood that they were made from trees harvested illegally in Indonesia. Some of Sumatra's heaviest logging is in the central province of Riau, where huge swaths of forest have been cleared for palm oil plantations. For centuries, people and tigers lived in the area with few conflicts. But as logging accelerated in 1999, tigers began coming into villages looking for food.

Since 2001, tigers have killed at least six people near the coastal town of Dumai and possibly as many as 30, authorities say. Many of the victims were illegal loggers whose deaths were not officially reported. "It seems that tigers attack humans to eat them," said Jusman, head of the Dumai forest police. "Most of the tigers we catch are thin. I think it's because they cannot find their usual food. They go into villages and eat whatever they find: goats, cows, humans." The attacks prompted Dumai officials and two international environmental groups — the Tiger Foundation and the Sumatran Tiger Trust — to establish the country's first sanctuary for the animal, the 150,000-acre Senepis Tiger Conservation Area. Since the sanctuary opened in August, two tigers have been trapped and brought to the reserve. The area will be able to sustain about 25 tigers — too small to be an independent breeding population — but backers say it is an important step in preventing the Sumatran tiger from following the Javanese and Balinese tigers into extinction. Eventually, they hope to breed some of the animals with tigers from other parts of Sumatra to maintain a diverse gene pool, said Neil Franklin, director of Indonesian programs for the Canada-based Tiger Foundation and the Britain-based Sumatran Tiger Trust. In Pelindung, 60 miles east of the reserve, there is little concern about saving trees or endangered species. The muddy, one-lane village is home to 4,000 people who make their living almost entirely by cutting down the forest. "What we do is illegal," said Ponimin, 32, whose bloodshot eyes and grim demeanor suggested he hadn't gotten over the death of his friend, Siadul. "The forests belong to the people. All of the people here are tree cutters. That's how we survive — on logs." Siadul, 23, had logged in the area for three years, Ponimin said. The tree cutters usually work in groups of four, living in the forest for weeks at a time. By day, they chop down trees and send them floating downriver. At night, they sleep in a tarp-covered platform 3 to 6 feet off the ground to avoid attacks by tigers or snakes. Ponimin insists there is no shortage of rainforest — or tigers. "Three of my friends were eaten," he said. "That's a sign there are still a lot of tigers." On the evening of Nov. 18, Ponimin was camping in the jungle near Siadul's group about eight miles from the village. He was in his tent when he heard chainsaws running — a sign of danger after dark. He followed the noise and found that Siadul had been attacked. The tiger returned at least twice during the night to reclaim the body, but the loggers held the animal at bay with their chainsaws. Ponimin, who has been in the logging business for a decade, is still puzzled by the tragedy. As far as he knows, no one had violated the taboos of the jungle, which include bathing naked and dangling one's legs over the edge of the platform. "I think Siadul was polite enough," he said. "And I had not seen anybody violating the code. He was a friendly person and never acted excessively." Herman, 27, another illegal logger from Pelindung, survived a similar attack two years ago about 12 miles from the village. He was resting in his platform tent six feet above ground when a tiger, standing on its hind legs, grabbed his foot with its claws. The tiger never made a sound. It tried to drag Herman away but he grabbed a tent pole and held on. When another logger hit the animal with a lamp, it let go. With his foot bleeding badly, Herman and his friends ran for their lives. Looking back with a flashlight, he said he could see the tiger inside the tent licking up the blood. It took 30 stitches to sew up Herman's foot. He said he is nervous when he goes to the forest now, but the attack won't keep him from logging — it's the only job he's ever had. He rejects the notion that the tiger attacked him because its habitat had been destroyed. "I think there's a lot of forest left," he said. "Maybe I did something bad, like sleeping with someone who was not my wife. Cutting the trees is OK. There's no problem with that."

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January 3, 2004 The Economist p41 Gun crime You're history The Americanisation of armed robbery NEWS that police in Leeds are looking for an American in their search for the man who murdered one of their colleagues on Boxing Day fits with the way that gun crime has changed over the past decade. The pattern of offences involving firearms looks more and more like that in America: random, careless shootings have replaced the carefully-planned bank robberies of old. “Standards are down,” asserts Terry Smith, who carried out a string of security van robberies in 1980s London. “Most robbers now get caught up in drugs, and they don't plan properly. The professionalism has gone.” Old crooks nearly always resent upstarts, but those who used to make a living out of armed robbery have particular reason to be bitter. Tracking devices, hidden cameras and improvements in forensic science have hardened banks, vans and other traditionally lucrative targets so much that pulling on a balaclava scarcely seems

worthwhile. This year, England and Wales saw just 250 bank and building society heists—down from 1,400 in 1991. These days, most armed robberies take place on the street (where stick-ups have more than doubled in the past four years) and in shops (up 26% in 2003). In this new environment, old tools and techniques are of little use. Sawn-off shotguns are handy for robbing banks, mostly for reasons of presentation: they make a terrific noise when fired at the ceiling or floor, and are menacing enough to project a threat through bullet-proof glass. They are less useful for robbing today's “soft” targets, though, so they have mostly been discarded. Sawn-off shotguns were used in just 201 robberies last year—a third the figure of a decade ago—while almost 3,841 jobs were done with handguns. Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at Middlesex University, says that armed robbery is becoming Americanised, both in the sense that Britain is moving towards late-night convenience store robberies, and also in the sense that anyone can do it. The rise of unskilled robbery—junkies with guns and no previous experience—is bad news for shop workers, who

are less well trained in dealing with guns than are bank tellers; it is also bad for the police, who tend to find ill-thought-out crimes harder to solve than planned ones. For the most part, old dogs disdain the new tricks, which they regard as the preserve of drug-addled thugs. Officers in the Flying Squad—the arm of the London Metropolitan Police that deals with armed robbery—say that professional stick-up men tend to follow defined tracks. Betting shop specialists will rarely rob post offices, for example. Mr Smith claims, with a touch of pride, that he never robbed a shop, nor even a building society. With their chosen targets now out of reach, most of the men who terrorised Britain's cities in the 1980s have simply left the business. But not all have gone clean. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, a legendary American robber, people used to hold up banks because that's where the money was. These days it is in the international drugs trade. That is where many of the old-timers have gone.

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December 31, 2003 Los Angeles Times THE WORLD Germans Get a Look at Dark Side of Cyberspace A loner is charged with killing and eating a willing victim he met in an Internet chat room. By Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff Writer BERLIN — Every day there's another grisly revelation, a new stomach-turning detail about the smiling, smartly dressed computer technician known as "the cannibal." The trial of Armin Meiwes — charged with killing and eating a willing victim he befriended in an Internet chat room — is taking the German public on a dark ride into the human psyche. It is a glimpse into a hidden world where a disturbed man's fantasies were advertised and acted upon in a macabre corner of cyberspace. Among the most startling revelations of the trial so far has been Meiwes' testimony that more than 200 people answered his ad seeking a young man "who wanted to be eaten." This has touched off a stream of media commentary about how the Internet — a tool of wonder and modernity — has been pressed into serving base and deadly human desires. "This trial will write judicial history, and it already now belongs to the bizarre side of progress in [electronic] communications," wrote the daily Der Tagesspiegel as the trial entered its third week. "Without the Internet it would have been unthinkable that such an offer meets such a demand. Now, it is thinkable, but it remains incomprehensible." The case has raised concerns across this nation about the Internet's vast and virtually unregulated terrain. For many Germans, the prospect of a person clicking his or her way through Web sites to find victims has left them uneasy about the power of information technology.

"Be it sexual criminals or necrophiliacs or sadists or masochists, there are hundreds out there on the Internet," Meiwes told the court, according to the Berliner Morgenpost. The narrative of the crime is not in dispute. In March 2001, Meiwes, a 41-year-old loner, posted his ad in an Internet chat room. The missive was answered by Bernd Brandes, a 42-year-old Berlin engineer with a history of depression. Meiwes invited Brandes to his half-timbered farmhouse in the central German city of Rotenburg, where Brandes numbed himself with sleeping pills and schnapps. Meiwes sliced off and cooked part of Brandes' flesh and the two men ate it, according to court records. Brandes then took a bath while Meiwes read a book. Hours later, Meiwes stabbed Brandes to death, cut his body into pieces and placed them in his freezer. Meiwes told a German magazine that over the next several days he dined on Brandes, sometimes flavoring his meal with oil and garlic while drinking South African red wine. "I had the fantasy and in the end I fulfilled it," Meiwes told the court recently in the city of Kassel, where the trial is expected to last until the end of January. The case touches on seldom-explored legal questions. Cannibalism is not illegal in Germany. Prosecutors are arguing that Meiwes, who was found legally sane, murdered his victim in an act of perverse sexual gratification. Meiwes contends he should not be charged with homicide because Brandes consented to be killed and eaten. His lawyer said the harshest penalty Meiwes should face is "killing on request," which carries a sentence of six months to five years. Many tabloids and Web news sites seem less concerned with issues of Internet morality and German jurisprudence than with the lurid details of the case. Dressed in coat and tie, Meiwes,

following his lawyer and carrying legal documents, smiles for TV cameras and seems to relish his notoriety as a man of dark secrets. The setting for the killing and trial could hardly be more fitting. Rotenburg and Kassel are on what Germans refer to as Storybook Road, a string of hamlets the Brothers Grimm sketched as landscapes for Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin and other unsettling fairy tales. Stern magazine, with a picture of Meiwes on its cover, took readers inside "the cannibal's" house. The home is an edifice of creepy images: a hand-held mirror, photos of a strict mother, a bed cluttered with clothes, a dead mouse, a rocking horse and a swing set in a tangle of high grass. Woven around these pictures were vignettes about a boy growing up lonely in a big house and fantasizing about eating a friend so he'd always have someone with him. Police say they confiscated from the house more than 600 pictures depicting the killing of Brandes and Meiwes' cannibalism. They also discovered 300 videotapes and 16 computers, a testament to Meiwes' passion for seeking like-minded men in the ambiguity of cyberspace. "The one who listens to Armin Meiwes," wrote the Berliner Morgenpost, "learns a lot about loneliness and alienation. And about the dark side of an otherwise iridescent medium, the Internet. It is opening up so many opportunities, but at the same time it is providing invisible accomplices in countless dark chambers." If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

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The la times article below is excellent reading for 'incestual machinations' it identifies. Be that what it be then-

It is my opinion that rather than 'turn Hussein over to an appropriate court for justice', we should, perhaps, find out 'just exactly what makes him tick' -the point being that 'He must be brought to justice' because we only 'think' we know, but shouldn't we be getting into his mind to 'preempt' Hussein's of the future? Is it megalomania? -probably, -some delusion? -probably, -'pay-back' for injustices done his people? -or would we perhaps find too much of ourselves there? -philosophical righteousness? -Bush et al? -just an idea. (How about Hussein and Jay Leno? :-) -perryb

December 16, 2003 Los Angeles Times (pB19) We Got Him ... Now What? The capture of Saddam Hussein is being treated as a celebratory occasion, but it is one that the Bush administration might come to regret. By Robert Scheer The onus is on the United States to accord this former ally and head of state all the rights due a high-level prisoner of war, as established at Nuremberg and The Hague. His testimony in open court could prove fascinating if he is allowed to detail his past relationships with top U.S. officials — including the president's father and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who worked out terms of cooperation with Hussein in 1983. And now that the "fear factor" of Hussein's ghostly presence has been removed, there is no longer any valid explanation for why former members of Hussein's regime and key scientists cannot show us where all those infamous weapons of mass destruction went. After all, this invasion — based on a new doctrine of preemptive war that bypassed United Nations inspectors — was not pitched to the American people as a mercy mission. We were told that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world and was close to building nuclear weapons that he might give to Al Qaeda. Occupying Iraq, it was stated over and over again by the White House, was a legitimate response to the horror of Sept. 11 and a way to prevent, as Condoleezza Rice once put it, "a mushroom cloud" from appearing over an American city.

Of course, President Bush was finally forced to concede that there was no evidence that linked Hussein to 9/11. Yet, in his brief statement after the capture of Hussein, he again connected the secular dictator to the threat of fundamentalist terrorism. He did this while continuing silence on the Bush family's old business buddies in Saudi Arabia, backers of Al Qaeda and other religious fanatics, who numbered Hussein among their enemies. We have lost valuable time and resources in the struggle to quell Al Qaeda and similar groups while creating a morass in Iraq. Hussein's removal was a politically motivated exploitation of our nation's anger and fear over the 9/11 attacks. With the historical footnote of his arrest now in the books, the White House needs to stop its daily lies of commission and omission regarding the war on terror. For example, the administration must stop its stonewalling of the panel Bush reluctantly formed to examine the origins of 9/11. This official obstruction would seem to be a clear indication that Bush is worried about embarrassing details emerging that could threaten his reelection. Yet Congress and the public must know the truth about 9/11 so that we may make our judgments about what happened and about how similar tragedies can be prevented. The capture of Hussein, while providing the president with fantastic propaganda footage, does nothing to make us safer from international terrorism. It could, however, shine a harsh light on Washington's decade-long military and economic support of the barbaric Hussein in his war against

Iran's religious fanatics, who were making inroads with their brethren in Iraq. For example, Bush has made frequent reference to Hussein's gassing of his own people, yet those incidents occurred when Bush's father and President Ronald Reagan were using the Sunni Baathists as a foil against Shiite Iran in a war that Hussein launched. Reagan removed the designation of Iraq as a terrorist nation and established diplomatic relations with Hussein's regime. The first President Bush extended $1.2 billion in credits to Hussein after the dictator used poison gas against Kurdish civilians. This is a dirty history that calls into question our current motives in Iraq. The threat of Hussein's return to power has been a key reason given by the United States for its hesitation to turn over any significant authority to Iraqis. Surely internationally supervised fair elections are now in order, and decisions about the rebuilding of Iraq and the disposition of its oil resources should be made by an Iraqi — not an American — government. To linger in power over Iraq now is to suggest that our motives are imperial, rather than an affirmation of self-determination for the Iraqi people.

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December 12, 2003 Los Angeles Times (pA15) THE WORLD Report Notes Toll of Cluster Bombs, Strikes in Iraq By Maggie Farley, Times Staff Writer UNITED NATIONS — Hundreds of civilian deaths could have been averted in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq if the military had not used two tactics, according to a Human Rights Watch report to be released today. The use of cluster bombs in populated areas caused more civilian casualties than any other factor, the 147-page report says. In addition, 50 strikes by warplanes targeting Iraqi leaders through intercepts of satellite telephone calls killed dozens of civilians but none of the intended targets, it says. Indiscriminately bombarding civilian areas violates warfare conventions, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "The basic rule is, you have to know who you're shooting at," he said. On Thursday, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, said that the military "applied precise methodology and extreme caution in a meticulous process when choosing valid military targets and munitions, including cluster munitions." "U.S. Central Command understands that various private and international organizations are very concerned with civilian casualties resulting from decisive combat operations in Operation Iraqi Freedom," said the spokesman, Mari ne Maj. Pete Mitchell. "While any civilian casualties of war are a tragedy, coalition forces have taken extreme care in Operation Iraqi Freedom in limiting needless loss of life and collateral damage." Three analysts from the rights group spent five weeks retracing the trail of the U.S. troops through 10 cities and interviewing doctors,

victims' families and U.S. and British military officials. The analysts concluded that, aside from the cluster bombs and strikes targeting Iraqi leaders, coalition forces tried to be careful to avoid killing noncombatants. Roth noted that researchers found a clear contrast between the civilian death rates in planned attacks on fixed sites and in assaults on targets of opportunity. "They were very, very careful and incredibly accurate when it came to planned targets," he said. But as U.S. soldiers encountered distant fire on the ground, they shot back with imprecise cluster munitions that carpeted an area with bomblets. "Hundreds of people were killed as a result," Roth said. Cluster munitions splinter above their targets and rain down dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller explosive devices — bomblets, or submunitions. The Human Rights Watch analysts calculated that more than 1,000 civilians were killed or wounded by cluster bombs and that unexploded bomblets potentially may cause even more deaths. They did not try to ascertain exactly how many civilians died, calling the number "unknowable" because of poor records, some fighters dressed as civilians and an Iraqi Health Ministry clampdown on discussing the issue. On Wednesday, Iraqi Health Ministry officials ordered a halt to a count of civilian deaths and told workers not to release statistics already compiled, Associated Press reported. A Los Angeles Times survey of civilian deaths in Baghdad after the war found that at least 1,700 noncombatants died in the five weeks after the war began March 20. An Associated Press study documented 3,240 civilian deaths between March 20 and April 20, based on surveys of about half of Iraq's hospitals.

