April 9, 2005 Economist Magazine Brazil's trigger-happy police Law-enforcers on the rampage SÃO PAULO A murderous day in Rio TWO of the victims were riding bicycles. Four of them were adolescents playing pinball in a bar. Two were transvestites, lounging outside a hotel. They were among the 30 people murdered on the single day of March 31st in Baixada Fluminense, a poor area outside Rio de Janeiro, apparently in a co-ordinated action by rogue members of the state police force. Only two of the victims had criminal records. Twelve policemen have been arrested, including eight charged with murder. Brazilians were shocked by the worst massacre in the history of Rio state, but perhaps not shocked enough. That is because such outrages are not that uncommon. In 1993 a group of policemen murdered 21 people in a Rio favela to avenge the killing of four of their colleagues. In the same year seven children were shot by police near the Candelária church, in the centre of the city of Rio. The state's mix of murderous drug-trafficking gangs and ill-trained, poorly paid police makes such violence a daily occurrence. Last year the state's police killed a total of 983 people out of a population of 14m, slightly fewer than the 1,195 they killed the year before. The Baixada Fluminense massacre seems to have started as a reaction against a crackdown by a local commander against crooked officers, but has its roots in a police force that is both fiercely repressive in its approach to crime and prone to criminality itself. Police “extermination groups” kill for hire and sometimes engage in theft and kidnapping. Since their victims are generally criminals, most people approve of them, says Pedro Strozenberg of Viva Rio,

an anti-violence organisation. In some areas of Rio, police “militias” have driven out drug-trafficking gangs and imposed a harsh order. The perpetrators of last week's massacre may have belonged to an extermination group. Rio's security secretary, Marcelo Itagiba, has set up a task-force to fight such groups and had earlier promised to take a “meat cleaver” to corrupt policemen. The state is already experimenting with promising initiatives to weave police forces into the communities they serve—a better way of catching criminals than invading their neighbourhoods. Gunning down the innocent “Things are advancing,” says Mr Strozenberg, but not yet far enough. The streets of Baixada Fluminense and other depressed areas will not be secure until both the locals and the police are convinced that there is more to be gained from obeying the law than breaking it.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

April 11, 2005 Newsweek Magazine MY TURN Tutoring Rich Kids Cost Me My Dreams It took me a while to figure out what my boss already knew: I had been hired to do their work. BY NICOLE KRISTAL FOR THREE YEARS I WAS AN academic prostitute. I ruined the curve for the honest and ensured that the wealthiest, and often stupidest, students earned the highest marks. I was a professional paper-writer.    It all started when I quit my journalism job in order to pursue my dream of being a singer-songwriter. I snagged a job tutoring inner-city foster children, but it didn't pay the bills. One day, I found a TUTORS WANTED flier on the UCLA campus. A small tutoring agency that serviced affluent families hired me.    "Just sit at her computer and type for her," my boss advised me with my first client, a private-high-school student. But as I typed her name at the top right corner of the screen, she slithered onto her bed to watch "Are You Hot?" I asked her what she remembered about Huxley's "Brave New World."    "She's a slut," my client said with a sigh, referring either to the character of Lenina or the woman on TV: After a handful of three-word responses like that, I realized she didn't care. I was hired to do the thinking. The parents knew it. So did my boss.    Welcome to the world of professional paper-writing the dirty secret of the tutoring business. It's facilitated by avaricious agencies, perpetuated by accountability-free parents and made possible by se1f-loathing nerds like me. For three-hour workdays, the ability to sleep in and the opportunity to get	WRITER FOR HIRE: I tackled Dostyoevsky while spoiled jerks smoked pot, took naps, surfed the Internet and had sex.
paid to learn, I tackled subjects like Dostoevsky while spoiled jerks smoked pot, took naps, surfed the Internet and had sex. Though some offered me chateaubriand and the occasional illicit drug, most treated me like the help. I put up with it because I feared working in an office for $12 an hour again.    Six months into the job, my boss sent me on a problem-solving mission for $10 more per hour than I was already making. He had earned C's and D's on papers for Evan (not his real name), a USC freshman my boss described as a "typical surfer retard." Evan's parents had hired "tutors" to compose their son's papers since he was 12 because he "wasn't going to be a writer anyway:" They were furious. In Evan's penthouse, surfers carved across the screen of this 51-inch television, next to a poster of "Scarface." The former clothes model handed me his assignment: to describe utopia. "I couldn't ask for a better life. I mean, -- was my soccer coach;' Evan said, naming a famous studio head.    Despite living in utopia, during the session Evan purchased an ounce of weed and a bag of Xanax. His WASPy girlfriend washed down a pill with some Smart Water and offered me one. T declined. Even sent me home with his $3,000 PowerBook to write his paper because he was "too busy" to work. Before I left, his girlfriend hired me to write her paper on "Do the Right Thing." I drove home at midnight, once again missing my chance to hit the music scene and battle my stage fright.    No matter. After I scored an A on Evan's paper, he promised to pass my demo on to a legendary music producer's family friend. He also promised a few leftover pairs of designer jeans. He never mentioned either again, and I knew I'd been played. The only help Evan offered came in the form of new clients, such as his roommate, who had one-night stands with strippers and	said things like "Why should I care about some little black girl?" in regard to Toni Morrison novels.    When my streak of A's ended after I scored a B-minus on Evan's paper about clanship in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," I never heard &om him again. His teenage sibling, for whom I composed countless high-school English papers, revealed that Evan had replaced me with a classmate.    That summer break, my boss referred me to a junior at a private Christian university who couldn't spell "college." Come fall, the kid leased my brain three hours a day, five days a week. Depressed, I lounged around in my bathrobe until he finished class, then waded through rush-hour traffic to demoralize myself. One day, my Ford Bronco lost all power on the freeway and I could have died. I hadn't played a gig for seven months. I could barely pay my bills because I refused to take on more paper-writing clients.    Last spring, two months shy of my client's graduation date, I snapped while staring at a term-paper assignment on Margaret Thatcher. "I can't do this anymore," I mumbled. I had completed nearly two years of college for him. He replaced me with a teacher about to earn his Ph.D. who charged $15 less per hour than I did. Despite my intellect, I handed over my self-respect to rich losers. I allowed myself to be blinded by privilege and the hope that some of it would rub off on me and help my flailing music career. Ultimately, trading my morals for money cost me the confidence I needed to turn my dreams into reality. Unemployment was a small price to pay to restore my fractured dignity. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ KRISTAL lives in Los Angeles.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

April, 2005Smithsonian Magazine Book Review William Clark and the Shaping of the West Landon Y. Jones Hill and Wang, $25.00 In a deeply researched, splendidly written biography (a part of which appeared in Smithsonian), William Clark and the Shaping of the West, Landon Y. Jones gives an impressive—if not always noble—American his due. In filling the gaps in our knowledge of Clark, who, along with Meriwether Lewis, led Thomas Jefferson's Corps of Discovery expedition (1804-1806), Jones also revivifies the complex and compelling period when the West didn't reach very far beyond the ramshackle settlement of St. Louis. In 334 pages, he sharpens the soft focus that tends to blur and compress our national historical view of the long struggle between European settlers and Native American tribes. In setting the stage for his close examination of William Clark's busy

life—he outlived Lewis (who committed suicide in 1809) by 29 years and died at 68 in 1838—Jones vividly limns the tooth-and-claw savagery of the struggle for territory on both sides. Much has been written about the expedition of the Corps of Discovery—Jones is the author of The Essential Lewis and Clark (the pair's edited diaries)—but after the fabled band returned, Clark began a long career as a military leader, chronicler, diplomat, territorial administrator and enforcer of the draconian Indian policies that largely contributed to, as the title states, the shaping of the West. Jones is no hero worshiper, and he shows us Clark by turns enlightened, conniving and cruel. In the free-form society beyond the Appalachians, where opportunity favored boldness, and ethical behavior was less than consistently applied, Clark did not hesitate to pursue his own aggrandizement. In today's world, he would be the kind of canny, compromised rascal who might end up in jail, or in politics.

His older brother George felt that the only way to convince Native tribes not to side with the British was to "excel them in barbarity," and this harsh attitude influenced William. He once had four captured Indians tomahawked to death in front of a besieged fort, and one eyewitness claimed Clark had personally taken part in the killings. But later, when the Indians were rarely an equal force in battle and Clark served as Jefferson's superintendent of Indian affairs, his approach became more nuanced, taking into account political as well as military realities. Working as a direct representative of the federal government, Clark could be fair and helpful to tribes that went along with his edicts but ferocious to those that resisted. Jones points out that Clark honestly felt his tactics of removing Indians from land coveted by settlers was the only way to save them; the

author quotes a number of contemporaries attesting to the man's humaneness. Yet Clark was a willing executor of a Jeffersonian policy of economic servitude that created in Indians a hunger for consumer goods, then encouraged them to cede land to pay their debts. In a time when many states still recognized slaves as legitimate property, this may not have seemed beyond the pale, but it is hardly enlightened public policy, and its short- and long-term effects were devastating. In this essential biography, Jones looks on his subject's behavior with a humaneness of his own: "The cruelties of Clark's time and the strengths of his character did not contradict one another; they lived within him. He was a man whose complexity encompassed both." Reviewed by Owen Edwards

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 29, 2005 Los Angeles Times For Sudan Slaves, Freedom at a Cost Most are thrilled to be emancipated, but the uprooting shocks some of their children. By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer MALUAL KON, Sudan — The map of Majok's life is carved on his body in scars. They trace the vicious beatings, his castration, the time he was left hanging by a rope around his neck. But grief and trauma have erased nearly every other scrap of his boyhood story.    He has no idea of his age or his family name. From his initiation marks and coloring, it is obvious he is a member of the dominant Dinka tribe of southern Sudan. But he says he is an Arab and that the man who kept him as a slave in northern Sudan is his father.    "I do not know whether I am an adult or a child," he said, puzzled, as a small crowd of villagers here snickered at his confusion. Bereft of his identity, family or home, he can imagine nothing of his future except that, his manhood stolen from him, he can never marry. He hangs his head in silent distress at this thought.    "All I do is eat and sleep, eat and sleep," said Majok, who was brought to southern Sudan in January by the Commission for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children, or CEAWC, an organization set up by the Sudanese government in 1999 after an international outcry over the enslavement of southerners by northerners, who speak Arabic and identify themselves as Arabs.