The Human Rights Watch researchers also visited the sites of four strikes targeting Saddam Hussein and other senior Iraqi leaders. The Pentagon has acknowledged targeting 50 "high-value" targets, often through the global positioning signals emitted by the leaders' Thuraya satellite telephones. Although the Pentagon says that its intelligence is bolstered by other sources, the signals can pinpoint a location only in about a 100-yard radius, and so residents of neighborhoods where leaders were thought to be sheltered unwittingly became targets as well. In response to questions about children mistakenly killed this week in air raids in Afghanistan, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that the military took pains to avoid killing innocents. "There are risks, there are risks any time you go after any target. But I can tell you, the kind of vetting that the process goes through, from the beginnings of intelligence to the final operation, is exquisite," he said. "And we haven't been perfect. But I would offer, and would offer again, that both in Afghanistan and Iraq, that the amount of force brought to bear, that the progress that was made, the success we've had, has never been done with more care about bringing innocents into the line of fire." But Roth, who oversaw similar postwar studies in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, said the Pentagon knew that it had a problem with cluster bombs. Human Rights Watch found that the Air Force and Marines were using fewer cluster bombs in populated areas, instead augmenting ground troops with close air support. However, the Army continued to use the cluster shells and missiles heavily in Iraq — U.S. Central Command reported that its forces used 10,782 cluster munitions overall.

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December 11, 2003 Los Angeles Times THE NATION Changes in Fish Tied to Feedlots By Marla Cone, Times Staff Writer Hormones that leak into streams from cattle feedlots are altering the sexual characteristics of wild fish, demasculinizing the males and defeminizing the females, according to a study. The newly released study, which examined minnows in three streams that flow into Nebraska's Elkhorn River, suggests that cattle operations pose a previously unknown effect on the environment. About 30 million head of cattle are raised in U.S. feedlots each year, and nearly all are implanted with growth-promoting synthetic hormones. A group of scientists from five U.S. institutions, led by the University of Florida in Gainesville, reported "significant alterations in the reproductive biology" of fish immediately downstream from a large Nebraska feedlot. The male fish had about one-third less testosterone and testes about half as big as unexposed fish upstream, according to the study, which was published last week in the online version of the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The female fish had about 20% less estrogen and 45% more testosterone than females from the uncontaminated section of stream, the study found. In addition, lab tests confirmed that feedlot effluent contained a complex and potent mix of androgens, the male sex hormones, and estrogens, the female hormones, said Edward Orlando, the study's lead author. He is now at St. Mary's College of Maryland in St. Mary's City. The scientists said they did not know whether the damage was caused by natural hormones in cattle or by synthetic ones administered to the animals. Either way, their report says, the findings "clearly demonstrate" that effluent from feedlots is hormonally active. The discovery could fuel ongoing controversies

over the safety of growth hormones in beef and increase pressure on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to tighten rules for livestock operations. Cattle industry representatives, who have long maintained that hormone treatments are safe, called the study an unsubstantiated attack. They question whether the effluent came from the feedlots, rather than from septic tanks or sewage plants, which are known to release hormones from human waste into the environment. "It's very suspicious that they would indicate it is from feedlots, because there are long-standing regulations prohibiting discharge," said Gary Weber, executive director of regulatory affairs at the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn. "Feedlots are not allowed [under state and federal laws] to discharge into waters, so that raises the question of where are these materials really coming from?" However, the scientists said the samples were taken from a site "directly connected to a retention pond" located at the base of a large feedlot, Orlando said. Several spots along the Elkhorn contained hormones, indicating that "this is not due to one farm in one location," said co-author Louis J. Guillette Jr. of the University of Florida. In their report, the scientists say that further investigation of livestock farms is "urgently needed if we are to understand the possible adverse effects of these compounds on aquatic ecosystem health." A priority, they said, should be to identify the compounds that altered the fish, and determine whether they were natural or pharmaceutical in origin. "Cattle can be treated with any number of chemicals, or chemical combinations, including androgens and estrogens. We do not know what the cattle in this feedlot were treated with or what was in the effluent," said Earl Gray, a reproductive toxicologist at the EPA's health effects laboratory who also was an author of the study. "This is really the first study of this kind, and there are lots of questions, but few answers so far."

Whether hormones implanted in cattle have any effects on people who eat beef is unknown. About 99% of the nation's largest, factory-sized cattle feedlots and 90% of smaller ones use hormone implants, which stimulate growth in castrated bulls and help them produce more meat and less fat, according to a 1999 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Most implant-free cattle are raised on open rangeland instead of in feedlots. In California, the nation's seventh-largest beef-producing state, about half a million cows are raised in feedlots annually. Some implants contain trenbolone, a potent androgenic steroid, and zeranol, a fake estrogen. In lab tests, trenbolone feminizes male fish and causes male-like characteristics in female fish. Some synthetic hormones, including trenbolone, last for months or years in manure piles and waste ponds, compared with natural hormones, which disappear within hours or days, Guillette said. The ability of dozens of contaminants, mostly pesticides and pharmaceuticals, to mimic hormones has been a growing concern since the early 1990s, when scientists began finding mixed-up sexual characteristics in wild animals, including alligators and polar bears. In human beings, some studies have linked contaminants to lower sperm counts and premature puberty. The European Union has banned U.S. hormone-treated beef. Because nearly all the study's funding came from the European Commission, the beef groups said the researchers might have had an agenda. But Guillette said that no U.S. funding was available and that the EU "was not looking for an effect; they were looking for data, given the complete lack of ecological data" related to cattle farms.

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December 8, 2003 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE A Killing Floor Chronicle A down-and-out former poultry worker's online memoirs of his gruesome job have electrified animal-rights activists worldwide. By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer PINE RIDGE, Ark. — In his dim trailer in the pines, Virgil Butler writes of killing. He once shot a man to death in the parking lot of a bar. He served in the American invasion of Panama and recalled killing enemy soldiers at close range. That is not the violence that drives him to his keyboard. He is haunted, instead, by the nine years he made his way in the world by slaughtering chickens. In the chilled dark of a Tyson processing plant, Butler killed 80,000 birds a shift. He snapped their legs into shackles so they hung upside down. He slit their throats. Every two seconds, another chicken came at him down the line, squawking and flapping. It was not possible, then, to think much. But Tyson fired Butler last fall, for reasons the company won't specify. He has time now to think. The man he shot at the bar — that was self-defense. The soldiers he killed — that was war. It's the birds that shadow his sleep. He sits cross-legged on his sagging bed and pulls the keyboard to his lap. "There is blood everywhere . It's just you and the dying chickens . You are ashamed to tell others what you do at night while they are asleep in their beds." Butler writes for hours each day. His words have electrified animal-rights activists around the globe.    Posted at http://www.cyberactivist.blogspot.com , Butler's account of a career on the kill floor is being translated into French and Dutch. Britain's Guardian newspaper has recommended his Web log as "powerful stuff," a "must-read." Supporters in Singapore and Russia e-mail questions. Strangers from across America send cards. Veterans of the animal-rights movement say Butler has done more for their cause than celebrity endorsements from actress Pamela Anderson and former Beatle Paul McCartney. Lucy Kelley, a 60-year-old cook in Mount Juliet, Tenn., said she had one response to the blog: "I don't eat chicken any more." "Virgil's description of the horrible abuse of chickens in our nation's slaughterhouses has turned more people vegetarian than anything else we did last year," said Bruce Friedrich, director of vegan outreach for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. With 750,000 members, PETA is the largest animal-rights group in the world. "We get letters and e-mails about it constantly," Friedrich said. * No Lawsuit Planned Tyson dismisses Butler as a disgruntled worker who invented tales of slaughterhouse horror only after he lost his job. "Some of the things he says are outrageous," spokesman Ed Nicholson said. Tyson does not plan legal action to shut down the Web site, he added, only because suing would give Butler more publicity. The local sheriff, meanwhile, points to Butler's criminal record and asks why anyone would listen to a down-and-out former poultry worker with a rap sheet. Butler, 39, sometimes wonders that himself. A self-described hillbilly, with a drooping mustache, thin ponytail and a broken smile missing many teeth, Butler is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. He used to gulp ephedrine pills and smoke pot; he's been arrested at least twice on drug charges. He has a high school diploma and some carpentry skill, but he never expected much from life. "I didn't see myself as anything other than a chicken plant worker," he said. Deep in the Ouchita Mountains, 130 miles west of Little Rock, Butler lives in a camper so small that he and his fiancee, Laura Alexander, can't stand up side by side. The stove is broken. The bare light bulb flickers dim when the coffeepot is switched on. The closest town has a population of just 220, and even that's nine miles away.

Butler has never had a cause before. "Never had anything I wanted to try that much for," he said. Yet somehow, from his trailer in the woods, he has become a beacon for animal rights. "The vegan cream of the activist crop," Friedrich calls him. "It's the greatest feeling," Butler said. "All my life, people told me, 'They're just damn chickens.' I had no idea so many people would care." Animal-rights groups have long relied on insider tips to help them craft protest strategies. But most whistle-blowers insist on anonymity to protect their jobs. That's why activists regard Butler's blog as such a coup. "He came forward from a world that's completely locked away out of sight," said Karen Davis, who runs a shelter for rescued chickens in Machipongo, Va. "Very few people have the courage." Butler's blog, which runs more than 200 pages, describes everything from the bird droppings that seemed to hang in the air ("kind of gritty, like Metamucil, and kind of salty") to the panic he thought he saw in the chickens ("sometimes, you catch one looking up at you, eye to eye, and you know it's terrified"). He spares no gore in recounting the slaughter, including the occasional mishaps that condemn some birds to broken bones, shocks, bruises and being boiled alive in the scalding tank. Such mistakes are "not common in terms of the number of birds per thousand affected," said Bruce Webster, a poultry scientist at the University of Georgia who advises KFC on animal welfare. "But if you stand there long enough, you will probably see it happen," Webster said. In his blog, Butler also claims he saw his co-workers at a Tyson plant in Grannis, Ark., rip the heads off live chickens, stomp them to death and blow them up with dry-ice bombs. Polk County Sheriff Michael Oglesby investigated the allegations but found no proof. "Everyone from the plant manager on down denies it," he said. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also looked into the claims but "could not substantiate them," spokesman Steven Cohen said. Butler's disputed claims of sadism at the Grannis plant have been heavily promoted by animal-rights groups. But his less sensational — and less controversial — account of the slaughterhouse routine appears to stir readers just as well. "Before reading it, I never thought about how meat came to be on my plate," said Josh Tetrick, a senior at Cornell University. After reading it, he took up tofu. "I was shocked to learn that the animals weren't always killed instantly, that sometimes the instruments didn't work right," he said. A football player accustomed to wolfing down three chicken breasts at a meal, Tetrick, 23, has maintained a vegan diet for three months. "Hearing a firsthand, personal account — that's what did it for me," he said. * A 'Disturbing' Read Butler's blog draws anywhere from four to 400 readers a day. Many are moved to respond. "Your page was the most disturbing thing I have ever read in my whole life," one supporter wrote. Another, "not quite vegan but working on it," asked for advice: "I am so afraid to let my friends know what is really behind their McNuggets." Butler and Alexander, at their banged-up computer at 5 a.m., answer every e-mail. Butler made $500 off his activism this fall, when PETA sent him undercover to try to corroborate his claims of chicken abuse at the Grannis plant. (He taped some workers talking about the incidents, but the district attorney declined to prosecute.) Unable to find work since Tyson fired him, Butler has not earned another paycheck in more than a year. His unemployment benefits, $112 a week, ran out last month. Alexander, 35, is broke as well. She says back injuries from a car accident make it hard for her to work, so she spends most of her time helping Butler with the blog and a chat room they run at http://groups.yahoo.com/ [no spaces] group/activistsagainstfactoryfarming .

Hoping for help from supporters, Butler recently put a donations button on his Web site. He's received one pledge of $75. But even if he can't make a living off his activism, Butler plans to keep writing. "The more I've done, the more right I feel about it," he said. "I have found my niche." It has been an improbable journey. Butler took his first job in the poultry industry when he was 14. Joining a local catch crew, he went from farm to farm, grabbing chickens and stuffing them into wooden crates for transport to the slaughterhouses. As soon as he finished high school, he enlisted in the Army. He said his combat reconnaissance team was sent to Panama during the American invasion in 1989, and was involved in several firefights. When he came home, Butler took the only steady work he could find in rural Arkansas: killing chickens at Tyson plants in Grannis and Waldron. The job was dull but Tyson paid well above minimum wage, with benefits. Butler didn't stop to think much about the birds he slaughtered; they were just so much "pre-processed product." After the fight outside the bar, Butler spent three years in prison for manslaughter. When he was paroled in 1997, Tyson put him right back on the line in Grannis, an hour south of Pine Ridge. Butler was disciplined several times for scuffling with his co-workers. He was also honored at least twice as employee of the month, accepting his plaques with pride. But the longer he worked the kill floor, Butler said, the more it began to disturb him. He dulled himself with drugs. He started carrying a knife. He verbally assaulted Alexander. He felt like a killer, he said, and acted the part. "It felt like you were losing your humanity." Butler found he couldn't talk to Alexander about the job. On mornings when he came home without his T-shirt, he couldn't bring himself to explain that it had been so soaked in blood, he threw it away. "I realized I was honestly ashamed to show her what I did for a living." Butler claims his loud griping about conditions for both birds and workers cost him his job in November 2002. Tyson says no one at the plant recalls Butler making such complaints. Two months after he was fired, Butler described slaughterhouse abuses at a news conference sponsored by PETA. Only one reporter attended. No one wrote it up. But over the next several months, PETA and other groups featured Butler's story on their Web sites. Each time they did, hundreds of e-mails poured in, thanking him for, as one writer put it, "being a voice for the animals." Amazed, emboldened, Butler began to think of himself as more than an assembly-line killer. He gave up his fried ham and his pork rinds in favor of a vegan diet. When memories of the kill floor crowded his thoughts, he talked through them, instead of pushing them aside. For the first time, he told Alexander what he had done those nine years at the slaughterhouse. And how it felt. * Inspired by Iraq Blogs He spent months haltingly unrolling his memories. Then, in August, inspired by soldiers' blogs from Iraq, he launched the online diary. Last month, Tyson officials began logging on to Butler's site. Within weeks, the company announced plans to inspect its slaughterhouses regularly to ensure humane treatment of the 42 million chickens it processes each year. Nicholson said the new inspections had nothing to do with Butler's blog: "His saying it does is like the rooster saying the sun came up because he crowed." Butler isn't so sure. "One person can make a difference if you just don't shut up," he said. "If you keep talking long enough, people will hear you."

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December 6, 2003 The Economist p28 Language and existentialism Rumspeak Donald Rumsfeld speaks his mind with unusual clarity. Give him an award IT PROBABLY troubles him little, but among those who loathe the Bush administration around the world, Donald Rumsfeld is a hate-figure rivalled only by George Bush. And as with the president, a favourite line of attack is his abuse of the English language. Jacob Weisberg, a leftish American journalist, has compiled a couple of books of "Bushisms", casting a patronising look at the everyday verbal glitches of a homespun Texan. More recently "Pieces of Intelligence: the Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld", by Hart Seely, mockingly recasts in blank verse some of the defence secretary's turns of phrase. Now the Plain English Campaign, a British group that lobbies for clearer use of language, has given Mr Rumsfeld the "Foot in Mouth Award" for the most baffling comment by a public figure. It was:

"There are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones." Sorry, but what is so muddled about that? Certainly, it compares favourably with the prize-winning burble of previous years. Of her aptly named film "Clueless", Alicia Silverstone, a film star, said "1 think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness." Dan Quayle, a future vice-president, once mused: "We offer the party as a big tent. How we do that, with the platform, the preamble to the platform or whatnot, that remains to be seen. But that message will have to be articulated with great clarity ." Or consider Bill Clinton's existential remark (which, alas, never received an award) when he was under questioning about Monica Lewinsky: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

By contrast, Mr Rumsfeld is a model of clarity and wisdom. The nature of ignorance is a serious philosophical problem; for decision-makers, it is a knotty practical one. For a senior politician to grapple with serious epistemological questions, and to do so publicly, is as commendable as it is rare. Indeed, no less than the London Guardian, normally known for its withering disdain for those ghastly rednecks across the Atlantic, fired a salvo in his de fence. Far from being foolish, it argued, the offending remark was "a complex, almost Kantian, thought", admirably free of jargon and gobbledegook. Well said. Not that Mr Rumsfeld, sensible fellow, is likely to care.

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Much of what is excerpted in these pages is 'California specific', but let us not kid ourselves, readers in other states and countries: this file is not 'the human condition' for nothing.

November 30, 2003 Los Angeles Times COMMENTARY We Will Reap What We Sow in the Central Valley By Gerald W. Haslam, Gerald W. Haslam is the author of several books about the Central Valley, among them "The Other California" (University of Nevada, 1994). Twenty years ago, the vaquero writer Arnold Rojas, who had lived in the Bakersfield area for nearly 80 years, said, "Some day we will have to tear up these malls and plant something to eat." It seemed funny at the time. Today, though, that vast trough we call the Great Central Valley — the richest agricultural region in the world — truly is threatened by short-term economics and planning. Its population is swelling and real-estate developers are pocketing big bucks. But the region's infrastructure is strained, and some of the most productive agricultural land is being covered with houses and malls. This is happening all over California, but given past mistakes and the importance of agriculture, we should know better in the Central Valley. During the last decade, more than 200,000 acres of prime farmland in the Central Valley have been lost to development. Pro-growth advocates point out that nearly 300,000 "productive acres" have been added in that period. So what's the problem? First, not even ingenious Americans have figured out how to invent acreage. That so-called

new land is marginal for agriculture and was previously being used for things like grazing, or it wasn't being used by humans at all. Now it has been vivified by irrigation, by chemicals and perhaps by leveling so it can grow crops. That fits the historical pattern in this state: pave superior farmland, then convert less fertile tracts to agricultural use, usually requiring more acreage and more aggressive technology. The erstwhile citrus groves of Orange County or the forgotten orchards of Silicon Valley, for instance, were paved, and their loss led to chemically augmented farming in places like Kern and Tulare counties. Today the Central Valley is absorbing the state's fastest population growth; more than 6 million live there now, with more than 12 million considered possible by 2050. New residents will come, but where will they live? Like the native cultures our ancestors overwhelmed, we have built communities on the rich alluvial soil deposited by streams, the earth most productive for agriculture. Beneath that topsoil is an ancient seabed on the Central Valley's west side. Irrigating there a few years ago leached seabed selenium into Kesterson Drain, killing birds. In fact, the only thing dumber than irrigating soil on the west side may be to build houses on east-side flood plains. We do both because there is no effective regional planning. No one argues seriously that there won't be new houses in the Central Valley, but why not build them on the marginal (and abundant) west-side acreage that is less suitable for intensive

farming and less susceptible to intensive flooding? Why not, at first at least, infill existing towns and not build on open land at all? There are many reasons why we don't do that, most revolving around greed and convenience. Blame too the American assumption that land is owned rather than held in trust for future generations, mated with the notion that you should be able to do anything you want with your property, no matter what the long-term consequences to the commonweal. Regional prejudice lingers in this state too: Hey, it's only the Central Valley . Who cares? Yet the gradual paving of an area that produces 25% of all the food eaten in the United States may well lead to reliance on provisions from distant locales where environmental and health guidelines are lax. Californians won't allow people to build randomly on our magnificent coast, but we apparently consider the Great Central Valley's cornucopia expendable. Perhaps because it isn't pretty, even though its annual production of crops and petroleum (it produces more than 80% of the state's oil and gas) is worth more than all the gold mined in the history of the Golden State. Some hate the notion of regional planning, but it works. We have a commission to protect our remarkable coast, so why not consider a similar body to direct regional development in the state's agricultural heartland before it is lost, one parcel at a time?

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November 30, 2003 Los Angeles Times (pM5) COMMENTARY When Evil Becomes Invisible Commonplace incident in Israel puts light on tragedy of all-powerful authority By Batya Gur, literary critic for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the author of several novels, including the forthcoming "Bethlehem Road Murder." A version of this essay appeared in Haaretz. JERUSALEM — The three women soldiers who detained an old Palestinian man on a narrow stretch of street didn't spit on him or beat him, nor did they kick him or force him up against a wall with the butt of a gun. But there was something in their behavior that made me pause, watch for a moment, then retrace my steps after walking on a bit. It's hard to say why I went back. These sights are really not all that rare these days. We're in the fourth year of what we here call "the situation," a devastating time that has imposed upon us the contempt and animosity of most of the world. Our lives and those of the Palestinians around us are joined in an unbelievably complicated embroidery of contacts. Ordinarily, we do our best to go about our business, try to ignore the crisis, try to live as best we can. But on this particular day, there was something I couldn't overlook. What was it that drew me back? It was something undefined and awful. The man was tall, about 70 years old, wearing the traditional black-and-white kaffiyeh on his head. He was standing on the narrow part of the sidewalk with his back toward the stone wall of the old German cemetery, whose iron gates are always locked, with an expression of disorientation and meek acceptance. The three soldiers were leaning on the railing separating the sidewalk from the road. One of them was holding the identity card and travel documents the old man had given them (he came from Hebron and had no permit to be inside Israel's "green line") and she was talking on her cellphone about personal matters, while the two others chatted and laughed, going on about their

personal affairs. This went on for a long while. I had seen them standing with him about half an hour earlier, on my way to the grocery store. The soldiers were having a good time. And the old man stood there helpless, his face expressing the knowledge that he would have to wait until they finally decided to pay attention to him. What are we to do in such situations? Last week, I was teaching Hemingway's great short story "The Killers" to my literature students in Jerusalem, about two professional killers who appear in a small town diner somewhere in the U.S. and threaten the lives of the manager, the cook and a young guy named Nick Adams, who can't stand the impotence of those around him. My students, who are young and vigorous, thought that the way the manager and cook responded to a death verdict that the assassins planned to carry out (it's terrible, just don't think about it, they advised Nick) was contemptible. It took several hours of examples from our daily lives before they realized that this is the way of the world: If you want to go on living you have to resist interfering on behalf of the cause of justice. It was very difficult for me to convince them that growing up means giving up the sensitivity to life's wrongs. But on that particular day in Jerusalem, I did the opposite. I did not withdraw and protect my seemingly sheltered life by walking away. Instead, I went up to the soldiers and spoke to them about respect and civility; told them that this old man could have been their grandfather. I asked them to identify themselves. They refused. I admit that this was not one of the greater and more visible evils that take place around us daily, nor was it a disaster — only an insidious and consuming evil, one that is hard to pinpoint, hard to put into words. I do not see the horrors that take place at the checkpoints every day, but I know they occur. I also know perfectly well that such an act of protest by a woman like me, someone who avoids any political activity or any consistent struggle for human rights, is actually a sentimental

act. Such a trivial act is a bit like sweeping the path to my own private garden, but what the words and eyes of this soldier with a blond ponytail and a pierced tongue reflected was not easy to sweep away. It was the glittering, sharp tip of a force of nature: the destructive power penned up in the all-powerful authority of 18- and 19-year-old men and women. From the moment the soldiers opened their mouths at me ("Why? Who the hell are you?" the pierced-tongued one asked), the hidden plots of our lives, specifically one engraved in us, were exposed suddenly in their full banality and truth: I found myself saying that I refused to feel like a German walking past an abused Jew in Nazi Germany, to turn away indifferently or fearfully. "You're calling us Nazis!" shrieked the soldiers, and within a minute this word became their precious possession. They rejoiced in their justice, and I could already imagine the self-righteous gloating over the use of this word. But I couldn't help seeing the incident with the old Palestinian through this prism. I saw a young woman, who could have been my daughter in looks and in age, acting with total conviction of being right. She was unable to see that the person she had detained was a helpless old man. I was arrested for disturbing a policewoman in the line of duty: "Move it, lady, get in the car," yelled the pierced- tongued girl with a victorious glee. That tiny ring, that shining metal bead, which in any other context would have been mischievous coquetry, became the glittering tip of corruption. This young woman had failed to grasp that her uniform should symbolize a society and a nation, a responsibility and a duty. Instead, the uniform — and the glittering bead at the tip of her tongue — was a permit to do whatever she wanted. The glittering tip of her assaulting tongue is the tip of what we have become. Time and again, every day and every hour, we see how we've turned our children into hobnail-booted soldiers. It is not political stances we're talking about here — and not "Peace Now" or peace talks — but about the image of man and his dignity.

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November 14, 2003 Science Magazine vol 302 Three-Gorges Dam: Risk to Ancient Fish THE HUGE THREE-GORGES DAM (TGD) of the Yangtze River is going to demonstrate the mighty power of humanity to change and fragment an area of about 58,000 km**2 with the formation of a huge reservoir of 1080 km**2. It is expected to exert disastrous influences on many terrestrial plants and animals, as discussed by J. Wu et al. in their Policy Forum "Three-Gorges Dam -experiment in habitat fragmentation?" (23 May, p. 1239). However, loss of biodiversity will take place not only terrestrially but also aquatically. More attention should be given to ancient endemic fish species that are extremely vulnerable. The Yangtze River basin is one of the richest areas in freshwater fish species diversity, with 361 fish species belonging to 29 families and 131 genera, accounting for 36% of all freshwater fish species in China (1); There are as many as 177 endemic fish species in this area, of which 25 already have endangered status, accounting for 27% of all

endangered freshwater fish species in China (2). The construction of the Gezhou Dam (38 km downstream from the TGD) in 1981 led to sharp declines in the populations of three endemic ancient fish species, Chinese sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis), River sturgeon (A. dabryanus), and Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) (3). These three species are listed as Grade I endangered species in China Red Data Book of Endangered Animals (2). The Chinese sturgeon originally migrated from brackish water or the sea into their breeding ground in Jinsha River, the upper branch of the Yangtze River, swimming over 3000 km. However, the construction of the Gezhou Dam has completely prevented their upstream spawning migration, and although a new spawning site formed below the dam, their breeding ground shrank from 600 km to only 7 km. The TGD will reduce 41% of the water flow below the dam, which will most likely destroy the only breeding ground. The spawning of Chinese paddlefish was also severely impaired by the completion of the Gezhou Dam, and since 1988, only 3 to 10 adults have been found below the dam annually. Some spawning takes place above the dam, but TGD will further damage the paddlefish population when it is completed. The middle and lower basins of the Yangtze River are the most densely populated part of China. This region was originally a huge flood plain characteristic of a network of water systems, including the river and its tributaries, and many interconnected shallow lakes (4). Mainly to increase farmland, the Chinese have

constructed numerous flood-control projects along the river and separated thousands (almost all) of the lakes from the river, which caused serious fragmentation of the water system and lamentably promoted, in turn, the construction of the world's largest dam, which has decreasing flooding as one of its major roles (5). Many ancient fish coevolved with the flood plain, and the local monsoon climate has been threatened by these environmental modifications to such a rate and extent that the TGD will deepen fragmentation of the river and will undoubtedly bring more problems to migratory fish such as Chinese sturgeon. Additionally, consequential salinization of the estuary might potentially contribute to the extinction of related fish species. Although the dam will start storing water and generating electric power in late 2003, these concerns could possibly change the way the dam is operated in the future, increasing public awareness and promoting urgent adoption of a conservation agenda and substantial international collaborations in research and protection activities for endangered fish in the Yangtze River, where the Chinese government is still planning to construct more than 10 dams in the future. PING XIE Donghu Experimental Station of Lake Ecosystems, State Key Laboratory for Freshwater Ecology and Biotechnology of China. Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, People's Republic of China. E-mail: Xieping@ihb.ac.cn

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November 23, 2003 Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES Many Have the Will but Still Seek a Way to Save Orangutans A conference in Long Beach focuses on the great apes and what can be done to protect them. By Steve Hymon, Times Staff Writer According to an atlas, it's roughly 10,000 miles from Southern California to the nearest orangutan living in the wild. But that didn't deter a crowd from packing a lecture hall at Cal State Long Beach on Saturday for a daylong conference on the great apes, their behavior and what can be done to save them. Orangutans are native only to the islands of Borneo and Sumatra in the Southeast Asian nations of Malaysia and Indonesia. Their populations have plummeted in the last century. Some estimates hold that there are at least 18,000 orangutans in the wild, but the apes are being squeezed by a variety of pressures, most notably the loss of their habitat to logging and agriculture, and poaching. Though the problem is half a world away, there is no shortage of primatologists and anthropologists in Southern California interested in the apes. "Conservation is driving it, but it's also that so many schools today are teaching courses in primate behavior, and students love it. The primates are a window into ourselves," said Norm Rosen, a Cal State Fullerton anthropology professor and the head of the Southern California Primate Research Forum. The group sponsors daylong conferences on various primate issues twice each year at campuses in Southern California. Money from ticket sales helps bring experts from across the globe to speak. Orangutans are the only great ape found in Asia; gorillas and chimpanzees are found in Africa. Like those other species, orangutans are considered very intelligent. But they also need vast expanses of habitat and are slow to reproduce — much like grizzly bears and mountain lions in North America. Echoes of familiar arguments from the Northern Rockies about persuading people to save

unbroken chunks of grizzly habitat could be heard in the lecture of Willie Smits, an ecologist and founder of the Balikpapan Orangutan Society, which works to save habitat in Borneo and Sumatra. "Today I won't speak much about orangutans, but I will speak about the forest," said Smits, who said the key is to show people how to make a living without destroying the forest. Others spoke of the need to learn more about how orangutans think and behave — before they disappear from the wild. "Of all the great apes, orangutans are the least understood in terms of behavior and cognitive abilities," said Robert Shumaker, a researcher who is helping build the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines. Shumaker has been studying orangutans at the National Zoo in Washington, where he has learned to communicate with the apes by having them point to symbols on a computer screen. It's not, he said, simply a matter of teaching an animal a neat trick. Rather, it's a way to show people how intelligent the orangutans are and convince people they should be saved. "The apes are our closest living relatives," Shumaker said. "I think that confers a level of respect and a special set of responsibilities for the great apes." Shumaker is a pro when it comes to research. But the conference also attracted those who wish to become the next generation of scientists in the field. Emilie Kissler, who is 23, traveled to the conference from Guelph, Canada, to make a small presentation on a question that has been gnawing at her: Are there certain plants that orangutans eat only for their medicinal value? And, if so, did the native Dayak people in Borneo learn that trick from the apes? Kissler, who is shopping around for a graduate program, realizes she faces years of research. She'll need skills in toxicology, chemistry, wildlife behavior, nutrition and biomedicine and will have to battle other scientists for funding while working thousands of miles from home. So why do it? "I've never liked working inside," she said.