Years of bondage: Now free, Akon Lual, with daughters Abla Umar and Nadya Umar, says she was seized when she was a child and later forced to be a soldier's wife. "I was not there as a housewife. I was there as a slave, because they used to call me a slave," she says.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

April, 2005 Smithsonian Magazine OUT OF TIME Less than a decade after their first contact with the outside world, the volatile Korubo of the Amazon still live in almost total isolation. Their fiercest champion, Indian tracker Sydney Possuelo, is trying to keep their world intact. But how long can he, and they, hold out? TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL RAFFAELE Deep in the amazon jungle, i stumble along a sodden track carved through steamy undergrowth, frequently sinking to my knees in the mud. Leading the way is a bushybearded, fiery-eyed Brazilian, Sydney Possuelo, South America's leading expert on remote Indian tribes and the last of the continent's great explorers. Our destination: the village of a fierce tribe not far removed from the Stone Age. Complete Article

On the lookout for enemies, a warrior named Ta'van leads a patrol tyhough the jungle. Several hundredindians -some never seen by outsiders- live in the Amazon's Javari Valley. Maya, the second adult from the left, seems to call the shots for the Koruba, says writer/photographer Paul Raffaele. But is she the chief: Hard to say: Posseulo won't let anthropologists study the group, so its social structure remains a mystery.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 27, 2005 Los Angeles Times THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ Comforts Of Home Amid Perils Of Iraq U.S. soldiers confront chaos daily, then take refuge By David Zucchino, Times Staff Writer BAGHDAD — The war in Iraq is the first American conflict in which a GI on patrol can risk evisceration from artillery shells rigged to a cellphone, then return to base in time for ESPN's "SportsCenter," a T-bone steak, a mocha cappuccino, a gym workout, an Internet surf session, a hot shower and a cold, if nonalcoholic, beer.    In Iraq, there is the "fob" — the forward operating base — and there is life outside the fob. A soldier's existence in Iraq is defined by the fob, and by the concertina wire that marks its boundaries.    The war beyond the wire is so draining that the more than 100 fobs in Iraq are fortified refuges for the nearly 150,000 U.S. troops here. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, a 3rd Infantry Division commander based at the Baghdad airport's FOB Liberty, calls them "little oases in the middle of a dangerous and confusing world."    This is a war with no front but plenty of rear. Many soldiers spend a year in Iraq without ever leaving their bases. Others may never even meet an Iraqi. A soldier may patrol for months without ever seeing the enemy, yet risk death or disfigurement at any moment.

ON A MISSION: Army Staff Sgt. Dustin Flowers is forced to don a bomb-protection suit and venture out to inspect ordnance because the batteries died on a remote-controlled robot. “That robot is gonna be the death of me,” Flowers says. (Steve Hebert / Polaris / For The Times)

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 18, 2005 Science Magazine ECOLOGY: Are U.S. Coral Reefs on the Slippery Slope to Slime? J. M. Pandolfi,1* J. B. C. Jackson,3,4 N. Baron,5 R. H. Bradbury,6 H. M. Guzman,4 T. P. Hughes,7 C. V. Kappel,8 F. Micheli,8 J. C. Ogden,9 H. P. Possingham,2 E. Sala3[HN15] Coral reefs [HN1] provide ecosystem goods and services worth more than $375 billion to the global economy each year (1). Yet, worldwide, reefs are in decline [HN2] (1-4). Examination of the history of degradation reveals three ways to challenge the current state of affairs (5, 6). First, scientists should stop arguing about the relative importance of different causes of coral reef decline: overfishing, pollution, disease, and climate change. Instead, we must simultaneously reduce all threats to have any hope of reversing the decline. Second, the scale of coral reef management--with mechanisms such as protected areas--has been too small and piecemeal. Reefs must be managed as entire ecosystems. Third, a lack of clear conservation goals has limited our ability to define or measure success.

Figure 1 The slippery slope of coral reef decline through time. CREDIT: MARY PARRISH Large animals, like turtles, sharks, and groupers, were once abundant on all coral reefs, and large, long-lived corals created a complex architecture supporting diverse fish and invertebrates (5, 6). Today, the most degraded reefs are little more than rubble, seaweed, and slime. Almost no large animals survive, water quality is poor, and large corals are dead or dying and being replaced by weedy corals, soft corals, and seaweed (2, 7, 8). Overfishing of megafauna releases population control of smaller fishes and invertebrates, creating booms and busts. This in turn can increase algal overgrowth, or overgrazing, and stress the coral architects, likely making them more vulnerable to other forms of stress. This linked sequence of events is remarkably consistent worldwide (see figure, below).

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 18, 2005 Science Magazine Science, Vol 307, Issue 5716, 1716-1717 , 18 March 2005 PUBLIC HEALTH: Provocative Study Says Obesity May Reduce U.S. Life Expectancy Charles C. Mann The rising incidence of obesity, especially among children and teenagers, is leading to a variety of diseases that could depress average life span In the 1980s and 1990s, the late maverick economist Julian Simon infuriated environmentalists by arguing that free markets and scientific progress were constantly improving human life rather than pushing the world toward ecological ruin, social collapse, and famine. A key example was life expectancy at birth, which Simon showed had been steadily rising for centuries. Using that as a metric, he repeatedly claimed that in the 21st century, "humanity's condition will improve in just about every material way." Not so, says a 10-person research team led by S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois, Chicago, and David S. Ludwig of Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. In a study published in the 17 March New England Journal of Medicine, the team predicts that U.S. life expectancy "could level off or even decline" by 2050.

Figure 1 End of an era? Average years remaining for U.S. females at age 65 rose steadily, in spite of projections to the contrary. CREDIT: N. ENGL. J. MED. 352, 11 (2005) Figure 2 A growing health burden. One in eight U.S. youths is now overweight. CREDIT: RADHIKA CHALASANI/CORBIS The culprit, though, is not environmental heedlessness but [perryb] the very market-driven affluence that Simon celebrated, because it has fostered an explosive rise in obesity, and especially childhood obesity. That rise, the research team argues, has already offset increasing life expectancy "by 0.33 to 0.93 year for white males," with similar offsets for women and other races. Assuming that current trends continue and that no big technical fixes emerge, Olshansky says, "we have strong reason to believe this number will rise rapidly in the coming decades."