November 22, 2003 Los Angeles Times SCIENCE FILE Last of Center's Rare Rhinos Dies It's the fifth lost in three weeks, crushing a Malaysian breeding program. A bacterial infection is suspected. By Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer The last of seven rare Sumatran rhinoceroses at a breeding center in Malaysia died this week, a severe setback in the 16-year effort to save the species. All seven rhinoceroses at the Sungai Dusun Conservation Center in central Malaysia have died this year, five of them in the last three weeks. The latest death came Tuesday. Researchers are not sure yet what killed them but suspect a pneumonia-like bacterial infection. "They became inactive, then they started having difficulty in breathing," said Mohamad Khan Mohmin Khan, chairman of the Malaysian Rhino Foundation. "After that, they slowly lay down, and it became difficult for them to get up. Some of them were with us for 16 years, and we loved them very much." The Sumatran is the smallest of the world's five species of rhinos, reaching a length of no more than about 9 feet and a weight of 2,000 pounds. They are also among the rarest of the world's large mammals, with only 300 believed to be living in the wild, mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia. It is the only Asian rhino that has two horns rather than one. The Sumatran rhinos are being threatened by poachers and loss of habitat. The center has denied allegations that the animals were kept in unhygienic conditions or that its veterinarians lacked the necessary skills to care for them. "Random events such as the deaths at Sungai Dusun are always a risk for small populations, whether in the wild or in captivity," said Thomas Foose, director of the International Rhino Foundation. The Sungai Dusun center will be shut down and the research moved to somewhere that is not infected, foundation officials said.

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November 22, 2003 Los Angeles Times Wood-Chipped Chickens Fuel Outrage A San Diego area vet who allegedly allowed the disposal of 30,000 live birds feels the heat. By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer San Diego County's Animal Services Department has filed a complaint against a veterinarian who allegedly authorized a Valley Center egg ranch to kill 30,000 hens by dumping them alive into a wood chipper. Reports by the county, recently obtained by The Times, recount workers at the ranch feeding squirming birds by the bucket into the pounding machine, then turning the mashed remains with dirt and heaping the mixture into piles. The complaint centers on Gregg Cutler, a veterinarian who is also on the animal welfare committee of the American Veterinary Medical Assn. Last winter, Cutler attended a meeting of poultry ranchers, veterinarians and state and federal officials to discuss how farmers should deal with chickens and other fowl during the outbreak of exotic Newcastle disease. During the meeting, the group discussed using a wood chipper to destroy birds that could not be moved because of a quarantine. A few weeks later, in February, Ward Egg Ranch rented a wood chipper to destroy hens which, though not infected with the Newcastle disease, had stopped laying eggs. San Diego County authorities received a complaint about the killing, and operators of the ranch said they got the idea from Cutler and others at the meeting. Cutler denies he came up with the idea, but said he doesn't have a problem with using the machine for that purpose. "No idea was too crazy to throw out at these meetings," said Cutler. "We were in desperation trying to deal with this disease." Feeding chickens into a wood chipper, he said, "seemed like it was instantaneous and there was no suffering . I personally believe if it's done properly with correct equipment, it's a humane way of disposing of birds in an emergency."

Cutler said he's being unfairly targeted by animal welfare activists. In the last three weeks, four national animal advocate groups have called for his removal from the animal welfare committee. In the county's report into the incident, Arie Wilgenburg, one of the ranch owners, is quoted as saying that several veterinarians, including Cutler, said wood-chipping was an "approved method" to kill hens that were no longer producing eggs. An egg ranch manager, Ken Iriye, told officials that the ranch preferred using the wood chipper to the usual methods of gassing by carbon-dioxide or snapping chickens' necks because it was "less traumatizing." He said it was easier for the staff to "cram the chickens in a chute than to chase them around and break their necks." The report says that Cutler acknowledged supervising the mass euthanasia over the phone. County Animal Services Lt. Mary Kay Gagliardo said Cutler also told her that he believed using a wood chipper was humane. Gagliardo wrote: "I then asked him if he felt it was still humane if they were going in there bunches at a time, being plugged up in the chute, not knowing if they were going into the shredder feet first, breast first, if he still considered that a humane death, and he said to me, 'Yes, of course. However they go in, it's quick, it's painless, and it's over in seconds.' " Cutler denies saying this and claims there are numerous inaccuracies in the report. Wilgenburg, one of the ranch's owners, said that since February he has received about 100 pieces of hate mail and several threatening phone calls in the middle of the night. The sale of part of the ranch to Cebe Farms, which raises poultry for eating, was held up for several months because of the public outcry, Wilgenburg said. If he had to do it again, he said, he would have gassed the chickens instead of sending them through a chipper. "Still, gassing is worse than the wood chipper . It takes slightly longer for the chicken to die." In filing the complaint against Cutler, the county asked the state Department of Consumer Affairs to investigate the incident further and determine if punishment was warranted.

A state veterinary board spokeswoman said the agency does not comment on filed complaints. Generally, if the veterinary board believes a violation has occurred, the case is taken to the state attorney general's office, said Gina Bayliss, the board's enforcement director. The attorney general may present it to an administrative law judge, who can put a veterinarian on probation or suspend or revoke his license. In April, the San Diego district attorney's office investigated whether the egg ranch had committed animal cruelty. Elisabeth Silva, the deputy district attorney assigned to the case, said that she could not find criminal intent on the part of the owners, concluding that the Wilgenburgs were just following professional advice. Silva's office declined to file a case. Animal welfare groups protested. Silva investigated further, but again declined to file a case against the Wilgenburgs. Animal interest groups continue to protest Cutler's fitness to practice avian medicine. Karen Davis, president of the Machipongo, Va.-based United Poultry Concerns, has been circulating the San Diego County documents and vowed that animal groups would continue to nettle the American Veterinary Medical Assn. until it removed Cutler from the animal welfare committee. In response to the outcry, the veterinary association has publicly condemned throwing live chickens into a wood chipper. Spokeswoman Gail Golab said they are pursuing "standard procedures to investigate allegations against members," but would not divulge details. Other poultry experts may have also authorized the wood-chipping, the animal welfare groups acknowledged, but they said they focused on Cutler because of his committee membership. "This is not just anybody," said Wayne Pacelle, spokesman for the Humane Society of the United States. "This is a guy on the animal welfare committee of the most prominent animal veterinary group in the country. That does not inspire confidence in any declaration from such a committee."

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November 22-28, 2003 The Economist p43 Prostitution in Cambodia The children in Gucci shoes KRONG KOH KONG The grisly results of human trafficking THE United States classifies countries that allow human trafficking into three "tiers". Cambodia is in tier two, which means pretty nasty. It is unlikely that the teenage prostitutes in the town of Krong Koh Kong in southern Cambodia are aware that bureaucrats in Washington may be concerned for them. Their world is very small: a row of shacks on a dusty road at the outskirts of the town, with red lights outside to advertise their business. The girls' knowledge of the hazards of their trade seems even smaller. A Vietnamese girl, aged 17, has lesions on her skin, a symptom of AIDS. She traces them with her fingertips and says they are the result of a disease caused by the local water. She and others who have similar markings use a local traditional medicine to try, without success, to clear them up. Krong Koh Kong, it has to be said, is at the lower end of the sex trade. But when a number of brothels in Phnom Penh, the capital, were raided after complaints about human trafficking, the sex bosses moved some of their business out into the provinces. Krong Koh Kong, whose respectable business is fishing, seems to be unpoliced, and the porous Thai and Vietnamese borders makes things even worse. The town attracts custom from a wide area because sex there is cheaper than in Phnom Penh, and very much cheaper than in neighbouring Thailand. The girls, some of them children aged only 14 but looking older in their heavy make-up and fake Gucci sandals, charge the equivalent of $2 or $3. half of which goes to their boss. A girl can make about $25 a week, a relatively big sum in an area of widespread poverty and unemployment. Traffickers seem to have no trouble finding staff, often offered as debt repayment. It is human trafficking of a most cynical sort. The girls will be discarded when they become too ill to work. During their short working lives many will be spreading AIDS. The United Nations says that in 2001 170,000 people in Cambodia had HIV. About 2.7% of adults were infected. Some observers say that the United States has been soft with Cambodia over trafficking. Employing young girls in the sex business amounts to slave labour, they claim. Under America's trafficking law,it is argued, Cambodia should be reclassified in tier three -very nasty. Countries in tier three can be punished under American law with sanctions. Politics seems to have played a part here. The countries now in tier three, such as North Korea and Myanmar, are already in trouble with America. But some Asian countries thought to be soft on trafficking, among them Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, are anti-terrorist allies of America and as a result may have slipped the noose of sanctions into tier two. In America's most recent human-trafficking report, published in June,Cambodia and Thailand were given an apparent pat on the back. "The governments recognise the problem," the report mumbled.

November 22-28, 2003 The Economist p43 Afghanistan The pains of motherhood CHAGHCHARAN Giving birth in Afghanistan HALF of Afghanistan's hospital beds are in Kabul. They are gruesome enough. Enter the provinces and it gets worse. Most people there have no access at all to medical care, but the women are the worst off. Their worth is measured in fertility; the more children (read boys), the better. So rhythms in villages remain medieval: girls engaged at ten, married at 12 and giving birth from 14 through to their menopause. According to a study by America's Centres for Disease Control, parts of Afghanistan have the highest rates of maternal mortality ever recorded. In remoter provinces the rate is 500 times higher -6,500 deaths per 100,000 live births- than in developed countries. "Women will suffer everything to have a child," says Dr Noosh Dolati, a gynaecologist who serves as the only woman doctor in Ghowr province. Medecins du Monde, a front-line medical aid organisation, is working with Ms Dolati and four trainee midwives to reduce the risks of pregnancy. It isn't easy. Traditional midwives are dangerously ignorant. Some refuse to tie umbilical cords, so that "dirty" blood can flow from the baby. Others seek to cure infections by placing dead mice -and other treats- in the vagina. Many insist babies be born into a bowl of dirt. Tetanus contracted by new-borns from the dirt is dismissed as demonic possession. The cure, all agree, are the amulets sold at a tidy profit by the local mullah. Hospital is the last choice. Simply getting there is a nightmare. Consider a recent case of a woman from an isolated village. "The baby was breached in a shoulder position," explains Dr Dolati. "The traditional midwife told the father she was not strong enough to pull the baby out. So the father reached in, found the arm of the baby and pulled as hard as he could. But the arm came off in his hand. The rest of the baby remained in the womb." It took four days -by donkey and pitching car- for the mother to reach hospital. "By then, the baby was dead and the mother lost her uterus." The hospital in Chaghcharan is much better since Medecins du Monde undertook to rebuild and supply it; in Taliban times it lacked medicine and had no gynaecological section. But it still offers only the most basic care. It has no blood bank and no way of testing for blood groups. Caesarean sections for women who arrive after days of bleeding are life-threatening. But so is the alternative.

[Sharon didn't get enough 'ghetto' in pre-WWII Europe apparently -perryb] November 19, 2003 Los Angeles Times (pA8) Sharon Urges Europe's Jews To Immigrate to Israel Such a move is best way to fight anti-Semitism, the visiting leader tells Italians. Some disagree. By TRACY WILKINSON Times Staffwriter ROME -Israeli Prime Minister Aerial Sharon, in Italy for a three-day official visit on the heels of attacks on Jewish temples and schools in nearby nations, is urging Europe's Jews to immigrate to Israel as the best way to fight anti-Semitism. But Sharon's comments, made in a meeting with the heads of Italy's centuries-old Jewish communities, waded into the long-standing debate between those Jews who hold that all Jews should live in Israel and those who believe that it is just as important to foster Jewish life in Europe. ""The best solution to anti-Semitism is immigration to Israel," Sharon told the Italians in a meeting Monday night. "It is the only place on Earth where Jews can live as Jews." Tullia Zevi, the former head of Rome's Italian Jewish community, disagreed. Zevi, whose family fled Benito Mussolini's Italy in World War II, said she refused to be made to feel guilty for choosing to return to her homeland and help reconstitute its Jewish community. "I had an urge, a nostalgia, a duty to return," said Zevi, who was present at the meeting with Sharon. "Since I'd had the luck... "[et cetera, et cetera, et cetera -perryb].

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Three items, GREAT READING! -right on for the invitable attrition humanity will have to undergo -'sustainable resource use' by 2040-50 most unlikely.

November 14, 2003 Los Angeles Times (pA19) THE NATION Buy the Fleet to Save Fishery The U.S. hopes reduction will aid devastated West Coast grounds. By Tomas Alex Tizon, Times Staff Writer SEATTLE — Mike Waldrop is hanging up his nets. The 56-year-old ground fisherman from Coos Bay, Ore., has sold his trawling permit and gear to the U.S. as part of a $46-million buyout to save a devastated West Coast fishery. Ground fishermen in Washington state, Oregon and California voted overwhelmingly for the buyout, announced this week, which will reduce the Pacific ground-fishing fleet by more than a third. The government, through the National Marine Fisheries Service, bought 92 of the fleet's 260 trawlers, among them Waldrop's 75-footer, Captain Jack. Waldrop and the others who took the buyout must pull up their nets for the last time on Dec. 3. Pete Leipzig, director of the Fishermen's Marketing Assn., a trawler organization based in Eureka, Calif., that lobbied for the program, called the vote a "landmark event" that could turn things around for the Pacific fishery. The term groundfish refers to species that feed at or near the ocean bottom, such as red snapper, whiting and flounder. Federal regulators say several species have been nearly wiped out by overfishing, and harvests have plummeted from their 1982 peaks. As catches shrank and profits dropped, fishermen struggled to make ends meet and found it difficult to sell their permits and boats. The buyout aimed to pay each fisherman the value of his boat plus one year's earnings. The average approved payout per fishermen was about

$460,000. Much of the money will be used to pay off boat loans. The 92 who took the buyout included the most productive fishermen in the fleet. Leipzig said the group accounted for nearly half the fleet's annual take over the last several years. By taking them out of the fleet, the program aims to make it possible for the remaining fishermen to increase their catches by reducing the competition. "This program will certainly translate into more fishermen making money," Leipzig said. Waldrop, vice president of the Coos Bay Trawlers Assn., was more cautious. He said the program would pay off only if federal regulators kept their promise and allowed larger catches for the remaining fishermen. Talks for increasing catch limits are underway. New limits could be implemented as early as January. West Coast fishermen lobbied for the buyout for a decade, soon after it became clear there were too many boats and not enough fish. The government promoted fishing in the 1970s, offering incentives for fishermen to buy new boats. Leipzig said officials in other overfished regions have contacted him about initiating buyouts, among them ground fishermen in New England and shark fishermen in Florida. West Coast Dungeness crab fishermen are also weighing it. The U.S. government, since 1995, has spent nearly $200 million in such buyouts. For fishermen like Waldrop and Scotty Hockema of Coos Bay, a longtime fisherman who sold both his boats in the buyout, the program is a mixed blessing. It relieves them of financial pressure, but it also forces them to turn away from a lifelong vocation. Waldrop, a fisherman for 35 years, said he's not sure what he's going to do next. "I'm still exploring options," he said.

November 15, 2003 Los Angeles Times GERMANY Nuclear Plug Pulled as Plant Phase-Out Begins Germany disconnected the first of its 19 nuclear power stations, beginning an unprecedented phase-out that aims to close all of them by 2020. Technicians at a 32-year-old nuclear plant at Stade, near Hamburg, switched off the facility. Germany is the first major industrianzed nation to renounce the technology. Nuclear power provides nearly one-third of the country's electricity. The government argues that eliminating it will spur utilities to spend billions on new, cleaner-buming gas generators as well as wind turbines and solar panels. November 15, 2003 Los Angeles Times ILLINOIS Man Gets Prison Term for Killing Big Cats A former corrections officer was sentenced to a maximum four years and three months in prison for slaughtering and stuffing endangered tigers and leopards for collectors. William Kapp, 37, also was fmed $5,000 for his part in a ring that killed the big cats to turn them into stuffed trophies and rugs. The meat was sold to a gourmet market for $3 a pound. Kapp was convicted in chicago in April on 17 counts of violating the Endangered Species Act and a related law. Prosecutors say the animals were bought from exotic animal dealers who purchased them from circuses.