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

p

March 22, 2005 Los Angeles Times NEUROSCIENCE Time Robs Hope for Recovery One man came to after 20 months in a vegetative state. Terri Schiavo has been in one for 15 years. By Thomas H. Maugh II, Rosie Mestel and Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writers While serving a search warrant on a December afternoon in 1979, Minneapolis police Officer David Mack was shot in the neck and abdomen, triggering a cascade of events that left him in a persistent vegetative state.    He choked on his own vomit, depriving his brain of oxygen for several crucial minutes. Doctors gave up hope that he would ever regain consciousness.    Then he surprised them. After 20 months, the policeman came to, eventually gaining the ability to communicate with nods and to spell out words on an alphabet board.    Mack is the only known patient to regain consciousness after so much time in a persistent vegetative state brought on by oxygen deprivation. Doctors consider his recovery after 20 months mind-boggling.    Terri Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years.	For all the legal, political and religious arguments that swirl around the Schiavo case, it is the faint hope of recovery that fuels her parents' efforts to keep her alive with a feeding tube.    Terri Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years.    The overwhelming consensus among neurologists is that the chances are almost nil.    "After 15 years, it is truly hopeless," said Dr. Howard M. Eisenberg of the University of Maryland Medical Center.    Dr. Ronald Cranford, a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota who examined Schiavo in 2002, added: "The chances of her waking up or benefiting from treatment are zero."    If you are in a room with Schiavo, her eyes do not track you, Cranford said.    CT scans show that the higher-thinking region of her brain — the cerebral cortex — has been severely damaged and scarred, he said.    To visitors, she may look as if she is aware. She sleeps and wakes. Her eyes move. She smiles at times.    It is an illusion of consciousness, doctors say.    Much confusion exists among the public about the nature of a persistent vegetative state, as compared with a coma or even being brain-dead.    A coma covers a range of conditions that can reflect minor to severe brain damage. Those patients are unconscious, lying still with eyes closed, unable to wake or speak. A person in a coma may respond to pain and there are some reflexes, such as gag or swallow responses.
Brain death is a severe loss of cells in the brain so that it cannot carry out any normal functions. Parts of the brain involved in high-level thinking are severely damaged or destroyed, as are the most primitive parts that control autonomic functions, such as breathing.    Brain-dead patients may be kept alive on life support, but if that support is stopped, they die within minutes.    A persistent vegetative state is somewhere between coma and brain death. As many as 35,000 Americans are in such a state at any one time.    In that condition, the primitive parts of the brain continue to function and the patient goes through normal sleep-wake cycles and is able to breathe.    But patients lose all meaningful contact with the world because of damage to higher-functioning parts of the brain. Such patients show no awareness, no ability to interact with others and no evidence of language comprehension.    They do display random tic-like behaviors, apparently grimacing or smiling, making sounds, and moving arms and legs. Such patients can even squeeze a hand in response to a caress.    "The problem frequently is that people who are involved with the patient over-interpret this very rudimentary behavior and develop unrealistic hopes," said Eisenberg of the University of Maryland. "That is not unusual, but it makes for a very difficult problem."    There are essentially two causes of a persistent vegetative state. The first is head injuries that damage a part of the brain. Patients with this condition have a better chance of recovery because they may not have suffered widespread death of brain cells.	The second cause is oxygen deprivation, typically through a heart attack or stroke.    Once the blood supply is stopped, the lack of oxygen can kill the cortex, "the part of the brain that makes us human," Eisenberg said.    Schiavo and Mack both suffered this form of injury.    After Mack awoke, he remained almost entirely paralyzed. He could smile and frown, but he could not speak and had trouble swallowing. He would go through periods of depression, though he said he didn't regret the decision to be kept alive.    Mack died of an infection 5½ years after regaining consciousness.    According to guidelines from the American Academy of Neurology, a vegetative state can be judged to be permanent rather than persistent after 12 months if it results from traumatic injury or after three months if it results from heart attack, stroke or other illness.    "The chance for recovery after these periods is exceedingly low," the guidelines note.    Most patients die in two to five years due to infections, general systemic failure, respiratory failure or strokes. It is unusual for a patient to survive for 10 years, according to the committee, and the odds of surviving for 15 years vary from 1 in 15,000 to 1 in 75,000.    The panel identified three patients, however, who survived for 17, 37 and 41 years.    In general, children who enter a persistent vegetative state do not survive as long as adults.
The guidelines were set off partly in response to the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, whose parents sued to have her removed from life support after she had been comatose for 11 months after consuming alcohol and tranquilizers.    That case established the right-to-die debate in the U.S. Quinlan survived for nine years after Joseph and Julia Quinlan took her off a respirator in 1976.    The hopes of Schiavo's parents are fueled in part by pronouncements from physicians such as Dr. William Hammesfahr, a neurologist who runs the Hammesfahr Neurological Institute in Clearwater, Fla.    "Her chances of getting better are excellent," he said in an interview Monday. "They are overwhelming, with the proper therapies."    Among other treatments, Hammesfahr proposed placing her in a hyperbaric chamber to force more oxygen into her blood and administering drugs to dilate blood vessels and increase blood flow to the brain. He also suggested using physical, speech and occupational therapy, and perhaps omental transfer, in which fat from the stomach is transplanted into the brain, to increase blood flow.    Hammesfahr said he had treated 250 patients and that 98% of them showed "significant improvement."	Cranford, however, described such treatments as absurd.    "The idea that she would respond to hyperbaric oxygen or vasodilator therapy is totally bogus," he said.    Dr. James Bernat, professor of neurology at the Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, N.H., agreed. "There is no scientific evidence that it helps," he said.    Schiavo's parents have expressed hope that science may one day come up with a solution to their daughter's plight.    Indeed, scientists have begun experimenting with stem cells in animals to regenerate neurons, with some success.    But the thought of rebuilding whole sections of the brain is beyond reasonable speculation, doctors said.    "When you are talking about what is currently regarded as irreversible neuronal damage, I don't know what kind of treatment in the future could bring those back to life," Bernat said. "It sounds like science fiction to me."

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 20, 2005 Los Angeles Times WORLD CINEMA He's outgrown anonymity Discovered in an orphanage at age 14, Olzhas Nusuppaev has won several best actor awards for his role in the Kazakh film "Schizo." By John Clark, Special to The Times The legend of Schwab's drugstore — of being discovered in an unlikely place and becoming a star — lives on, though in ways more poignant and more unexpected than might be imagined.    Such is the case of then-14-year-old Olzhas Nusuppaev, who was found in an orphanage in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan and cast in "Schizo," a film that went on to appear in festivals at Cannes, Tokyo, Toronto, Copenhagen and Morocco and that opens here April 1. Along the way, Nusuppaev has won several best actor awards.    "He even became actor of the year in Kazakhstan, or something like that," says the film's director, Guka Omarova, laughing a bit at the wonder of it all.    Of course, it's a wonder that she had everything to do with creating. Omarova says she was "looking for someone who was strange. He's calm, he doesn't look smart, but at the same time he could be aggressive, so you don't know what to expect of a guy like that."    In other words, she was looking for someone like Schizo, so named because of his unpredictability. He lives with his mother and her younger boyfriend (Eduard Tabyschev) in poverty near Almaty in southeastern Kazakhstan, a derelict, windswept area on the Chinese border. To make ends meet, Schizo is employed by the boyfriend to solicit fighters for illegal fistfights.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 16, 2005 Los Angeles Times OBITUARIES Opal Marie Petty, 86; Won Lawsuit Over 51 Years in Mental Hospitals By Myrna Oliver, Times Staff Writer Opal Marie Petty, the Texas farm girl who spent 51 years wrongly locked away in mental institutions and ultimately won a six-figure verdict for her suffering, has died. She was 86.    Petty died of unspecified natural causes Thursday at a hospital in San Angelo, Texas.    In 1989, four years after she was rescued by a nephew she had never known, Petty won a $505,000 verdict against the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation for negligently subjecting her to "institutionalization syndrome."    The Texas Supreme Court upheld the decision three years later, cutting the amount to the $250,000 legally allowed in damage suits against the state. With interest, she received about $350,000.    Because the state's Supreme Court issued a 9-4 decision, and declined to resolve several issues over mental health treatment records, the ruling was not considered a legal precedent.

Nevertheless, Petty's case became a rallying cry for those in Texas and across the country working to reform mental health treatment practices through the courts and state legislatures.    Petty's sad saga began on the family farm in Goldthwaite, Texas, in 1934, when she was 16. She talked about seeing a man at her window and frequently lashed out at family members. One day she was found digging her own grave with a butcher knife.    Her parents, baffled, consulted a local doctor who convinced them to commit her to Austin State Hospital. Depression-era conditions meant that patients slept on concrete floors and cared for each other because of a lack of staff.    State officials claimed that Petty was schizophrenic. Her lawyers argued that she suffered a brief period of psychotic depression and recovered but was never released.    The Texas Supreme Court majority opinion concluding her personal injury case on Dec. 31, 1992, noted that Petty was variously diagnosed during her confinement as being schizophrenic and not mentally ill, and mentally retarded and not mentally retarded.    "Her treatment, however, was never affected," the court said. "For five decades, her treatment consisted of only 'custodial care,' the principal rehabilitative therapy being 35 years of work in the hospital laundry at a salary of $2 per week."

After 37 years at the Austin facility, Petty was transferred to a state school for the mentally retarded in the west Texas town of San Angelo in 1971, when she was 53. Her status was first reviewed by a court in 1979.    In 1978, Texas had passed its Mentally Retarded Persons Act, which for the first time set standards for involuntary commitment.    A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court upgraded involuntary commitment standards, forcing all states to revamp their mental health laws. By 1983, Texas completed its revision, which included periodic reviews of all mental health patients.    But Petty's involuntary institutionalization had long pre-dated those measures and seemingly was not to be affected by them.    Her personal happy ending began not in a court or legislature but at a family reunion in 1985. Her younger sister happened to mention Petty's whereabouts — the first time Clint Denson, the son of a third sister who had died, had ever heard of his Aunt Opal.    Denson and his wife, Linda Kauffman, went to see her — finding her dirty, disheveled and barely able to communicate. They began visiting, took her clothes and convinced officials to place her in a group home. When that didn't work — she had become so institutionalized that she couldn't bathe herself — they moved her into their own home.

At age 68, Petty finally began to regain her independent life. With the help of a speech therapist, she became more verbal. She resumed playing the piano, which she had learned as a youngster, and took an interest in wearing jewelry and polishing her nails.    She sewed clothing for the six dolls she had purchased with her earnings from the hospital laundry, caring for them like the children she never had.    Denson and Kauffman worked with Texas Civil Rights Project to file suit on behalf of Petty. The money Petty received in her court case was administered through a trust fund by the Texas Mental Health Assn.    She used some of the funds for her health care and to purchase a limestone ranch house on a 6 1/2-acre lot 20 miles outside San Angelo, where the trees outnumbered people and she could simulate her early farm life. She lived there with Denson and Kauffman.    Petty disliked talking about her half century of involuntary confinement, saying only that it was "awful" and that she missed having birthday parties.    She allowed herself one big celebration after receiving money from her personal injury case — a trip to Disneyland.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

18 February 2005 Science Magazine Science, Vol 307, Issue 5712, 1032-1034 ENVIRONMENTAL RESTORATION: A project backed by the World Bank aims to reverse the Aral Sea's rapid decline, but it could also increase traffic to an abandoned bioweapons testing site To Save a Vanishing Sea Christopher Pala* AKESPE, KAZAKHSTAN--Amid a parched landscape, Denis Zhakupov draws his hand across his chest, recalling how shoreside reeds grew "up to here" in his childhood. The air was full of birds, and the sea was full of fish. "We had everything," the 60- year-old medic recalls. But his community, like many other towns near the coast of the Aral Sea, has lost its shoreline and its easy fishing. They are victims of an avoidable environmental catastrophe that has devastated this region and given Akespe a problem all its own. As the sea withdrew several kilometers to the south, it bared a bottom of fine, alluvial sand. The winds picked it up and blanketed the village, piling up dunes higher than houses that now make the place look like a Saharan oasis--without the palms. Some houses have collapsed under the pressure of drifts. "We have to dig ourselves out every day when the wind blows," Zhakupov complains. Desiccation has been eating at the Aral Sea for 30 years, turning a bountiful source of fish into a salty, inhospitable body of water. The sea shrank by 75% and split into two parts joined by an isthmus: the Small Aral in the north, which includes Akespe, and the Big Aral in the south.	Beached. A Soviet decision to divert river water to cotton farming hastened the Aral Sea's retreat. CREDITS: C. PALA A regional governor in the north decided to do something about the crisis a dozen years ago and built a primitive dike to prevent the Small Aral from completely draining away. But the dike quickly breached. Workers rebuilt it again and again--seven times in all--finally giving up in 1999. After years of monitoring the local efforts, the World Bank agreed to finance a properly engineered dike that includes a sluice to release excess water. The bank also committed to major works aimed at doubling the flow of the Syr Darya, the main river that feeds into the Small Aral. The $85 million project, now under way, "is the biggest attempt to repair a damaged lake that we've seen so far," says Philip Micklin, an Aral Sea specialist at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The new dike and sluice are to be completed this summer. Within 3 years, the Small Aral is expected to rise at least 3 meters and cover about 1000 square kilometers of now-dry former seabed, extending its surface by 25%.
The water's rise is also expected to increase rainfall, improve pastureland, and cut down on dust storms. The sea's salinity, now at 15 grams per liter, is predicted to fall to 10 grams, a third of the concentration of the ocean and roughly that of the Aral Sea before desiccation began. Fish and other freshwater aquatic life forms that retreated into the Syr Darya delta when the sea became too salty are expected to return, perhaps including the commercially valuable caviar-yielding ship sturgeon. If it succeeds, the restoration will partly undo the damage wrought by 3 decades of Soviet policy. But the dike may also decrease water flow to the south and expose land in the Big Aral that was partially submerged. This in turn is likely to increase traffic across a land link to Vozrozhdeniye (Renaissance) Island, a remote site where the Soviet military once did field tests of plague and other bacteria whose lethality had been artificially increased. Thus the paradox: Reviving the Small Aral could worsen problems around the Big Aral. Sacrificed to cotton The recent disruption of the Aral Sea began in the 1940s with Josef Stalin's decision that the Soviet Union needed to become self-sufficient in cotton production. This could be done, he declared, by massively increasing the amount of water diverted for irrigation from Central Asia's two big rivers, Uzbekistan's Amu Darya in the south and Kazakhstan's smaller Syr Darya in the north. The sea, which got most of its water from these, would shrink, and a 50,000-ton-a-year fishery would be lost, but the Kremlin calculated there was plenty of seafood coming in from its Pacific and Atlantic fisheries. Today, the skeleton of a huge fish cannery towers over the town of Aralsk, Kazakhstan, once the main port on the northern part of the sea, now 80 kilometers away.	Since the heavy irrigation began in 1961, the Aral Sea has dropped 22 meters and lost 90% of its volume (Science, 2 April 1999, p. 30). Dust storms have picked up millions of tons of salt and scattered it over neighboring areas, spurring desertification. Pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers used with abandon during the Soviet period were also picked up by winds, resulting in steep increases in respiratory diseases and cancers--one consequence the Soviets hadn't expected. As the sea level dropped, the sea's only nature preserve, located on an island called Barsa Kelmes, became accessible by car in 2000. It had been a primary research center for Soviet-era university studies of desert botany and zoology. Hundreds of saiga antelopes once grazed there; poachers have decimated all but a few, and the park administration no longer bothers keeping wardens there. A summer visitor, after driving for hours on the caked mud of the former seabed, found the scientific station deserted and partly in ruins. Because the water table had dropped, even the sturdy saxaul trees that form the region's biggest vegetation were dying. This wasn't the first time irrigation had damaged the Aral Sea region. The Zoroastrian civilization built a vast agricultural network that collapsed in the 3rd century. In the 16th century, the British traveler Anthony Jenkinson noted that abuse of irrigation by Islamic settlers had caused "the great destruction" of the Amu Darya. Both civilizations discovered a simple fact of nature: The region is steeped in plant-stunting calcium sulfate, which is why very little grows, even near rivers. This salt leaches to the surface when land is excessively irrigated and requires increasing amounts of water to wash it away. The modern ecosystem collapse differs from earlier ones in two ways:
It happened faster and was accompanied by chemical contamination from fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. As the crisis deepened, Soviet scientists and policymakers drew up grandiose plans for digging huge canals to divert and bring southward the waters of two of Siberia's northward-flowing great rivers. But when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 with a mandate for change, he tossed out the plan as environmentally dangerous and ordered a reduction in the use of river water for irrigation. Uzbekistan, for whom cotton is the main export, ignored him. The Amu Darya was still pouring some water into the Big Aral when Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991. To rescue the wetlands around its delta, Uzbek authorities, with international support, built a half-dozen more dikes. As a result, the Big Aral dropped another 7 meters and became so salty that today only brine shrimp survive in it. The economic collapse brought one positive change, however: The use of agricultural chemicals plummeted. Residues seem to have settled or dissipated; the remaining fish in the Small Aral have fewer poisons in their fatty tissues than those in Europe, says Sergei Sokolov, a hydrochemist monitoring the project for the World Bank. But the risk isn't gone, Sokolov says. As Kazakhstan's economy improves, the use of fertilizers has been rising. They flow into the river in the fall, after	the harvests of rice and cotton, when farmers rinse the ground to wash out salt. "There needs to be a system under which, for 1 month a year, this water is not sent into the river but into special lakes," Sokolov argues. If not, he warns, "the Small Aral will become polluted." But Masood Ahmad, the World Bank official in charge of the project, disagrees: He says pollutants will be diluted to a safe level by the river's increased flow. New prospects Standing atop the smooth, new, 13-kilometer dike financed by the World Bank, most of which is already completed, Aitbai Kusherbayev, the dam's chief engineer and a former governor of the Aralsk region, says he's confident the barrier will work this time. It stands 6 meters high, 3 meters above the planned new sea level, and slopes gradually for about 120 meters toward the water. The seaside will be covered with gravel to resist the waves and the winter ice that dislodged the previous dike in 1999. The structure will indisputably benefit the Small Aral. But the three-times-larger Big Aral will suffer as water from the Syr Darya is retained in the north for several years to raise the Small Aral by 3 meters. Already, desiccation around the Big Aral has caused Vozrozhdeniye to grow from a 33-kilometer-long island into a 145-kilometer peninsula attached to the coast of Uzbekistan. Until last year, this southern end was too wet even in summer for any vehicle to pass. But access may soon be possible.
Because of its remoteness, Vozrozhdeniye was used as the main Soviet center for testing bioweapons, antidotes, and vaccines in complete secrecy. In the 1970s and 1980s, the only town, Kantubek, had a population of 2000 in the summer when experimenters were busy. Researchers exposed monkeys, horses, and other animals to weaponized anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, Q fever, smallpox, botulinum toxin, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis. In 1992, Uzbekistan acquired the southern part of the deserted island; Kazakhstan, the northern part. But neither country bothered posting guards, so Kazakh scavengers were able to travel there episodically in small boats to take away pipes, wires, and other materials and sell them on the mainland. To a visitor 2 years ago, Kantubek presented a rare glimpse of the world's biggest bioweapons program in ruins. Cages and lab equipment were piled haphazardly, and unused germ suits still could be found in boxes. Most of the equipment in the "hot zone" had been evacuated. Russian and Kazakh scientists agree that one potential hazard remains: Military-grade, antibiotic-resistant plague bacteria--very different from the strain endemic in Central Asia--may have survived among the rodents in the testing range, 16 kilometers from Kantubek, despite attempts to minimize risk. Gennady Lepyoshkin, who spent 18 summers supervising a laboratory testing weaponized bacteria such as plague and brucellosis, recalls: "Before we tested, we would spray a poison over the area to kill all wildlife. Then we would bring in our testing animals and release the aerosol with the germs. But there's a good chance that some rodents had stayed in their burrows when the poison gas was released and came out when the germs were passing around	them." Rodents and camels are natural carriers of plague; they don't die of it but spread it through fleas. Lepyoshkin says Uzbeks will eventually cross the land bridge to Vozrozhdeniye, and the weapons-grade plague, if it has indeed survived, will spread when island and mainland populations of rodents begin to mingle. "An environmental catastrophe is inevitable," he claims. There is a solution, according to Nikolai Aladin, a professor at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Aladin, 51, has been studying the Aral Sea for 27 years, perhaps longer than any other scientist (see sidebar on p. 1033). He proposes building a dike from the northern part of Vozrozhdeniye to the Kazakh mainland that would cause the shallow water on the eastern side to rise and return the foot of the peninsula to marsh, making it impassible for vehicles. "There has been talk about it," says the World Bank's Ahmad, "but so far no work has been done to investigate its feasibility or find financing for it." Micklin, while acknowledging the bioweapons threat, calls the dike project backed by the World Bank "a reasonable approach" for now. He says, "You can't restore the whole sea, given the amount of water you have available now, so restoring the Small Sea and bringing back the fishery is a wise idea, even though it may speed up the decline of the Big Aral." It boils down to a tradeoff between the clear benefits of restoring part of a devastated ecosystem and the uncertain risks of resurrecting an old threat. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Christopher Pala is a writer based in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 14, 2005 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Extreme Cinema Verite GIs shoot Iraq battle footage and edit it into music videos filled with death and destruction. And they display their work as entertainment. By Louise Roug, Times Staff Writer BAQUBAH, Iraq — When Pfc. Chase McCollough went home on leave in November, he brought a movie made by fellow soldiers in Iraq. On his first night back at his parents' house in Texas, he showed the video to his fiancee, family and friends.    This is what they saw: a handful of American soldiers filmed through the green haze of night-vision goggles. Radio communication between two soldiers crackles in the background before it's drowned out by a heavy-metal soundtrack.    "Don't need your forgiveness," the song by the band Dope begins as images unfurl: armed soldiers posing in front of Bradley fighting vehicles, two women covered in black abayas walking along a dusty road, a blue-domed mosque, a poster of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. Then, to the fast, hard beat of the music — "Die, don't need your resistance. Die, don't need your prayers" — charred, decapitated and bloody corpses fill the screen.    "It's like a trophy, something to keep," McCullough, 20, said back at his cramped living quarters at Camp Warhorse near Baqubah. "I was there. I did this."