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This article is especially interesting because although Rifkin is more often activist than scientist, he is exactly the latter here and 'right on'. Most critical here however, is that one would like to believe that the president of a country is even 'sorta up to date' on science; that Bush is so fucking ignorant, on the other hand, also speaks badly for everyone that has ever supported him in any respect whatsoever -'the human condition'. Nor, for that matter, does this speak well for scientists in general for they are, in general, well aware of this situation, but are also, in general, higher-ups in our 'very aristocratic democracy'.

November 9, 2003 Los Angeles Times (pM5) COMMENTARY Bush Plan for Hydrogen Is Just Hot Air Using fossil fuels in energy process gets us nowhere. By Jeremy Rifkin President Bush hopes to reverse his dismal record on energy and the environment with what the administration trumpets as an alternative plan to address global warming and guarantee energy independence. But the proposal is only a Trojan horse to promote the interests of the coal, oil, gas and nuclear industries. From Nov. 19 to 21, the White House will host energy ministers from around the world to sign an agreement to share research and development with the goal of ushering in a hydrogen economy over the next several decades. The United States has proposed that it lead this first-of-a-kind global research and development effort, which it calls the International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy. Hydrogen — the lightest and most abundant element of the universe — is the next great energy revolution. Scientists call it the "forever fuel" because it never runs out. And when hydrogen is used to produce power, the only byproducts are pure water and heat. The shift to fuel cells and hydrogen energy — when it happens — will be as significant and far-reaching in its effect on the American and global economy as the steam engine and coal in the 19th century and the internal combustion engine and oil in the 20th century. Hydrogen has the potential to end the world's reliance on oil from the Persian Gulf. It will dramatically cut down on carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. And because hydrogen is so plentiful, people who have never before had access to electricity will be able to generate it. The environmental community is up in arms over the Bush hydrogen agenda. Why? Hydrogen has a Janus face. Though it is found everywhere on Earth, it rarely exists free-floating in nature. Hydrogen has to be extracted from fossil fuels or water or biomass.

In other words, there is "black" hydrogen and "green" hydrogen. And it is this critical difference that separates Bush's vision of a hydrogen future from the vision many of us hold in the environmental movement. Bush and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham say hydrogen can free us from dependence on foreign oil. What they leave unsaid is that their plan calls for extracting hydrogen from all of the old energy sources — oil, natural gas and coal — and by harnessing nuclear power. Bush would like to take us into a hydrogen future without ever leaving the fossil fuels and nuclear past. Today, most commercial hydrogen is extracted from natural gas via a steam reforming process. Although natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels in producing hydrogen, it is a finite resource and in relatively short supply. Hydrogen can also be extracted from coal, and enthusiasts point out that the U.S. enjoys ample coal reserves. The problem is that coal produces twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas, which means a dramatic increase in global warming. The coal industry counters that it might be possible to safely store the carbon dioxide emissions underground or in the ocean depths for thousands of years and has convinced the White House to subsidize further research into this. For many environmentalists, the issue of storing carbon dioxide seems eerily reminiscent of the arguments used by the nuclear industry about nuclear waste. The nuclear industry would like to produce hydrogen, but there are still unresolved issues surrounding the safe storage of nuclear waste, the skyrocketing costs of building new reactors and the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to terrorist attacks. There is another way to produce hydrogen — the green way — that uses no fossil fuels or nuclear power. Renewable sources of energy — wind, hydro- and geothermal power and photovoltaic cells — are increasingly being used to produce electricity. That electricity, in turn, can be used, in a process called electrolysis, to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Hydrogen could also be extracted from sustainable energy crops and agricultural waste in a process called gasification. There would be no increase in carbon dioxide emissions because the carbon taken from the atmosphere by the plants is released back during hydrogen production. The White House proposal calls for large subsidies to the coal and nuclear industries to extract hydrogen. The secretary of Energy claims that the administration is equally committed to research and development of renewable sources of energy to extract hydrogen. However, the White House and the Republican Party have systematically blocked efforts in Congress to establish target dates for the phasing in of renewable sources of energy in the generation of electricity and for transport. If the U.S. is successful in steering the International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy toward a black hydrogen future, it could lock the global economy into the old energy regime for much of the 21st century, with dire environmental and economic consequences. The real benefits of a hydrogen future can be realized only if renewable sources of energy are phased in and eventually become the primary source for extracting hydrogen. In the interim, the U.S. government should be supporting much tougher automobile fuel standards, hybrid cars, the overhaul of the nation's power grid with emphasis on smart technology, the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and benchmarks for renewable energy adoption. All of these other initiatives should be carried on concurrently with an ambitious national effort to subsidize and underwrite the research and development of renewable energy technology, hydrogen and fuel cells. The goal should be a fully integrated green hydrogen economy by the end of the first half of the 21st century. Jeremy Rifkin is the author of "The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth" (Tarcher/Putnam, 2002).

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Two articles, both having to do with 'natural rights and freedoms' that Bush et al seem to know more about than the rest of us. Question: what are we doing in Iraq when the same kind of shit only recently stopped going on in Guatemala and is now -Rios Montt (trained in the US), about to perhaps pick up again?

November 9, 2003 los angeles times (pA11) 300,000 Believed Buried in 263 Mass Graves in Iraq, Officials Say U.S. human rights chief says 40 sites have been confirmed, one of which may hold 3,000 bodies. From Associated Press BAGHDAD — Saddam Hussein's government is believed to have buried as many as 300,000 opponents in 263 mass graves that dot the Iraqi landscape, the top human rights official in the U.S.-led occupation administration said Saturday. Sandy Hodgkinson said the administration has been sending forensic teams to investigate grave sites reported to U.S. officials. So far, about 40 graves have been confirmed. "We have found mass graves with women and children with bullet holes in their heads," she said. President Bush has referred to Iraqi mass graves frequently in recent months, saying they provide evidence that the war to drive Hussein from power was justified. Before the war, the threat from Hussein's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was the primary reason Bush cited for the need to invade Iraq; no such weapons have been found. Some human rights activists have criticized the U.S.-led administration in Iraq for moving too slowly to protect grave sites and begin excavations, and have expressed skepticism that it will ever fully identify who is buried in the mass graves. "There is just no way — technologically, financially — that they're going to deal with mass graves on this magnitude," said Susannah Sirkin of Physicians for Human Rights in Boston.

The U.S.-led administration held a workshop Saturday to train dozens of Iraqis to find and protect the mass grave sites. Hodgkinson said the workers would be crucial in protecting the sites from desperate relatives trying to dig for evidence of their missing loved ones. In the weeks after the U.S.-led war drove Hussein from power, relatives damaged some grave sites, using bulldozers that mangled bodies and scattered papers and clothing that could have been used to identify remains. The largest mass grave discovered so far, a site near the southern town of Mahaweel believed to hold at least 3,115 bodies, was damaged by relat ives searching for remains. But officials say most of the mass graves haven't been disturbed. Iraqi Human Rights Minister Abdul-Basit Turki said that in addition to families' need to find the bodies of missing relatives, excavating mass graves is important in building criminal cases against members of the former government. International tribunals handle prosecutions for atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, where tens of thousands of missing are believed buried in mass graves, and Rwanda, in which hundreds of thousands of people slain in a 100-day killing spree in 1994 were buried in communal pits. But for Iraq, the United States has insisted any trials be conducted by a new Iraqi legal system that is still being developed. Hodgkinson said most people buried in the mass graves are believed to have been Kurds killed by Hussein's regime during the 1980s after rebelling against the government, and Shiite Muslims who were killed after an uprising following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

November 9, 2003 Los Angeles Times pA17 Ugandan Rebels Go on Rampage Villagers are hacked to death in apparent revenge for killing of commander, army says. From Reuters KAMPALA, Uganda — Rebels shot and hacked to death scores of civilians in northern Uganda on Thursday and Friday in apparent revenge for the killing of a rebel commander, the army said Saturday. The Vatican missionary news service said rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army killed about 60 people on a rampage through Lira district, forcing some villagers to watch as they beheaded the corpses of fellow villagers they had just killed. Thousands of terrified civilians were fleeing a number of villages and seeking shelter in and around Lira town, the main settlement in the district of the same name. The guerrillas, led by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, are feared for their brutality and for abducting thousands of children for use as sex slaves and front-line fighters in the east African country's 17-year-old civil war. The LRA rebels say they are fighting for the establishment of a government based on the biblical Ten Commandments. "They are cutting off people's heads. Every time we hear of an incident it's a new level of brutality," said Father John Fraser, who helps run a Lira radio station owned by the Catholic Church. Lt. Chris Magezi, a spokesman for the Ugandan army's 3rd Division, put the death toll at "scores" and said Kony appeared to have ordered the raid to avenge the army's Oct. 29 killing of Charles Tabuley, the No. 2 leader of the LRA. The army blamed Tabuley for several massacres of civilians in northern and eastern Uganda over 16 months.

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[lat dec 31, 2003, by kim murphy; Vitaly Nikolayenko of this article was killed by one of his bears. ] This is a rather longish and painful article; the one immediately following is much 'nicer'.

November 8, 2003 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE A Loss to Man and Nature A researcher who had lived lovingly with bears in Russia returns to find them gone --with only one gruesome trace. Poaching is suspected. By Kim Murphy, Times Staff Writer KAMCHATKA PENINSULA, Russia — There are parts of the world so wild, so distant from places inhabited by men, that when things happen, they happen without witnesses. The traces slowly disappear; they melt with the snow in spring, get washed away by rain, carried off by ravens. Eventually, it becomes unclear whether they happened at all. Such a thing happened here. Charlie Russell closed up his cabin at Kambalnoye Lake, on the remote tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia's Far East, and said goodbye for the winter to the bears he had studied for seven years. There were 20 in all. Among them: Brandy, who often left her three cubs with Russell for baby-sitting while she went fishing. Walnut, a young male. Biscuit, whom Russell had raised as a cub and who, pregnant with her own offspring, would sometimes come bounding to greet him when he landed his plane, brushing against his leg or nibbling his boot. Russell left last November for his home in Canada, confident that the bears would soon be safe in their snow-shrouded slumber. He returned, as usual, in spring. But instead of finding Biscuit emerging with blinking cubs from her den, all he found was stillness. Biscuit did not appear. Nor did Walnut or Brandy or any of the bears. Russell searched for two months without finding a trace of any of them. What he did find, when he opened his cabin, was a bear's gallbladder, hung from a nail on the wall. What had happened during those weeks before impenetrable drifts of snow settled over the valley, before the bears would have lumbered off to the safety of their dens? Who left the gruesome artifact on the wall, and was it an oversight or a message? And the question that haunts Russell most of all: Did Biscuit walk up to greet her killers? Kamchatka prosecutor Alexander Voitovich is investigating the case as a poaching. The "mass killing" of an estimated 20 bears, he said, appears to have been the result of a search for gallbladders, whose contents are valued in Asia for use in folk medicines. "There is a strong possibility that we will solve this ugly crime very soon," he said. But Russell and others who work around Kamchatka's famous brown bears aren't so sure. For one, it is not clear why someone who wanted gallbladders would have wasted one on Russell's cabin wall. For another, a lot of people had reason to resent Russell. In fact, singling out someone who might have wanted to send a warning to the Alberta rancher — who helped uncover corruption in the Kamchatka government, warred with the local scientific establishment and organized measures to thwart the region's billion- dollar poaching industry — is like trying to find the bad bean in a pot of chili. "This was obviously an action to prevent Charlie from doing his work. And it achieved its result," said Alexei Maslov, a scientist who has worked frequently in the South Kamchatka Wildlife Reserve, where Russell's project was based. "It was a demonstration of power," added Maslov's wife, Ekaterina Lepskaya, also a scientist. "They demonstrated that they own the lake, not Charlie." A strategic Soviet military region that was closed to outsiders through most of the last century, the Kamchatka Peninsula has remained one of the world's most vital stretches of wilderness, a primeval landscape of steaming, snow-covered volcanoes and black-sand beaches. Up to a quarter of all wild salmon in the Pacific spawn in its cold rivers. Brown bears up to 10 feet tall roam in untouched birch forests and tundra berry meadows. Now international conservation organizations regard it as one of the most threatened of the world's natural treasures. The United Nations has placed parts of Kamchatka on its list of World Heritage sites, which are eligible for international protection because of their universal value. The U.N., with other organizations, will spend more than $13 million over the next several years to protect Kamchatka from the hazards of rural Russia's post-perestroika meltdown. The poaching to which Russell's bears probably fell victim has become a potent economic engine on the 1,000-mile peninsula. Riverbanks this summer and fall were littered with dead salmon cast aside by villagers who had stripped them of eggs to be sold as red caviar. Fishermen in the Okhotsk Sea off Kamchatka routinely ignore their fishing quotas, and bears — already shot at the rate of up to 1,000 a year, both legally and illegally — will face critical food shortages if the salmon poaching isn't stopped, biologists say. "The federal government is so preoccupied with macroeconomic problems, it doesn't even occur to them what is really happening on the outskirts of Russia," said Robert S. Moiseyev, a Kamchatka economist. "In Moscow, they give us directives to manage the Okhotsk Sea. But in reality, the Okhotsk Sea is being pillaged by everybody." As a Soviet military outpost, Kamchatka had a robust fish-processing industry and state farms that produced milk, meat and vegetables for markets all over Russia. But the post-Soviet economic collapse hit here hard. Even as military forces drew down, the economic transition led to the closure of most state farms and fish plants. Now there are entire villages without a single job, and the regional government, officially bankrupt, announced recently that it couldn't afford to buy sufficient fuel for the coming winter. Many apartment buildings and most schools are without heat. It is perhaps not surprising that most Kamchatkans are losing little sleep over poached fish or dead bears. "In summer, everybody's fishing. And if you get enough caviar, you sell it. We have to survive,