This image was shot by an American soldier in Iraq. There is an abundance of battle footage, which the soldiers edit into short films. Many are humorous or patriotic, others gory.

Film cameras arrived at the front during World War II, but soldiers didn't really document their own combat experience until the Vietnam War. (The technology didn't lend itself to amateur moviemaking until the arrival of the smaller Super 8 cameras.)    Today, video cameras are lightweight and digital technology has cut out the need for processing. Having captured a firefight on video, a soldier can create a movie and distribute it via e-mail, uncensored by the military. With editing software such as Avid and access to Internet connections on military bases here, U.S. soldiers are creating fast-paced, MTV-style music videos using images from actual firefights and killings.    Troops often carry personal cameras and video equipment in battle. On occasion, official military camera crews, known as "Combat Camera" units, follow the troops on raids and patrol. Although the military uses that footage for training and public affairs, it also finds its way to personal computers and commercial websites.    The result: an abundance of photographs and video footage depicting mutilation, death and destruction that soldiers collect and trade like baseball cards.    "I have a lot of pictures of dead Iraqis — everybody does," said Spc. Jack Benson, 22, also stationed near Baqubah. He has collected five videos by other soldiers and is working on his own.    By adding music, soldiers create their own cinema verite of the conflict. Although many are humorous or patriotic, others are gory, like McCollough's favorite.	"It gets the point across," he said. "This isn't some jolly freakin' peacekeeping mission."    Commanders have discretion to establish regulations concerning photography on base, but common-sense rules apply, an Army spokesman said. Images that threaten operational security — such as pictures of military installations or equipment — are not allowed.    Before being deployed to Iraq, some Marines were told they could not take pictures of detainees, dead or wounded Iraqis or American casualties. But photographs and videos of dead and maimed Iraqis proliferate.    "It doesn't bother you so much taking pictures of the guy who was just shooting at you," McCullough said. He added that he hadn't seen any pictures of dead U.S. soldiers. "It's just a little too morbid, a little too close to home."    On the bases where Benson and McCullough live, the Army regularly searches soldiers' quarters for drugs, alcohol and pornography as part of what it calls health and safety inspections. But searching personal laptops would infringe on soldiers' privacy, said Capt. Douglas Moore, a judge advocate general officer with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team at Warhorse. Besides, if this brand of filmmaking breaks rules, they're of a different kind.    "It's in poor taste," Moore said, "kind of sick."    McCullough was surprised that his favorite video was disturbing to his loved ones back in Texas.    "You find out just how weird it is when you take it home," said McCullough, whose screensaver is far more benign, showing him on his wedding day.
Brandi McCullough, then his fiancee and now his wife, said she had walked in as he was showing the videos to friends who were "whooping and hollering."    The 18-year-old was shocked by images of "body parts missing, bombs going off and people getting shot."    "They're terrifying," she said by phone from Texas. "Chase never talked about anything over there, and I watch the news, but not all the time. I didn't realize there was that much" violence.    She also wondered why anyone would record it.    "I thought it was odd — a home video," she said. "People getting shot and someone sitting there with a camera."    McCullough said his father, a naval reserve captain, had told him, " 'You know, this isn't normal.'    "They were pretty shocked," he said. "They didn't realize this is what we see."    Daniel Nelson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, said he understood the disconnect.    "I'm not surprised about this — it's a new consciousness that we're beginning to see," he said, comparing the videos to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photographs. "What happens in this situation, the culture is endorsing something that would be prohibited in another context stateside."    What seems disrespectful or a trivialization is also a way for soldiers to distance themselves from the trauma, he said, which says: "I don't want to see what I've done or experienced as real."	The creation of videos resembles what Nelson has seen in his work with traumatized children and Vietnam veterans, he said.    "How do we create the story about our lives?" he asked. "Part of the healing process is for them to create a narrative, to organize an emotional story that allows them to get a handle on it."    Thomas Doherty, chairman of the film studies program at Brandeis University and author of "Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II," called the videos an authentic diary of the war.    "There's always the disconnect between the front-line soldier and the sheltered home front," he said. "It's a World War II ethos: You don't bring it home."    After watching the video, Doherty said, "Of course you're struck by the gruesomeness of the carnage, but it's a wide range of images."    He went on to praise "the contra-punctual editing — the beat of the tune and the flash of the images," calling it "a very slick piece of work."    "The MTV generation goes to war," he said. "They should enter it at Sundance."    In another video, made by members of the Florida National Guard, soldiers are shown kicking a wounded prisoner in the face and making the arm of a corpse appear to wave. The DVD, which is called "Ramadi Madness," includes sections with titles such as "Those Crafty Little Bastards" and "Another Day, Another Mission, Another Scumbag," came to light in early March after the American Civil Liberties Union obtained Army documents using the Freedom of Information Act.
James Ross, senior legal advisor for Human Rights Watch, called it "disturbing that soldiers are making videos like that." But he added, "It doesn't mean that it's necessarily a violation of the Geneva Convention."    The Geneva Convention instructs that remains of deceased shall be respected and not "exposed to public curiosity," Ross said. "It's not putting heads on spikes and things like that. To argue you can't photograph [a body] would be a bit of a stretch."    Several websites sell footage from the war.    "Militants fight in the streets of Baghdad, looting, lawlessness," is how clips are advertised on efootage.com. A Las Vegas-based company, Gotfootage.com, offers $50 and $100 clips that include older footage of Saddam Hussein, Jessica Lynch, aerial bombardment and "sooooo many bombs." The site also advertises video showing an Iraqi fuel truck being destroyed by U.S. bombs during the invasion in March 2003.    Another website advertises, "GrouchyMedia.com is the place to find those pump-you-up-to-kill-the-bad-guys videos everyone has been talking about."    Spc. Scott Schroder, a gunner with Task Force 2-63, wouldn't show what he described as the "evil, nasty kill-videos," to his family.    "That's cool with the guys," he said. "I don't think my mom would care to see any of these videos."    Another specialist, who wouldn't give his name, said the bloody videos disgusted him.	"I wouldn't watch them, and the people I work with wouldn't watch them," said the specialist, stationed at a base near Mosul in northern Iraq. "I don't think it's proper."    He compared the violent videos to those made by insurgents showing beheadings.    "You bring yourself down to their level," he said. "Why would you do that?"    A poster for the video game "Grand Theft Auto" is pinned to the door of McCullough's room at Camp Warhorse.    Watching the home videos gives him a different perspective on combat, he said. Details are missed in the heat of battle, and the military "could use it as a tool, kind of like how they do it with high school football."    His roommate, 30-year-old Sgt. Benjamin Bronkema from Lafayette, Ind., said he was surprised no one had tried to sell the movies yet.    "If I had a copy of it, and MTV called, I'd sell it," he said. The videos are no different than what's on screen at the cinema, showing glorified violence, he added.    "It's no more graphic than 'Saving Private Ryan,' " he said. "To us, it's no different than watching a movie."

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 14, 2005 Newsweek Magazine The Military Back To The Front Soldiers who lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing the unthinkable: Going back into battle. Pat Wingert and T. Trent Gegax Army S/Sgt. Daniel Metzdorf figured his career as an infantryman was over when he lost his right leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq in January 2004. But back at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, Metzdorf saw other amputees ambling by on high-tech prosthetic legs and had a crazy idea: he wanted to go back into battle with the 82nd Airborne. It was a long and painful struggle. The 28-year-old had 19 operations and faced hours of grueling rehab, first learning to walk again, and then to run and swim. Confident that he was ready, Metzdorf applied for reinstatement. But instead of a new post, the Army had another offer: a medical discharge. To a fighter like Metzdorf, quitting didn't seem like an option. "I told them, 'I'm not going to get out'," he says. He applied--and was rejected--twice more before he won over one important ally, his unit commander, who weighed in on his behalf. Finally, the Army relented, assigning Metzdorf to a desk job at Fort Bragg, N.C. He's still angling to get back to combat duty in Iraq. "I'm still an asset," Metzdorf says. "I just want to give back as much as I got." In previous wars, many severely wounded soldiers died on the battlefield. Amputees who made it home were automatically retired. Now advances in medicine mean more amputees are surviving, and today's high-tech replacement limbs let them lead active lives-- something soldiers like Metzdorf aim to do in uniform. George W. Bush buoyed their hopes when he visited Walter Reed in late 2003. "Today, if wounded service members want to remain in uniform and can do the job," Bush said, "the military tries to help them stay."	PFC. GEORGE PEREZ: Age: 21. Hometown: Carteret, N.J.: Paratrooper Perez recently completed his first successful jump with his new prosthetic leg. Now training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he's preparing to head to Afghanistan as a member of the 82nd Airborne in May.
A small core of determined vets is taking the president at his word. So far, fewer than a dozen have been declared "fit for duty," and many more are training for their comebacks. Top Pentagon officials were at first reluctant. But after hearing personal pleas from wounded vets--and seeing the soldiers' astonishing recoveries firsthand--they reconsidered. The first Marine amputee found fit for duty has just returned from seven months in Iraq. "We realize that a soldier's strong mental and emotional outlook can more than compensate for a changed body," says Lt. Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the Army's deputy chief of staff for personnel. The same grit that drew many of these vets to the military in the first place helps push them back into combat. Army Pfc. George Perez, 21, who lost a leg to a roadside bomb in Fallujah, wanted to stay in the service as soon as he found out he could walk again. "Ultimately, I want to do what makes me happy. It's also love of country, but I've got goals. I'm hard to keep down," he says. In May, he'll head to Afghanistan. S/Sgt. David Chatham, 34, won a Silver Star for rescuing troops after a rocket- launched grenade attack outside Fallujah in 2003. He applied his own tourniquet to a nearly severed left ankle. As soon as he was conscious, "I knew I wanted to stay in," he says. "I've been in the Army for more than half of my life. It's my family." It's not just the grunts who are eager to fight again. This month Army Capt. David Rozelle, 33, who lost part of his right leg to an antitank mine in 2003, will return as commander of the Third Armored Cavalry's regimental headquarters. Hours after surgery, Rozelle's commander stopped by his bedside to promise him another command once he'd healed. "I thought to myself, You can do this, I can go back and serve my country," says Rozelle, who has written about his experience in a new book, "Back in Action." Some wounded soldiers are willing to do almost anything to get back into uniform. After Senior Airman Anthony Pizzifred, 20, lost his leg just above the ankle in Afghanistan last March, surgeons told him that the best	prosthetic leg--one that would allow him to walk, run and wade in the ocean--was designed for those with more severe amputations. Pizzifred wanted maximum mobility as fast as possible. So he told his doctors to take off as much as they needed. They wheeled him back into the operating room and cut off his leg almost to the knee. Rejoining the service isn't necessarily a moneymaking proposition. Pizzifred says the Air Force would pay for a college education and a guaranteed mortgage if he retired, but he passed up the perks for a chance to serve overseas again. "I would have gotten more if I got out than I would by staying in," he says. For many amputees, returning to combat duty may be an impossible dream. Some have multiple amputations. And those who've lost arms find it very difficult to learn to fire a weapon again. Special Forces Sgt. Andrew McCaffrey, 32, who lost his right arm below the elbow to a grenade in Afghanistan, now hopes to redeploy with the elite Green Berets. He has spent more than a year training and last week was performing field exercises with his unit at Fort Bragg. But base officials said his status was still uncertain. Many amputees can't return to the exact jobs they left. Army S/Sgt. Josh Olson, 25, lost his leg clear up to the hipbone while on foot patrol in Iraq in 2003. Army recruiters asked him to retrain and teach marksmanship instead. Last week Olson was thrilled to learn he'd been declared fit for combat. Even if they persuade the military to let them go back to work, soldiers have to contend with an even tougher force: their families. Metzdorf is still trying to persuade his. "They think I've lost part of my brain, too," he says. Metzdorf told them not to worry. This time, he joked grimly, he'd be coming back in one piece.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

March 7, 2005 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Deadly Swerves and Spins Nightly displays of automotive recklessness called 'sideshows' have turned Oakland's streets into danger zones. Fans liken it to an art form. By Louis Sahagun, Times Staff Writer OAKLAND — At 1:30 on a recent Saturday morning, a caravan of 60 cars and vans barreled through this city's gritty east side, running red lights and stop signs. Some drivers weaved in and out of their lanes, dodging oncoming traffic at the last second.    Moments later, three cars collided, the wreckage spattered with engine fluids, blood and brandy. Though some people stopped to help the injured — or to grab stereo equipment — most raced on.    They had to get to the "sideshow," a dangerous and illegal frenzy of speeding and acrobatic driving perhaps best described as vehicular break dancing.    Virtually every night, from midnight to dawn, hundreds of young people gather at intersections throughout this city to watch cars spin and swerve wildly, the drivers and passengers often dangling halfway out of open doors as the vehicles burn rubber. Some drivers like to spew sparks by wearing their tires down to the steel belts.

VEHICULAR BREAK DANCING: In a “sideshow” exhibition in an East Oakland intersection, passengers stand on the roof and hang out the doors of an accelerating car. (Robert Durell / LAT)

The people of Oakland have survived epidemic drug use, soaring murder rates and police corruption scandals, but now they face an increasingly violent homegrown movement that has police chasing one spontaneous driving exhibition after another at a cost of $500,000 a year.    "Sideshow" means something to the side — on the side of the road and outside the law. Many residents say sideshow is a growing threat to people and property. Participants, however, tout it as an Oakland original: an artistic expression of controlled power — like riding a bull — and East Bay hip-hop culture.    "The sideshow has always been about where you go out and get seen," said Yakpasua Zazaboi, 28, whose company has been making sideshow videos for five years under the brand name Sydewayze.    "When you successfully do doughnuts," he said, referring to 360-degree spins, "especially doughnuts that the crowd likes, it's such a release just to know that, if for no other reason, you are accepted."    Part of the sideshow experience is the caravans that blast through major thoroughfares, picking up participants along the way. That's what led to the early-morning three-car pileup at MacArthur Boulevard and 77th Avenue.    Two Times reporters traveling with undercover police officers in an unmarked vehicle happened upon the crash moments after neighbors summoned an ambulance. Two of the drivers had fled on foot. Police later determined that they were driving stolen vehicles. The third driver, who collects parking meter fees for the city, suffered a deep eyelid cut, bruises and	a mild concussion.    The caravan eventually came to a stop a few blocks away at Foothill Boulevard and High Street, and the strange ritual that is sideshow began. As some cars blocked oncoming traffic, others took turns entering the intersection to perform tricks — some at high speed, others at a crawl.    With sexually explicit rap music thumping from oversized speakers, cars spun and fishtailed with passengers hanging out of open doors and windows, a move called "spread your wings."    Another car moved in tight circles with the driver somehow sticking both feet out an open door. Spectators jumped into the fray, standing on the hoods of slow-moving cars or dancing in the street in the thick blue smoke of burning rubber.    "It's crazy," Taja Hamilton, 28, a sideshow follower of many years, said of the nightly scene. "The cars attract people like magnets. I've seen people almost get hit, then turn to the crowd and yell, 'Wow! Great! Did you catch that?' "    By the time police arrived, the cars roared off for a new place to sideshow, their numbers overwhelming the few patrol cars on duty. The strange delirium at Foothill and High was broken.    Sideshow began a decade ago as impromptu street parties featuring stunt driving. About two years ago, it took an ominous turn, with crashes, beatings, fatal shootings and a rave-like lunacy fueled by the psychedelic stimulant Ecstasy.
"It used to be about candy-apple paint, loud music, guys trying to meet girls, and doughnuts," said Zazaboi, a former driver. "It used to be about doing perfect doughnuts for a big crowd, and feeling special. It was about physics and skill, and knowing your vehicle, and the tread of your tires.    "Now it's a different crowd," he said, shaking his head in dismay. "It's something crazy. It's 'anything goes.' "    Mayor Jerry Brown, who has led the effort to revive this once-struggling city, has called for tougher laws to combat sideshows, which occasionally erupt under his bedroom window.    "They're about spinning cars, girls, booze and drugs — with a lot of yelling and loud music," Brown said. "It has a certain ritual quality and obviously is stimulating and attractive to hundreds, if not thousands, of people.    "They are totally unacceptable," he added, "and an unfortunate drain on Oakland resources."    When police roll up on a sideshow, they are often greeted with bottles and rocks — or worse.    At a sideshow last November, two men were shot to death and three officers were injured. Among them was Officer Brad Young, who was bruised when someone placed a brick on a car's accelerator, tied off the steering wheel and sent the vehicle careening down a hill.    "It hit the side of the patrol car I was in," Young recalled. "Man, that night was like a Baghdad street fight."    In December, four young women in an Escalade were trapped in sideshow traffic congestion, pulled from the car, stripped, assaulted and sent running down the street naked as participants turned over their automobile, authorities said.	On Feb. 6, a young mortgage broker who got caught up in a sideshow was shot and killed after his car accidentally grazed a van.    Sideshows occur mainly at intersections along major thoroughfares. They can last a few minutes or more than an hour. But they also can erupt in mall parking lots, in tunnels, even on Interstate 80.    They tend to feature Corvettes, Camaros, Mustangs, Corollas and Chevelles with oversized 20-inch wheels, state-of-the-art sound systems with 15-inch speakers and special oil pans that prevent overheating by not allowing the lubricant to slosh to one side during high-speed turns.    Maneuvers include sidin' — another term for doughnuts — and dippin', in which a driver hits the brakes and the gas to make a car rock back and forth in time to, say, Tupac Shakur's "Starin' in My Rearview" or Mac Dre's "Thizzelle Dance," a slang reference to Ecstasy. Ghost ridin' means jumping out of a moving vehicle — usually stolen — and letting it smash into another car, home or business.    Then there is gettin' stupid, in which drivers or spectators dance spasmodically, sometimes on the hoods of moving cars.    All of this is chronicled on DVDs and videos with titles such as "Oakland Gone Wild" and "23109" — the vehicle code for reckless driving.    Sideshow was born a decade ago in places such as East Oakland's Eastmont Mall, where columns of smoke from burning rubber could be seen half a mile away.    Though imitations have been reported over the years by police in Sacramento, San Jose, San Bernardino, Riverside and even St. Louis, sideshow never caught on outside the East Bay. Just why is anybody's guess.    In Oakland, police cracked down on the parking lot sideshows a few years ago, inadvertently forcing the activity onto the streets.
Former Oakland Police Chief Richard Word, who now heads the Vacaville Police Department, will never forget the night his commanders pushed hundreds of sideshow participants onto Interstate 80, then blocked all of the freeway's exits for six miles.    "We sent them as far south as Hayward, where they looted a convenience store," Wood recalled. "Hayward folks were pretty upset. They said, 'Don't do that again!' "    The city has tried various ways to control sideshow. In 2002, state lawmakers passed legislation by Sen. Don Perata (D-Oakland) that allows officers to confiscate sideshow vehicles for up to 30 days.    During a dozen operations last summer, "we wrote about 3,000 citations and towed over 1,400 cars," said Oakland Police Traffic Cmdr. David Kozicki. "Labor Day weekend alone, we towed 321 cars. Of those 321 cars, 64% were unlicensed. The average age of their drivers was 25."    In December, the Police Department announced plans to disband its 25-year-old mounted patrol to free up more officers for sideshow suppression.    But the damage inflicted by sideshow continues to mount.    Twice in November, sideshow drivers who were, as they say, swingin' acrobat ripped through Gladys Green's yard.    "The first time, it cost me $1,200 to fix a fence," said Green, 81. "The second time, they tore down a different fence. That one cost me nearly $900."    Ralph Davis' Higher Spirit Fashion store has been hit three times since June — most recently when the three cars collided at MacArthur and 77th. The vehicles had smashed up beneath a banner reading: "MacArthur Merchants Revitalizing the Boulevard."    Several hours later, Davis gazed at broken glass and metal parts that had been swept into neat piles near the entrance to his store. "This stuff is bankrupting me, man…. It just tears me up. I've lost everything," he said.	With residents demanding more protection, Councilwoman Deseley Brooks has proposed creating a city-sponsored sideshow venue.    "The preferable thing is to move sideshow out of neighborhoods and into a place like the airport or Army base," she said. "We're spending an inordinate amount of money on this problem. Law enforcement, by itself, won't get the job done."    "That's nuts," said Councilman Larry Reid, whose district has been hit hard by sideshow activity. "It's not the responsibility of the city to provide a venue for adults to engage in sideshow."    For now, Reid's main concern is putting more officers in the vicinity of Palm Villa, a development of brightly painted affordable homes built on what used to be a stretch of liquor stores and seedy motels.    The homes were designed to attract development in the blighted area. But lately they have been plagued by sideshow and its fans.    "The stench and squeal of burning tires can be so strong that people can't sleep," Reid said. "Buses can't traverse the intersection. Homes have been hit by spinning cars."    Oakland police have cracked down hard on sideshow in the past, most notably in 2002 after 22-year-old U'Kendra Johnson was killed in a sideshow-related accident. But sustaining those crackdowns has taxed department resources. Maintaining them year round, officials say, simply isn't possible.    Brown says that with Oakland's homicide rate at historic lows, the city plans to splurge on "sophisticated new tactics" to combat sideshow. Those may include curfews, permanent confiscation of vehicles and arresting sideshow organizers.    Even some sideshow participants, such as Terone Ward, 26, agree that the activity has spun out of control. Yet he can't imagine Oakland without it.    "They'll never be able to stop sideshow; we've got strength in numbers," Ward said. "It's part of Oakland culture. It's in the people. It's who we are."