and that's the only way," said Yuri Slobodchikov, who once worked as a cattle breeder at a state farm in the village of Sokoch. Now the farm is a mass of crumbling, abandoned barns, and Slobodchikov is unemployed. Wildlife managers say bears — harvested legally at the rate of 500 a year — often die at the hands of American and European hunters, who pay $8,000 or more to hunt a big male trophy bear. "American hunters would come, they were 70 or 80 years old. They were hunters with poor eyesight," said one former hunting guide, who said he quit because the abuses "made me sick." An industry has grown up around guiding foreign hunters to their targets, but critics say even the legal hunts are often conducted using illegal tactics. Helicopters, the former guide said, were routinely used to drive bears into killing zones. The illegal practice is particularly controversial in Kamchatka because it allows trophy hunters to eliminate the biggest bears and poachers to kill large numbers. "It happened often. Very often," he said. "You could ask American clients. They don't admit it. But 90% had their bear shot with a helicopter, and of course, I took part in this kind of thing many times. We shot them even directly from the helicopters. It was not very pleasant." Moiseyev says an entire generation in Kamchatka is being raised with a new indifference to the region's resources. "For 12 years now, children have been growing up in families in which their parents have no other job but illegally catching fish. How are we going to get them back to a normal economy? It has become not an economic problem but a moral problem," he said. "God save us from living in an epoch when an entire country is stolen from you. Because it steals human souls." Side by Side With Bears Russell and his partner, artist Maureen Enns, were not unaware of the dangers facing Kamchatka wildlife when they arrived for their first summer in 1996. But it was only here that they could realize their dream of living side by side with wild brown bears and raising orphaned cubs — which would not have been sanctioned in North America. Russell, 61, grew up on a ranch at the border of Alberta and Montana. He had spent 18 years studying North American grizzlies, seen their habitat diminishing and wanted to find ways to enable humans and bears to live in harmony. Even in Kamchatka, the endeavor was difficult. The couple won reluctant permission from local officials to launch their study, and when they began to succeed, they attracted funding from a variety of foundations in the U.S. and Canada. Russell wanted to prove that brown bears — Kamchatka's are larger but otherwise identical to the widely feared North American grizzly — could coexist peaceably with humans, so long as people adhered to a protocol of respect and caution. Russell rejected the conventional wisdom that bears need to maintain a healthy fear of people and that those who become too accustomed to humans will inevitably display aggression and end up being shot. "Bears tend to like to be around people. A lot of them do, anyway," he said. "So these bears often come toward people when they meet them on a trail and that makes people uncomfortable." Russell hoped his work in Kamchatka would answer two questions: Are brown bears as unpredictable as most biologists believe? And are bears that lose their fear of people invariably dangerous? Russell and Enns chose one of two federally managed wildlife reserves in Kamchatka as their base, built a cabin and began quiet interactions with bears. Over the vehement objections of local scientists, they adopted three orphaned cubs and raised them as essentially wild, encouraging them as they grew to feed themselves and roam the surrounding hills. Biscuit and the other orphans, Chico and Rosie, would disappear for days at a time, then reappear to seek out Russell's company for walks or play. Several other bears seemed to grow comfortable around the couple, allowing them to walk the trails with them or watch them fish. "Some of the bears would come and sort of invite us on a walk. They'd come to the cabin, and if we made a move to get our pack ready, they would kind of wait for us," said Russell, who wrote about his project in a popular book, "Grizzly Heart." Rosie was killed by a large male bear early on, and Chico disappeared in 2000, possibly to strike out for new territory. Biscuit, Russell hoped, was going to present him with her first cubs last spring. As his friendships with the bears progressed, Russell racked up enemies as well. In his plane, he frequently spotted large-scale fish poaching along the rivers, and one of his reports resulted in charges against a prominent local official. He reported poachers trapping a large male bear in a snare, then leaving it to storm and bleat for days to increase the volume of valuable bile in its gallbladder. Russell managed to raise more than $25,000 a year from North American contributors to support new rangers in the southern reserve, supplementing their salaries — most earn about $83 a month — and building new cabins to house them. But he also managed to alienate potential allies in the Russian scientific community, who had opposed his petition to raise the cubs and saw him as a foolhardy amateur. One of Russell's main adversaries was the man with whom he probably had more in common than anyone in Kamchatka: Vitaly Nikolayenko, a ranger and amateur scientist who had spent 25 years living with bears on the 2.8 million-acre Kronotsky state reserve, 110 miles north of Petropavlovsk. The reserve is one of two managed by the federal government in Kamchatka. The south Kamchatka reserve, where Russell operated, is more remote. Nikolayenko had made a life's work of harassing poachers and monitoring bears, naming them and chronicling their habits. For 22 years, Nikolayenko followed an enormous male he named Dobrynya, forming such an easy bond that the bear would often curl up for a nap just a few feet from him.

Russell and Nikolayenko clashed when the Russian ranger was called in to review Russell's project. Nikolayenko strongly objected to feeding the half-grown cubs, arguing that it rendered the research meaningless and had the potential to make the cubs dangerously eager for human handouts. Russell felt the cubs needed the kind of nourishment they would have received from their mother to make them strong enough to fend off predators. The men argued bitterly throughout their acquaintance. But they perhaps also wound up having something tragically in common. Dobrynya disappeared in 2001, sometime after Nikolayenko saw the bear to its den and stood by as it fell into deep sleep. Dobrynya was not seen in the spring, nor during all of 2002. When Nikolayenko returned to his cabin this spring, he found large tufts of hair and bones — obviously the remains of an enormous male bear — less than two feet from his window. It could have been a bear injured in a fight, but why so close to his cabin? "I think it was my old Dobrynya who came and died near my hut, early in spring, when I was not there," Nikolayenko said. "I try not to think about it, but sometimes I can't help but see him injured and bleeding, running to my hut for help when I am not there." The bear, he said, "was the main thing in my life . I just can't bear the thought that he was killed like this, by poachers or somebody who doesn't like what I am doing here and doesn't want me to be here anymore." Nikolayenko's cabin is stuffed with notebooks, the record of his daily journeys around the reserve. He is 65, and his leg is deeply scarred from a poacher's shot several years ago. Still, he walks six miles a day — across the meadow, over the river, up to the spring-fed lake from which the river flows. He counts the number of chum salmon in the lake, scuffs at the abundant piles of fresh scat to see what the bears have been eating. He meets bears — often half a dozen times a day — and quietly watches from the reeds as they leap and splash in the river 30 feet away. Nikolayenko's notebooks fill three walls, and though they constitute a remarkable documentary of bear behavior, it is unlikely, given budget cutbacks at the reserve over the past decade, that they will ever be widely published. "It is sad for me to realize that what I am doing here, I am largely doing just for myself," he said. The solitude, in fact, has usually been the undoing of those appointed to watch over the reserves, Nikolayenko notes. "One inspector hanged himself. Three drank themselves to death. People can't stand being lonely. "It gets to the point that they can't even stand themselves. There have been moments when I began to read aloud because I was afraid I would forget how to speak. And when the bears are asleep, who do I talk to?" Unlike Russell, who never even fired his pepper spray, Nikolayenko has fallen down bluffs to avoid charging bears and been chased up trees. He helped conduct an inquiry after Michio Hoshino, the renowned Japanese American bear photographer, was pulled out of his tent and eaten by a bear in 1996 in the southern reserve. Nikolayenko never underestimates the bear's potential for ferocity and resists the urge to ascribe human emotions to the animals. Even Dobrynya, he says, probably only tolerated his presence. "A bear thinks only of himself, his own needs. He never thought about me," Nikolayenko said. "I thought about him." 'I Think We've Lost' At the reserves' headquarters in the town of Yelizovo, near the town of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, manager Valery Komarov sat in his dark, chilly office. The building is in a thicket of high weeds, its paint peeling and concrete crumbling. It looks, a Russian translator observed, "like the last building standing in Stalingrad." Nonetheless, it is the bureaucratic fortress from which the fight to protect Kamchatka's wildlife is fought. Although the reserves were relatively well funded during the Soviet era, Komarov said, his staff now includes only 30 rangers and six scientific researchers. Once there were twice that many. "No one wants to work for a miserable salary," he lamented. The poachers, he said, "are very powerful people, and all our legislative system is available to be bought and sold. There is no real protection." Russell hired former soldiers who had fought in Chechnya and were unafraid to chase poachers into remote corners of the peninsula. But there were never enough of them, he said. Although he initially thought about leaving Russia forever after the horrors of the spring, he is considering returning again next summer to help expand the ranger program. Arnold Zaslavsky, chief ranger for the Yelizovo district, said the upper reaches of some rivers are now devoid of fish because poachers have depleted the spawning grounds. Bears, he said, must travel farther and farther downriver to find food. This spring, he added, rangers found the remains of eight bears in south Kamchatka, all shot in the back of the head — clearly from a helicopter — two days before hunting season opened. "I think we've lost," Zaslavsky said, his eyes brimming with tears. "I can't sit and do nothing. I would like to do something useful for nature, but I don't have possibilities." Komarov believes there is little doubt about what happened to Russell's bears. "Russell's activities were in the way of this criminal structure, and he crossed their path. "Maybe they just did it for revenge," he said. "It was a very cruel revenge." Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report. Additional photos and previous coverage of Charlie Russell and the bears of Kamchatka are available on the Web at- www.latimes.com/bears

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November 8, 2003 The Economist Turkish women Discrimination rules ANKARA Controversy over the law on rape If a rapist marries his victim, he can walk free. It sounds an outrageous notion. Yet it is what the law says in Turkey. And if the country's justice minister, Cemil Cicek, heeds one of his advisers, the law will not be changed. Recently Professor Dogan Soyaslan declared, during a parliamentary debate on changes to Turkey's penal code, that "nobody would want to marry a girl who is not virgin." Mr Soyaslan concluded that it was fine for a victim to marry her rapist, rather then face a lifetime of spinsterhood. Mr Soyaslan would have been sacked in most countries. Not in Turkey. Instead, the professor spouted more wisdom in an interview with a conservative daily, Milliyet. His boss, Mr Cicek, has yet to utter any reproof. When a member of the opposition Republican People's Party suggested that Mr Soyaslan's words might encourage sexual assault, he was accused of ignoring "Turkey's realities".

It was modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk, who gave Turkish women the right to vote in 1934 and told them to jettison their veils. Over the past year,the Turkish parliament has been approving legal changes that would further promote equality. Today, for example, a Turkish man is no longer automatically treated by law as the head of the family, and women are entitled to an equal share of joint assets after a divorce. Perpetrators of so-called honour killings of women who have been accused of tainting the family name are no longer eligible for reduced sentences. Yet even with these changes, traces of old attitudes linger. Mothers who murder infants can still get reduced sentences if the babies were born out of wedlock, though a relative who does the job will no longer be able to. "That's meant to be progress," sniffs Feride Acar, a sociologist. Another provision making kidnapping a married woman a graver crime than kidnapping a single one remains untouched. So long as men who think with "organs other than their brains" continue to have a say over such laws, says Halime Guner,head of a women's-rights group, there is little hope of a change of mentality in Turkey.

-also from that same Economist magazine issue -not 'unrelated', "American values divide as well as define the country".

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Religion is as alive, well and 'wholesome' in Southern California as it is in Israel, The West Bank, The Vatican, The White House -whatever.

November 6, 2003 Los Angeles Times pA11 ORANGE COUNTY Religion Is at Center of Yearbook Battle Fountain Valley High blocked seniors' attempt to spell out Christian messages in photograph. By Claire Luna, Times Staff Writer Alex Lopez is as devoted to his Fountain Valley high school as he is to Christianity, and the chance to meld the two for posterity seemed a perfect way to cap off his senior year. So he and a dozen friends lined up in the front row during a senior class yearbook photo session with their T-shirts spelling out "Jesus is the way" and "Jesus {heart} U," with a cross on each side. Fountain Valley High School Vice Principal Ted Reid asked the students to rearrange themselves, turn around or stand in the back. After trying to compromise with the administrator, 11 students walked out. The students and their parents have requested that the school reassemble its 650 seniors and retake the picture with their message intact. The conflict pits students' rights to express themselves against a school's federally outlined responsibility to separate church and state. "We wanted to express how important Christianity is in our lives," said Alex, 17. "We weren't trying to impose our beliefs on others." The nonprofit Pacific Justice Institute, a legal defense group specializing in religious freedom issues, sent the demand in a letter that the Huntington Beach Union High School District received six days after the Oct. 21 incident. The district's legal counsel is expected to respond by Friday to allegations that the students' constitutional rights had been violated, school officials said.

"We're waiting for the interpretation of the district lawyer before we make any decision," said Fountain Valley High School Principal Connie Mayhew. She declined to speak further about the incident. At issue is whether an organized effort to send a group message in a student publication constitutes school speech, and thus can be regulated, or student speech. "If they had 'Jesus loves you' on their own shirt, that would have been just fine," said Assistant Supt. Carol Osbrink. "An individual student has the right to express their own personal opinion and their own beliefs." But, she said, group speech in such a public forum as a senior yearbook photo crosses the line. "That says to the public that the school endorses that message, as opposed to being the beliefs of an individual student," Osbrink said. Not allowing students to wear what they please and arrange themselves as they like amounts to anti-religious censorship, said attorney Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute. "This is nothing less than the school being hostile toward student faith," Dacus said. "For these students, who hold their beliefs very dear to them, it sends the message that this is the land of the free — unless you have strong religious convictions."` The district's dress code prohibits clothing that condones hate, violence and illegal substances. Fountain Valley High School did not provide more specific rules for students posing in the senior class photo, which is usually displayed across two pages in the yearbook. Accusing the district of anti-religious sentiments is wrong, Osbrink said. "The message could have been anything, and the district still would not have wanted to be a party to endorsing it."

All of the students who wore the shirts — alternating green and yellow for "Jesus is the way" and red for "Jesus {heart} U" —are members of the campus club Brothers and Sisters in Christ. Prayer groups, along with religion courses, are considered religious expression and are allowed under federal laws and guidelines. The group's president, Jon Gordon, and about 20 other seniors in the club did not participate in the T-shirt activity. Gordon declined to comment Wednesday about the participating students' actions. The Fountain Valley incident joins other recent arguments over student expression in school yearbooks: Last year, a Salem, Ore., high school principal banned a senior girl's photo that included her pet rat. In Illinois, a federal judge rejected an elementary school student's plea to allow her yearbook cover design, incorporating the words "God Bless America," to be published unaltered. In 2002, students at Boulder High School in Colorado staged a "kiss-in" to protest officials' decision to remove a photo of two girls kissing from the yearbook. Administrators said the photo was not banned because of its content, but because the girls' parents did not give permission before deadline. Alex, the Fountain Valley senior who donned one of the cross T-shirts for the photo, said administrators need to clarify dress policies for student publications. "If we knew the rules beforehand, we could have done something differently and still gotten our point across," he said.

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November 5, 2003 los angeles times pA11 4 Die in Fight Over Immigrant Cargo Five more are shot and wounded in Arizona as one ring of human smugglers apparently attacks another. From Associated Press CASA GRANDE, Ariz. - Smugglers trafficking in illegal immigrants opened fire on a rival group on an Arizona interstate Tuesday, killing four people and wounding five, authorities said. Four people were later arrested in the desert. The shootings began as smugglers traveling in a van chased down an SUV and a pickup truck carrying the other smugglers and several illegal immigrants between Tucson and Phoenix, said Final County Sheriff Roger Vanderpool. The pursuing group shot into the other vehicles numerous times. "This was clearly a retaliation to send a message," Vanderpool said. Vanderpool said the gunmen opened fire because the other group had taken the smugglers' human cargo earlier.

He didn't have any other details late Tuesday. "This tragic incident underscores how ruthless and violent organized smuggling has become," said Thomas DeRouchey, special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "The smugglers' only motive is money. They don't care about the human cost." Migrant smuggling is getting more dangerous as violent drug -dealers move into the lucrative business of bringing immigrants from Mexico into Arizona, one of the most-active illegal entry points on the U.S.-Mexico border. An increasing number of smugglers are holding immigrants hostage in the United States until they or their families pay up. Rival gangs of criminals also steal immigrants away from smugglers and hold them for ransom, officials said. In Tuesday's shooting, four suspects were arrested after they allegedly abandoned the van and fled on foot in the desert near Chandler. Three firearms were found in the vehicle.

November 2, 2003 Los Angeles Times pA4 SUDAN 11 Reported Dead After Grasshopper Swarm Eleven people died and thousands were taken to hospitals with breathing difficulties after a swarm of grasshoppers invaded central Sudan; the state-owned newspaper Al Anbaa reported. Health authorities in Wad Medani, 11O miles southeast of the capital, Khartoum, said an epidemic of lung eczema has afflicted 1,685 people since Oct. 22 and killed 11 people. "The epidemic is linked to the unprecedented increase in the grasshopper insects," the paper quoted the health authorities as saying. Wad Medani resident Joseph Mogum said the grasshoppers gave off a strong smell that caused breathing problems. From Times Wire Reports

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November 2003 Natural History Magazine p47
Trashed
Across the pacific ocean, plastics, plastics, everywhere by Charles Moore
...

"Bottle caps and other plastic objects are visible inside the decomposed carcass of this Laysan albatross on Kure Atoll, which lies in a remote and virtually uninhabited region of the north pacific. The bird probably mistook the plastics for food and ingested them while foraging for prey".

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"That'll teach him! -and it felt good too! (learned how in catechism :-) -no, it doesn't address the problem either".

November 1, 2003 Los Angeles Times pA18 From Reuters PHILADELPHIA -A man described by authorities as a known sexual predator was chased through the streets of South Philadelphia by an angry crowd of Roman Catholic high school girls, who kicked and punched him after he was tackled by neighbors, police said Friday. Rudy Susanto, 25, who had allegedly exposed himself to teenage girls on as many as seven occasions outside St. Marta Goretti School, struck again on Thursday just as students were being dismissed, police said. But this time, a group of girls in school uniforms angrily

confronted Susanto with help from some neighbors, police said. When Susanto tried to run, more than 20 girls chased him down the block. Two men from the neighborhood caught him and the girls took their revenge. The girls came and started kicking him and punching him, so I wasn't going to stop them," neighbor Robert Lemons told the Philadelphia Inquirer. Susanto was later treated for injuries at a local hospital. Police said he would be charged with 14 criminal counts including harassment, disorderly conduct, open lewdness and corrupting the morals of a minor.