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

25 February 2005 Science Magazine RISK AND PUBLIC POLICY: Courting Disaster A review by Kenneth R. Foster Catastrophe Risk and Response by Richard A. Posner Oxford University Press, New York, 2004. 332 pp. $28, £16.99. ISBN 0-19-517813-0. In this fine book, U.S. federal judge and public intellectual Richard A. Posner worries about events of very low probability but very high impact, such as possible human extinction. These are catastrophes of a different order than the usual hurricanes and floods that are subject to a growing academic literature on risk management (1). Complete article

Natural event with an impact. There is little doubt that a collision with an asteroid 10 kilometers in diameter, such as the one that hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago, would lead to the death of much of the world's population. CREDIT: DON DAVIS/NASA

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

March 3, 2005 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE Is Justice Done in 2 Versions? A California murder case in which two juries were told differing accounts of events raises concerns about fairness, ethics and tactics. By Maura Dolan, Times Staff Writer    Los Angeles prosecutor Steven J. Ipsen, arguing his first murder case in 1990, told a jury that Tauno Waidla had used a hatchet to inflict "the death blow" that killed a woman in her North Hollywood living room. Waidla was sentenced to die.    Several months later, the same prosecutor told a different jury that Waidla's accomplice, Peter Sakarias, had "finally ended" the life of the victim, Viivi Piirisild. Sakarias also was sentenced to die for the murder.    The lethal blow could not have been inflicted by both men. Did the prosecutor mislead the jury? If so, should the death sentences be thrown out?    More broadly, how far should prosecutors be allowed to go in presenting conflicting facts to different juries?    Both the U.S. Supreme Court and the California Supreme Court are considering that issue. In both cases, death sentences sit in the balance. The California court could rule in the Piirisild murder cases as early as today.    The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing an Ohio case involving two men who broke into a home, killed a woman and wounded her husband.

Peter Sakarias, left, and Tauno Waidla were found guilty in separate trials of killing Viivi Piirisild in North Hollywood in 1988. The California Supreme Court is reviewing the trials because the same prosecutor presented different versions of the evidence to each jury.

In that case, in which the court is expected to rule later this year, a prosecutor who argued that one of the defendants had fired the fatal shots accepted a guilty plea from him. The man received the death penalty. In a later trial, the prosecutor told a jury that the co-defendant had fired the fatal shots. The co-defendant received a life sentence.    Courts and legal ethicists have split on the question of whether such tactics are proper.    Prosecutors, as representatives of the government, are responsible for more than just advocacy. Legal ethics say they must seek justice and truth, not just victories.    Because of that, some courts and ethicists say prosecutors should not take contradictory positions knowing that one must be false, particularly in a death penalty trial. A prosecutor is more likely to win a death sentence if he or she can show that the defendant was directly responsible for the death.    "The prosecutor cannot argue for an inference he knows is false," said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University School of Law who specializes in legal ethics.    "Defense lawyers can," Gillers said, but "the prosecutor has an obligation to an accurate verdict. The defense lawyer's obligation is to win."    Others say that prosecutors should be free to make the most convincing case possible using the available evidence.    "A prosecutor is entitled to ask different juries to draw different inferences provided both arguments are made in good faith and not based on any false evidence," California Deputy Atty. Gen. Michael C. Keller argued before the California Supreme Court.	No one knows for certain how often prosecutors blame different defendants for the same criminal act.    University of San Francisco law professor Steven Shatz, who has reviewed cases of inconsistent arguments in California, found 14 trials during the last couple of decades in which prosecutors made inconsistent arguments about the roles played by co-defendants.    "I was quite surprised to find out how often it happens," Shatz said.    In some cases he reviewed, prosecutors presented substantially the same evidence at both trials but argued that the juries should draw different inferences. In others, prosecutors provided different evidence.    Such tactics appeared to bother several justices of the California Supreme Court during a hearing in December on the Los Angeles cases.    "In each trial, there is a selective manipulation of the evidence … to create a false impression that the case is a done deal," complained Justice Joyce L. Kennard.    Other justices argued that it was the defense lawyer's job to police the prosecutor's argument.    "What we have here is a horrendous murder — as bad as any I have seen — and two defendants working in concert to accomplish that murder," Justice Marvin R. Baxter said. Defense lawyers could have "put on a case" to expose any inconsistent arguments, he said.    Defense lawyers, however, note that doing what Baxter suggested is not always possible because of the rules that govern trials.    The trials for Piirisild's murder show how a prosecutor can create different impressions using the same evidence.
The 1988 killing of Piirisild, 52, stunned Estonian immigrants in Los Angeles.    Piirisild, an Estonian community activist, and her husband had met Waidla and Sakarias through a group opposed to Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.    At first the couple warmly embraced the young men, who had defected from the Soviet Army and escaped to West Germany.    The Piirisilds invited Waidla to live with them. For a year, he did jobs around the house in return for room and board. Sakarias visited.    Eventually, the Piirisilds began to feel alarmed by Waidla's behavior, court records say. Waidla demanded money for the work he had done and threatened to report the couple for construction done without a permit. The Piirisilds evicted him.    On a July morning when the Piirisilds were not at home, Waidla and Sakarias, then 21, broke into the house. When Piirisild returned, the two men attacked and killed her, stole some jewelry and credit cards, and fled. They were arrested weeks later near the Canadian border.    The evidence, including the defendants' statements to police, indicated that Waidla had attacked first, hitting Piirisild with a hatchet when she entered the door. Sakarias then stabbed her with a knife. The men later dragged Piirisild from the living room to her bedroom. Sakarias told police he then hit her twice with the hatchet.    Dr. James K. Ribe, the deputy medical examiner who examined Piirisild's body, said she died from a combination of her wounds.	But which wound was the fatal blow? The massive sharp-edged hatchet blow and the stab wounds both were potentially fatal, Ribe said.    There also was an abrasion on Piirisild's back consistent with her having been dragged. Ribe believed the abrasion occurred after death.    During the first trial, prosecutor Ipsen argued that Waidla had wielded the hatchet — "the more devastating of the instruments." He suggested that Waidla had delivered all of the sharp-edged hatchet blows, including "that deathblow" that killed Piirisild in her living room, according to court records.    The deathblow was the "critical point" that jurors should consider in deciding whether Waidla should live or die, the prosecutor went on. And he reminded the jurors about the abrasion on the victim's back.    "We know she was dead in the front room of her home in her living room. We know she did not live to see or be dragged back into her bedroom because the coroner testified and told you that the burn mark on her back, as she was dragged … was a postmortem, or an after-death wound," he told Waidla's jury.    Moreover, he argued, Waidla was "the dominant person between himself and Mr. Sakarias" — "the planner."    About eight months later, Sakarias went to trial.    This time, Ipsen presented the evidence very differently: Piirisild was still alive when she was dragged to the bedroom, he told the jury. Sakarias, not Waidla, was responsible for all of the sharp-edged hatchet wounds, which he inflicted in the bedroom, Ipsen said according to court records.
And, according to court records, he told jurors, "absolutely no evidence" showed that Waidla was the dominant personality. "In every respect, Peter Sakarias was a partner of Tauno Waidla," he said.    This time, Ipsen did not mention the abrasion on the victim's back. He said he no longer believed that the abrasion was significant. Sakarias' lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Daniel Blum, did not ask about it.    In an interview, Ipsen said his view of the evidence had changed between the two trials.    "There were multiple fatal blows, any one of which could have killed her," said Ipsen, president of the Los Angeles Deputy District Attorneys Assn., a vice president of the State Bar of California and a board member of Crime Victims United, a victims' rights group.    "They plotted the murder together. They were one," he said.    Ipsen also denied telling both juries that each defendant had inflicted all the hatchet cuts, although the state attorney general's office, in its court filings, has conceded that his arguments to the jury "suggested" that conclusion.    When the cases reached the California Supreme Court in a constitutional challenge to the inmates' death penalties, defense lawyers contended that Ipsen's arguments had violated the defendants' rights. The justices appointed Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Thomas Willhite Jr. as a special referee to determine what had happened at the trials.    Willhite decided that Ipsen had made "an intentional strategic decision … to maximize the portrayal of each defendant's culpability."    At the time of the second trial, Ipsen may not still have believed that Piirisild died in the living room, but he had "strong reason" to believe it and "the great weight of evidence" supported it, the judge found.    The judge presented his findings to the Supreme Court but did not make any recommendation about how the cases should be resolved.    California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer and the Los Angeles district attorney's	office have urged the state high court to uphold the death sentences, arguing that there was plenty of evidence supporting death verdicts even without Ipsen's arguments.    Deputy Dist. Atty. Hyman Sisman, who is representing the district attorney's office as a party in the litigation, said the sentences should stand because Piirisild could have died from wounds inflicted by either man.    Sisman nevertheless said he personally would have argued the cases "a little differently."    Ipsen is a "much more flamboyant kind of guy," Sisman said. "I probably would have said that it doesn't matter whether the cause of death was the ax crushing the skull or the knife piercing the heart."    Lawyers for the two defendants contend that Ipsen's arguments amounted to misconduct.    "The evidence cannot be accurate in both trials because the crime could have only occurred in one way: either the scenario the prosecutor asserted at Waidla's trial or the exact opposite scenario at Sakarias' trial," Waidla's lawyers told the Supreme Court.    Legal ethicists say prosecutors who are uncertain about who did what during a crime should confess the ambiguity to a jury.    "There is no way you can believe two inconsistent things at once," said Fordham University School of Law professor Bruce Green.    Based on Willhite's findings, the California Supreme Court could overturn both death sentences or leave them intact. Or the court could order a retrial on the sentence for Sakarias but permit Waidla's death penalty to stand on the grounds that evidence indicates that Waidla probably inflicted the killing blow.    That third possibility troubles some legal scholars.    "The D.A. knows better than anyone else, and if the D.A. can't pick the truth, how is the appellate court in the position to do it?" asked the University of San Francisco's Shatz.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