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November 3, 2003 NEWSWEEK p11 BEARS Just Say No To Sugar TURNS OUT THE bears in North Carolina could use a Candyholics Anonymous. Tempted with a new form of bait -huge half-ton blocks of candy some hunters have been using in recent years- the bears are gorging and becoming junkies. One bear was "just walking around in circles;" says David Cobb of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. A pair lying near a candy block "kind of moaned and woofed at us:" Among the deleterious health effects on the bears: cavities, hair loss and lethargy. Hunters buy the sweets cheaply from factories like Hershey Foods, which packages discarded product into cubes. (The company now says it won't sell candy to anyone suspected of using it to lure bears.) But the state commission plans to crack down on baiting this season; hunters charged with a misdemeanor could face fines and the revocation of their licenses. "We're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way;" hunter Don Collins says with resignation. As for the bears, they'll just have to revert to berries for their sugar fix. -LYNN WADDELL and ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES

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October 25, 2003 Los Angeles Times pA1 COLUMN ONE In India, No Job Is Too Small Amid growing wealth, hundreds of millions of the poor are left behind in a curbside economy, scratching out a living any way they can. By Paul Watson, Times Staff Writer KANTADIH, India — All day long, Subodh Mahato cools postal workers in this West Bengal village by tugging a rope attached to a grass-mat ceiling fan. He's been pulling it for 17 years because no one thought to connect the post office to the power grid. In Calcutta, the state capital, Mohammed Jamal and other sidewalk entrepreneurs extract clients' earwax with modified tools made from bicycle spokes, clean betel juice stains from teeth with a mysterious red fluid and wash street muck from feet in rusty basins — just like in the days when maharajahs ruled. India is a nuclear power and a leader in information technology that rockets its own satellites into space, but millions of its people live as if time had passed them by. The fan, or pankha, puller, Mahato, and curbside caregivers like Jamal are among the masses of 21st century India's working poor. They are the bedrock of an economy that is one of the fastest growing, yet most unbalanced, in the world. Most of the benefits of India's rapid economic growth are going to the wealthiest 20% of society, said economist Malay Chaudhuri. They have swimming pools in a country where millions of people don't have clean water, and they stroll through gleaming new air-conditioned shopping malls where security guards keep beggars at bay. India's elite is getting steadily richer from cheap labor that has been one of the country's main economic advantages since it began opening up to global competition just over a decade ago, Chaudhuri said. "The gap is growing between the poor in the bottom 80%, and the middle class and upper class," said Chaudhuri, founder of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management and author of a recent book on India's ills. "Those at the very bottom, below the poverty line, are seeing hardly any increase in their income," he added. "If this growing gap goes on, it will be very difficult to govern the country." India has more than 1 billion people, and by more optimistic estimates, as many as 300 million belong to a middle class. Their hunger for consumer goods has helped the economy grow at 6% or more a year during the last decade. But about 350 million others — more than a third of the population — live in dire poverty, according to the United Nations. In Calcutta alone, an estimated 250,000 children sleep on the sidewalks each night. The luckiest among India's poorest make a steady wage, like pankha puller Mahato, who toils through muscle ache and monotony for next to nothing because it's the best work he can get. And he is too proud to beg. The village of Kantadih sits in a neglected stretch of eastern India, down a potholed, single-lane road surrounded by lush rice paddies, about 155 miles north of Calcutta. Kantadih, with its several hundred people, is just important enough to have a sub-post office in a small, rented building on the walled campus of a local high school. The outpost's three full-time staff and five part-timers serve about 30,000 people in 11 villages. The postal workers sort and deliver about 300 letters a day. They cancel postage stamps on outgoing mail by hand and melt wax over a small oil lamp on the floor to close mail sacks with a government seal. It is a restful place, where telephones don't ring and computer keyboards don't click.

The little sunlight that spills through two windows, and the flickering lamp, leaves much of the post office in shadows. The only noise is the occasional thump of a rubber stamp, the mournful wail of a distant train, and on this day, the steady, all-day rain of a slow-moving cyclone. Because there's no electricity, the pankha is all that stirs the air when the post office heats up to 115 degrees or more during the long, humid summer months. The fan is made of two grass mats, sewn together with a red cloth border that is badly frayed. It is about 5 feet across and swings on chains from a wooden cross bar over the desk of the sub-postmaster, Jiban Mukherjee, and his desk mate, postal assistant Karan Chandra Mandi. Mahato sits a few feet away and tugs on a lime green nylon rope. He is the last known pankha puller in the state, and while the bosses he cools wish for the day when a more efficient machine replaces him, they are also his friends and worry that he won't find another job. Mahato sits in the shadows, in a grimy white plastic patio chair. His back is straight, his stare blank, and one arm is raised at a right angle, tugging on the rope like a bus passenger pulling the bell cord for his stop — except Mahato has to keep pulling, dozens of times a minute, for hours on end. "No, I don't feel bored. I have gotten used to it," he said. "There are times when, even if I doze off, my hand keeps tugging at the rope automatically." He would rather be pursuing his real passion: cockfighting. He has trained several of his birds to be winners in local rings, but there's little profit in village gaming. When he pulls the pankha cord, Mahato insists, he focuses on the work at hand. "My mind is completely clear when I am doing this job," he said. "Except, of course, at times when my son or someone else in the family is unwell. Then I only think of them." It was 1986 when the sub-postmaster sent a messenger to summon Mahato and asked if he wanted to pull the pankha from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day, with a 10-minute break for lunch, for about $7 a month. Mahato, now 38, was the sub-postmaster's last hope. No one else wanted to do it, Mahato said. At first, his thin wrists and shoulders ached from the repetitive pulling, and his wife had to massage him every day after work. But with time, the pain passed, and Mahato kept pulling. "No, I never thought of quitting this job," he said. "Tell me, what else can I do if I quit?" Even with steady pay raises over the years, Mahato earns about $45 a month, which supports an extended family of 13 people. By Indian standards, it's not a bad wage for a man who can't read and can only write his name. Mahato knows that someday progress must come, even to the Kantadih sub-post office. When that happens, his pankha will come down, an electrical ceiling fan will kick in, and he will be out of a job. He's worried it will happen soon, and he won't have $7 a month to put his 5-year-old son in school. "If I lose this job, I don't know what I will do — except for begging, maybe," he said. A pink slip is one thing Mohammed Jamal needn't worry about. He'll have a job as long as there are dirty ears, and in the filthy streets of Calcutta, there's no shortage. With barbers, teeth cleaners, feet washers, ear cleaners and tonic peddlers all within walking distance in central Calcutta's Chowringhee district, it's almost a sidewalk spa for anyone who wants a complete, and cheap, makeover.

For about 10 cents, Jamal sticks one of the implements he has fashioned from bicycle spokes into a customer's ears and scrapes out the wax. He earns about $2 a day. There are hundreds more ear cleaners like him trolling for customers along Calcutta's curbsides. Jamal, 34, normally works by a busy bus stop in Chowringhee. His regular spot is outside the Reserve Bank Employees Sports Club. A large sign at the gate declares: Members Only. Jamal invites his clients to sit on the edge of a concrete planter on the sidewalk, in the shade of a holy peepul tree. His best customers are people whose ears fill up quickly with the dust and grit of Calcutta's crowded streets. They are bus drivers and conductors, taxi drivers and traders. "Some women also do it, but they summon me to their houses," Jamal said. "Only those who trust me call me. It's a great responsibility, to be trusted with other people's ears." The method is simple, but the technique is Jamal's art. He pulls a small piece of the cotton wool tucked into a leather loop on his camel skin satchel, twists it around the end of a sawed-off bicycle spoke and inserts it in the ear canal. For the hardest wax, he uses a spoke flattened into a tiny spatula. "There is no magic, no mantra, whatsoever," he said. But Jamal is much less modest in action. When he's closing in on a substantial ear clog, he leans way back and squints, as if peering down a long tunnel. Then he raises the pinky finger on his working hand and gently twists his wrist with an artistic flair. Like the cat that shows off a dead bird to its owner, he enjoys displaying the uprooted wax to his client before wiping it on a handkerchief flung over one shoulder. Jamal got into the ear cleaning business eight years ago, when the Bank of India stopped buying his refurbished crates for storing its stationery. Jamal used to buy used crates for 25 cents each, fix them up and sell them to the bank for 38 cents a piece, a 50% profit. But he sold only about 100 crates a month, so he wasn't getting rich. When he needed a new job, someone from his village who was doing well cleaning ears suggested that he give it a try. "I practiced it on his ears at first," Jamal said. "He told me I had a good hand after this trial run and asked me to get started in the business." As Jamal reminisced, cabdriver Ratan Das paced impatiently to one side, waiting to get a nasty blockage cleared. He was paying his first visit to Jamal, instead of seeing a doctor, for a simple reason: Jamal is cheaper. "These days are bad," Das, 38, said, while Jamal probed deeper into his ear. "We are not earning enough to even sustain ourselves. How can we go to a doctor?" A few minutes later, Jamal was wiping off his bicycle spokes and Das said he felt lighter. He handed the ear cleaner a 2-rupee coin — about 4 cents — and Jamal clicked his tongue in disbelief. Das dug deeper into his pocket, pulled out another rupee and a half and dropped the coins into Jamal's open palm. It was still short of Jamal's 5-rupee minimum, but he let Das go with a smile, hopeful that at least he might have earned another steady customer.

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October 25, 2003 Los Angeles Times pA3 THE WORLD Australia Gives Eritrea Sheep It Couldn't Sell From Times Wire Services MASSAWA, Eritrea — Eritrea agreed Friday to accept as a gift 52,000 Australian sheep that had been stranded at sea for almost three months, rejected by dozens of countries because of a disease, the two nations announced. The first of the sheep were herded ashore at this Red Sea port in northeast Africa by workers who covered their noses because of the odor from the ship, where more than 5,000 sheep had died during the voyage. Australia has agreed to supply more than 3,000 metric tons of feed and $700,000 to fund the unloading, transport, holding and slaughter of the sheep, said Eritrean Agriculture Minister Arefaine Berhe and his Australian counterpart, Warren Truss. The sheep were sent in early August from Western Australia to Saudi Arabia but were turned away by Saudi officials who said that too many of them had scabby mouth disease.

The sheep's plight has sparked a storm of protest from animal rights activists around the world and threatened to jeopardize Australia's multimillion-dollar live animal exports. The fracas prodded Canberra to buy the sheep last month from the original buyer, a Saudi importer, for $3.1 million and attempt to find a country that would take them. Truss said it was satisfying to have found a destination for the sheep in the Middle East. The entire cargo had been offered free to 57 other countries, all of which rejected them. The animals were on their way back to the Cocos Islands, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, when Eritrea agreed to accept them. Australia exports $136.5 million worth of live animals each year, mostly to countries that require livestock slaughtered according to Islamic standards.

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October 24, 2003 Los Angeles Times (pA9) Surrogate's Offspring Denied Citizenship Childless Japanese couple had hired an American woman to carry babies to term. From Associated Press TOKYO -Japan has refused to grant citizenship to a Japanese couple's twins because an American surrogate mother gave birth to them, officials said Thursday. The Justice Ministry's decision could discourage Japanese couples who are unable to have their own children from seeldng surrogate mothers overseas. Surrogate births are virtually nonexistent in Japan, where the practice is frowned upon and the government wants to outlaw it. Ministry official Yoshikazu Nemura said the two boys can't be given citizenship because Japanese law requires that the biological mother be a Japanese citizen. According to media reports, the twins were conceived from the father's sperm with eggs donated by an Asian American woman. The boys were born last October at a hospital in California, which makes them U.S. citizens, a status Japan recognizes, Nemura said. The Japanese couple, who are in their 50s, reportedly started fertility treatments in Japan before turning to a company that offered surrogate birth.

Surrogate births involve removing an egg for fertilization and implanting it into another woman, who carries the baby until its birth. The Japanese Health Ministry is opposed to surrogate births. Omcials are developing legislation that would outlaw the practice and impose stitf penalties on violators. Ethical standards set by the Japanese Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology already restrict in-vitro insemination to married couples. As a result, few doctors will perform a surrogate birth, and many childless couples have turned to fertility clinics in the United States. Without citizenship, the children would be excluded from most schools. The couple have several options. They could challenge the decision in court or ask immigration authorities to grant a change of citizenship. The couple can also legally adopt the children. To do so, they must resubmit the birth certificates with the surrogate listed as the infants' mother, offer proof that the children were conceived with the father's sperm and provide immigration paperwork showing that the children are in Japan, said Nemura.

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October 24, 2003 Science Magazine MARINE BIOLOGY Sinking Whales We tend to think that if only we stop human depredations on a wild animal population, it will then recover. A longer-term analysis by Springer et al suggests the reverse. These authors have traced the knock-on effects of industrial whaling since the 19405 in the North Pacific Ocean. They suggest that with the demise of the great whales, killer whales shifted their attentions to smaller sea mammals. A similar phenomenon seems to have occurred in the Southern Ocean, which was once home to vast whale populations. This "top down" effect, rather than the "bottom up" effect of a decrease in prey for the smaller mammal species, may explain the sudden decline in Steller sea lion populations, as well as those of several other seals and of sea otters, in the North Pacific since the 1980s.An added complication is that as whale populations increase, they are checked as they again become vulnerable to the adaptable killer whales. It seems that even if human beings cease implementing techniques for industrial-scale slaughter in the oceans, the disturbances to long-established ecosystems may be irreversible. -CA Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 12223 (2003).

October 24, 2003 Science Magazine Limits to Fitness Can running make you stupider? A team of scientists in California and Wisconsin have shown that if you're an exercise nut -and if you're anything like a mouse- adding more neurons to your brain won't do it any good. Exercise helps new neurons form in the mammalian hippocampus, a brain area vital in learning and memory. But is a bigger hippocampus necessarily better? Scientists led by behavioral neuroscientist Justin Rhodes of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland tested that idea with specially bred hyperactive mice. Those that ran regularly on exercise wheels did add neurons. But, unlike the case with normal mice, the cells did nothing to improve spatial skills in a test that required them to remember the location of a submerged platform while swimming in darkened water. In fact, the runners actually performed worse than their nonrunning hyperactive colleagues, the team reports in the current issue of Behavioral Neuroscience. Rhodes, who conducted the work as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says the born-to-run mice are "addicted to exercise" and that in their case running "actually is impairing learning." Co-author Fred Gage of the Salk Institute in La jolla, California, says the experiment may explain "why the increased activity in hyperactive kids does not lead to cognitive enhancement."

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October 19, 2003 Los Angeles Times Builders Swamp Wetlands Developers are taking advantage of a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that removes 'isolated' waterways from any federal protection. By Elizabeth Shogren Times Staff Writer ST. MARYS, Ga. -The views across grassy salt marshes and the Intracoastal Waterway to a federally protected island wilderness are so picturesque that Home & Garden Television chose the Cumberland Harbour housing development as the location for its 2004 "dream home." So far, HGTV's large, genteel Victorian with a private deep-water dock is the only house constructed among the cypress and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss. But on these 1,100 acres in southeastern Georgia, the developer has plans for a gated community of 1,200 residences — plus streets, a yacht club, swimming pools and other upscale amenities. Potential home buyers may be eagerly anticipating the completion of luxury housing on pristine waterfront property, but federal officials charged with protecting rare plants and animals are worried: Two endangered species, the wood stork and the Eastern indigo snake, rely on these wetlands for habitat. But because these wetlands have been designated "isolated," no federal agency has a say in what happens to them. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that under the Clean Water Act, the government can protect waterways that are navigable or tributaries or marshes that drain into navigable waters — but can no longer regulate "nonnavigable, isolated, intrastate" ponds, wetlands or mud flats just because they provide a habitat for migratory birds. The Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over the nation's waterways, has interpreted that ruling to mean that isolated wetlands no longer fall under the provisions of the Clean Water Act — and are thus no longer protected from development.	Before the court's decision, Cumberland Harbour's developer would have been required to seek a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers before filling in or draining any of the wetlands. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would have investigated the potential effect on rare animals and plants. And the Army Corps of Engineers would have either rejected the permit or, at the least, required the developer to make up for the loss of each acre of wetland by restoring or creating wetlands nearby. Now, once a wetland area is determined to be "isolated," a developer may not even have to notify state or federal authorities before bringing in the bulldozers. But the environment pays a price each time wetlands are filled, say those who study them. "Wetlands can release water slowly over time, even during drought periods," said Keith Parsons, an environmental specialist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. "As wetlands are being developed, they're no longer acting as reservoirs." President Bush has declared his commitment to a goal of "no net loss" of wetlands, first set in 1990 during his father's presidency, but the Army Corps of Engineers does not know how many wetlands and streams nationwide are being lost or polluted as a result of the Supreme Court ruling. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency are not keeping track, either. Top officials in the Army Corps of Engineers downplayed the effect of the ruling so far but conceded that it could grow in the coming years. "The significant losses predicted immediately after [the court ruling], from what we've been able to see, are not occurring," said Mark Sudol, chief of the Corps' regulatory branch. "There may be [such losses] in the future." But regulators, environmentalists and wetlands experts in states like Georgia and Texas, which have no programs to protect isolated waters, point to projects where hundreds of acres of wetlands and streams have been destroyed or are slated for destruction because they were judged to be isolated. Even in California and Washington, which are among the 18 states with their own regulations for isolated waters, some wetlands and arroyos that used to be protected are being obliterated, officials said.
Over time, the state officials and environmentalists warned, the cumulative effect on water quality and wildlife could be significant, especially if the Army Corps of Engineers takes a broad view of what is considered "isolated." On the Texas Gulf Coast, thousands of acres of wetlands are being filled and drained near Galveston Bay to build housing developments, shopping centers and a new port, aggravating a severe water-quality problem that is decimating sea life and commercial fishing, according to an official of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Near Vancouver, Wash., in preparation for the construction of a new Costco, earth-moving equipment recently covered up a wetland that local biologists say was a habitat for juvenile salmon. In Southern California, the Army Corps of Engineers has continued to protect "the vast majority" of the wetlands, arroyos and streams on the coastal plain, officials said. But in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, where there are many closed basins, the Corps has stopped regulating many wetlands and ephemeral streams, which run only after storms, said David Castanon, acting chief of the regulatory branch at the Corps' Los Angeles district. In its ruling, the Supreme Court said it would be a "significant impingement upon a traditional state power" for the Army Corps of Engineers to regulate isolated waters and wetlands just because migratory birds depend on them. But, ironically, the majority of states have indicated they want the federal government to find a way to regulate as many of these areas as possible. Local and state environmental officials say they are concerned that the loss of wetlands and streams will affect water quality and wildlife, but add that they do not have adequate resources to enforce their regulations. Among them are officials in California, which has lost more than 90% of its wetlands to farming and development, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The state has laws to protect the remaining waters and wetlands, but it does not have the staff, programs or funding to ensure compliance, said Michael Levy, senior staff counsel for the State Water Resources Control Board.	The Bush administration contends that other federal and state programs aimed at preserving and creating wetlands are making up for any losses that may result from the court's decision. "It is merely one component of a much more massive effort across the federal government and states toward the goal of halting overall wetlands loss," said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Office of Environmental Quality. In January, the administration announced that in response to the Supreme Court ruling, it would develop regulations clarifying the definition of "waters of the United States" — those streams, water bodies and wetlands that still will be protected by the Clean Water Act. In the absence of such rules, there have been dozens of lawsuits and on-the-ground disputes over whether local Army Corps of Engineers officials are making the right calls. One involves a project in Brantley County, Ga., where as much as 177 acres of wetlands may be destroyed for a titanium mine. Environmentalists believe the wetlands should be protected because they are linked to other wetlands that connect to navigable waters. Altamaha River Keeper, a Georgia environmental organization, is considering legal action if the company developing the mine does not agree to protect those wetlands. "I'm getting even," said James Holland, a hulking 62-year-old with thick gray hair who said he helped found the environmental group after the destruction of coastal wetlands decimated his crabbing business. "Can we afford to lose any more wetlands than we already have? I say, 'No!' I've given my life to say 'no.' "
On a recent afternoon, Holland watched as a steady stream of trucks filled with dirt drove into the Cumberland Harbour development. Environmentalists are considering their options here too, including a possible lawsuit, he said. "You only bring in dirt to fill in wetlands," Holland grumbled, as he looked through binoculars at several wood storks flying around a recently created man-made lake. Development could be costly for these long-legged wading birds, which forage in brackish and freshwater wetlands, and for the Eastern indigo snake, which lives in burrows dug in these wetlands by the gopher tortoise, a threatened species in Georgia. Paul Beidel, a senior vice president at Land Resource Cos. which is developing the property, said his company was committed to having a "soft footprint" on the environment. "Our goal is to kind of have zero impact to wetlands," he said, adding that he was referring only to the so-called jurisdictional wetlands, the ones that the Army Corps of Engineers has determined have connections with navigable waters. He does not know, he said, how many acres of isolated wetlands are being destroyed at Cumberland Harbour. Some students of wetlands believe that the Army Corps of Engineers' interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling is not hurting the environment. David Crawley, a wetlands scientist and consultant for a housing development in Rincon, a bedroom community of Savannah, believes the regulations are sufficiently "protective." Touring the Rincon development on a recent morning, Crawley pointed out the 111 acres of wetlands — with hardwood trees that thrive in soggy soil — that were designated as isolated. "I don't feel this project is going to have a negative impact on the environment of Effingham County," Crawley said.	But officials in the Army Corps of Engineers are having second thoughts about whether those wetlands truly are isolated. They made their determination in the middle of a seven-year drought, which "skewed" the data, said Terry Kobs, regulatory specialist for the Corps. Now, after an unusually wet year and a lot of pressure from state officials and environmentalists, they are taking another look. In Georgia and elsewhere, scientists, state ecologists and environmental activists want the Army Corps of Engineers to more narrowly interpret the court's ruling, since most waters have some link to other waters. "This whole idea of 'isolated wetlands' is such a piece of fiction," said Parsons, the state environmental specialist, who oversees Clean Water Act regulations in Georgia. "Any reputable hydrologist or ecologist is shocked at what the political [and] regulatory apparatus is doing right now to our wetland resources." Officials from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources visited Cumberland Harbour in April, when large-scale earth moving was already underway. They were skeptical, they said recently, when the Army Corps of Engineers determined that large areas of wetlands on the property were isolated. The development is on a tiny peninsula almost surrounded by navigable waters. "How the Corps made its jurisdictional determination is a mystery to most people," said Parsons, who was on the tour. But since the area had been altered before he saw it, he said he would "never know" if his hunch was correct. Parsons said that although he is disturbed by the Cumberland Harbour development, his real concern is the impact of wetlands destruction in many projects over the course of many years. "There is a real potential for loss of endangered species, impacts to coastal fisheries and increased flooding," he said. "There is a long-term cumulative impact. Everybody knows it exists, but it's hard to prove."

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There is something fundamentally wrong if a child's learning to read depends somehow upon how one may have defaulted into writing the child's beginning literature -here, perhaps not immediately obvious, 'American free-enterprise, capitalist democracy (read 'freedom') and the right to make as much money as you can and spend it any way you choose -as long as there's no law against it'.

Science Magazine 10 October 2003 p225 TWO CULTURES Analyze this. Why do so many U.S. students avoid science? Part of the answer could be a deep dislike for the subject by authors of some of the most popular children's books. Sharon Creech,who wrote Granny Torrelli Makes Soup, loathed geometry so much that she "accidentally lost the text many, many times," she told The Washington Post on the eve of last week's National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. The thought of algebra, says writer-illustrator Steven Kellogg, author of Jimmy's Boa and the Bungee Jump Slam Dunk, "still causes me to lapse into a coma." Of the seven writers interviewed, four named math as their worst subject in school and two fingered chemistry. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming favorite was English.

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October 12, 2003 Los Angeles Times A Shipload of Sheep Without a Harbor By Richard C. Paddock, Times Staff Writer JAKARTA, Indonesia — For more than seven weeks, a ship full of unwanted sheep has wandered the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf searching for a country that will accept them. The ship set out from Australia with nearly 58,000 sheep, all of them bred for slaughter during the upcoming Ramadan, Islam's holiest month. But Saudi Arabia, alleging that too many of the animals had a skin disease, rejected the shipment. Now Australia can't give the sheep away — even to war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. As the pariah ship has cruised the Middle East, at least 5,200 sheep have died from the 100-degree heat and the stress of confinement. Australia insists that the remaining animals are healthy, but dozens more are dying every day. Rumors of sick sheep on the ship have spread throughout the Muslim world. The fear of contamination is so great that Jordan wouldn't let the freighter come into harbor and Egypt refused to let it pass through the Suez Canal. So far, 27 countries have refused to take the animals. In Australia, animal rights advocates say the conditions of the voyage amount to extreme cruelty to the animals. For a month, some prominent activists have urged the government to kill the sheep at sea. "Those sheep cannot be allowed to suffer like this, and the only solution is an emergency slaughter," said Dr. Hugh Wirth, president of the Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "If such measures had been taken when recommended, those poor animals would be out of their misery by now — instead, they are still trapped on that death ship in extreme temperatures, extreme humidity and surrounded by a sea of their own excrement." For years, Australia has been raising livestock specifically for the Middle East market, where Islamic tradition and lack of refrigeration dictate that the animals be slaughtered at the time they are consumed. Australia is the world's biggest exporter of live animals, sending 6 million abroad each year. Long criticized by activists for its treatment of the animals, the $600-million-a-year industry has been plunged into crisis by the latest episode.

Prime Minister John Howard, who stepped in to manage the emergency, said Wednesday that the ship would begin heading back to Australia while officials continued to search for a country that would accept the sheep. "The preferable outcome is to find another country that will take them, and we are still working on that," Howard said. "It is just quite impractical and horrendously difficult to slaughter them at sea." The 11-deck ship, the MV Cormo Express, was allowed to dock in Kuwait this month to take on food and fuel. When it arrived, the Al Watan daily newspaper ran a banner headline: "The Ship of Death Is in Kuwait." The freighter is scheduled to leave this week for the 16-day return voyage to Australia. The Dutch-owned ship with a largely Philippine crew left Australia for Saudi Arabia on Aug. 5 with 57,937 sheep aboard — all of them 2-year-old rams. The sheep were destined to have their throats slit in accordance with Islamic tradition and were supposed to look their very best. In Jidda, Saudi Arabia refused to accept the animals Aug. 22 after a government inspector concluded that too many had "scabby mouth," a virus that makes sheep less attractive but doesn't affect the quality of their meat. Under its agreement with Australia, Saudi Arabia is not required to accept a shipment if more than 5% of the sheep have scabby mouth. Initially, the inspector said 30% of the sheep he sampled had the disease, but the figure was later scaled back to 6%. An Australian veterinarian who traveled aboard the Cormo disputed the finding, contending that the rate of scabby mouth was 0.35%. Subsequently, Dr. Ghazi Yehia, an independent veterinarian from the World Animal Health Organization, examined the sheep and declared them healthy. There was no evidence, he said, that there had ever been a significant outbreak of scabby mouth during the voyage. Some Australians have questioned whether the shipment was turned away because their country had sent troops to help U.S. and British forces invade Iraq. But the Australian government and animal activists reject that theory, suggesting instead that the debacle was the result of a Saudi business deal gone awry.

Officially, the sheep belonged to a major Saudi importer, who took ownership of the animals when they left Australia. According to Wirth, other Saudis wanted to scuttle the deal because they could get a better price from Somalia and Ethiopia. Whatever the reason, the collapse of the deal has highlighted problems in Australia's live export industry. Advocates of the business have said that conditions on the Cormo are better than on the First Fleet that brought convicts from Britain to Australia in 1788. If so, that's not saying much. Animal rights groups contend that conditions on the animal transport ships are atrocious and that the trade should be banned. The animals are packed closely together in poorly ventilated pens, they say, and typically spend the voyage covered in their own waste. It is routine for some animals to die from heat or suffocate from crowding, activists say. Conditions are at their worst when the ship is docked for days on end and there is no breeze to cool the pens. The Australian Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals ran a series of advertisements last month deploring the conditions on the Cormo. "A recipe for cruelty," the ads said. "Take 57,000 sheep and steam to over 40C (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for 53 days." The Australian government, which contends that recent regulations have reduced mortality on the transport ships, hopes to restore the country's reputation for high-quality livestock by finding a country that will take the sheep for free. The Australian livestock industry bought the sheep back from the Saudi importer for $2.5 million as the ship began touring the Mideast. At one point, Australia worked out a deal to give the sheep to Afghanistan, but it collapsed when Iran and Pakistan refused to let the animals cross their territory.

In Iraq, plans for British troops to distribute the sheep fell apart when authorities concluded that the occupation force didn't have the resources to handle the animals, Australian Agriculture Minister Warren Truss told reporters. Other Arab countries followed Saudi Arabia's lead and refused the shipment. Italy and other Mediterranean countries were interested, but with the Suez Canal off limits, there was no practical way to get the sheep there. Indonesia also rejected an offer to take the sheep — not because of scabby mouth but because of fears the animals might have picked up a contagious disease in Saudi Arabia that could threaten Indonesia's livestock, an agriculture official said. Australia's last hope may lie with Sri Lanka or East Timor, two countries recovering from recent conflicts that might be desperate enough to accept the donation. If Australia can't find a place to land the sheep, its options are limited. Australia does not import livestock, officials say, so it isn't equipped to unload such a large number of sheep and keep them in quarantined isolation if they were returned home. Slaughtering the animals on the ship would mean stunning each one with a bolt gun, then dropping it down a chute into a macerator that would mince it into fish food. Destroying 50,000 sheep this way could take weeks and could cause an environmental disaster, officials say.

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October 12, 2003
People of the Mediterranean have always been able to 'anguish' more deeply than others -here, Mideasterners in overwrought traditions passed on from generation to generation. The news item following the picture is interesting (related) for its identification of the 'grief industry' (psychologists, counselors et cetera) that could only have evolved in a US new, rich and self-indulgently wasteful enough to evolve it -think Columbine, Twin Towers et cetera. (Gotta get outta here, my personal trainer's waiting!)

Science Magazine 3 October 2003 p49 Post-trauma Counseling Questioned What usually happens after a school shooting, a plane crash, an earthquake? The grief counselors are sent in. It's commonly accepted in the United States that immediate counseling and "psychological debriefing" about a traumatic experience will speed recovery. But a review of the literature, triggered by the events of 11 September, shows that such debriefing does not necessarily help defuse post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) -and instead sometimes has the opposite effect. "There is no convincing evidence that debriefing reduces the incidence of PTSD, and some controlled studies suggest that it may impede natural recovery from trauma," concludes the review, published in the November issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The lead author, Harvard University psychologist Richard J. McNally, found from a survey of the literature that most people recover on their own. "The vast majority do not require counseling," McNally says. And group counseling can actually be harmful -"Some people are too raw [and] get vicariously traumatized again by hearing others' stories in a public forum. Rehearsing a traumatic memory right after it occurred might consolidate it," he says. David Spiegel, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University who studies stress reactions to traumatic events, agrees that debriefing has been "oversold." But he says McNally et al. have oversimplified the picture. In cases where trauma victims suffer from dissociation, for example, there is a strong likelihood of developing PTSD in the absence of intervention, he says.

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