February 28, 2005 Newsweek Magazine Party, Play—And Pay Multiple partners. Unprotected sex. And crystal meth. It's a deadly cocktail that has stirred new fears about the spread of HIV By David J. Jefferson It's Saturday evening in Manhattan, and three dozen men are crammed into a one-bedroom suite in an upscale hotel across from Ground Zero. After shelling out $20 apiece to the man who organized tonight's event over the Internet, the guests place their clothes in Hefty bags for safekeeping and get down to business and pleasure. A muscular man in his mid-30s sits naked on the sofa and inhales a "bump" of crystal methamphetamine. Within minutes, he's lying on the floor having unprotected sex with the host of tonight's sex party, whose sunken cheeks, swollen neck glands and distended belly betray the HIV infection he's been battling for years. In the bedroom, a dozen men, several of them sweaty, dehydrated and wired on meth, are having sex on the king- size bed. There's not a condom in sight. "It's completely suicidal, the crystal and the 'barebacking' [unprotected anal sex]," says one of two attendees who described the scene. "But there's something liberating and hot about it, too." This is the ugly underworld of meth-fueled sex: "Party and Play," or PnP for short, as it's euphemistically called in Internet personal ads. News that a gay meth user in New York who had hundreds of unsafe sexual encounters may carry a virulent, drug- resistant strain of HIV has forced health officials and gay community leaders to take a sobering look at the growing role crystal methamphetamine is playing in the spread of AIDS. Doctors are unsure

whether the new strain is an isolated case or the precursor of a deadly new wave of HIV. But it's clear that a dangerous nexus has formed between the nation's two big epidemics: AIDS and methamphetamine abuse. The meth epidemic isn't new, nor is it just a gay problem. After exploding in the Southwest more than a decade ago, the relatively cheap drug has spread north and east; a 2003 federal study estimated that more than 12 million Americans have snorted, smoked or shot up meth at least once. But it is in the gay community that the link between crystal meth and unsafe sex is most

alarming. In a study of 1,600 men who have had sex with men, conducted by the L.A. County public-health agency in 2003-04, 13 percent said they'd used meth in the previous 12 months; those respondents were twice as likely to report having had unprotected sex, and four times as likely to report being HIV-positive. And as many as three quarters of new patients diagnosed with HIV by counselors at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in New York each month say crystal meth played a role in getting them there. Even before crystal became commonplace in gay sex clubs and at the roving bacchanals known as circuit parties, many men had begun to let safer-sex practices slip. The arrival of retroviral cocktails in the late 1990s made HIV a chronic but manageable disease for many, but it also gave uninfected men, especially younger ones, a false sense of security. Throw meth into the mix, and safe sex goes out the window: men high on crystal are four times more likely to engage in unprotected sex as those who aren't, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The powerful stimulant leaves many users feeling euphoric and hypersexual, resulting in binges with multiple partners that can last until the user comes crashing off the drug a few days later. Because crystal causes temporary impotence for many men (some pop Viagra to counter the effect), users are more likely to be the receptive partners in unsafe sex, where the risk of contracting HIV is greatest. Why are so many gay men tempted to play this game of Russian roulette? Hans Kindt did it for the sense of belonging—and for the sex. Arriving in San Francisco in 1994, Kindt, then 34, was just coming to terms with his homosexuality. "I had no role models. I had to find my own way. I really didn't know anything. So I asked a friend of mine, 'How do you meet guys?' He told me the way to get into anybody's pants is to give them a hit of speed." But the pleasure came with a steep price. Within a year, Kindt had lost his job, he was homeless and he was HIV-positive. "Had there been a

candid, clear, honest discussion about the drug and its dangers—not the hysteria we are prone to in this country—then I think I would have listened," says Kindt, now sober and 45. Many agree that frank discussion is the only way to deal with the problem. Recovering meth addict Peter Staley was so disturbed by the lack of dialogue that he spent $6,000 of his own money to plaster ads on phone booths in New York's gay neighborhoods that read BUY CRYSTAL, GET HIV FREE; the New York city council has since ponied up funds to expand the effort. Authorities in San Francisco launched a media campaign against "crystal mess," even plastering the ads on coasters at gay bars. And the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center has formed support groups where men can learn ways to deal with self-esteem and relationship issues without turning to crystal meth. Step into a Crystal Meth Anonymous meeting—they now rival AA in attendance in many gay neighborhoods—and you'll hear the same story over and over. John, a graying fortysomething New Yorker who earns a six-figure salary in finance, started using the drug as a way to meet guys. At first, John would use on the occasional Friday night. Then it became every Friday. Then every Friday and Saturday. Eventually, crystal took up the better part of his week. Decimated by the endless partying, he would crawl into the bathroom at his office and curl up around the toilet, still wearing his business suit, to steal an hour of sleep. "You get tunnel vision," John says. "Your world gets smaller until it's just you, a pipe and the Internet." And, for a growing number of users, HIV. With Karen Breslau, Jonathan Darman, Sarah Childress, Vanessa Juarez And Kathryn Williams

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

February 26, 2005 March-April 2005 American Scientist Magazine A New Force of Nature, an excerpt from Keepers of the Spring: Our Water in an Age of Globalization There are today some 800,000 dams around the world. Some 45,000 of them are more than 50 feet high; more than a hundred tower 500 feet or higher above the rivers they are intended to tame. If all the water in all the reservoirs behind all the dams in the world were collected together, it would measure 8 billion acre-feet. It would cover half of California to a height of 130 feet. If it were all released into the oceans, it would raise the sea level on every beach around the world by some 8 inches. ... Since 1900, the world has on average completed one large dam every day. Their turbines generate a fifth of the world's electricity, and their waters irrigate a sixth of the world's crops. They barricade 61 percent of the world's river flows.

These dams have even changed the shape and rotation of planet Earth. The water in their reservoirs is so heavy that it deforms the Earth's crust and unleashes periodic earthquakes. And by shifting water away from the equator, where ocean water is concentrated, they have altered the speed of the Earth's rotation in much the same way as ice skaters speed up by pulling their arms in close to the body. The "reservoir effect" has so far shortened the length of the day by about a thousandth of a second. The asymmetrical distribution of reservoirs round the Earth has even tilted the Earth's axis. The North and South Poles and every line of latitude and longitude are now 2 feet from where they would otherwise have been. Dams are more than an earth-shaping technology. They have great power as totems of modernism and as symbols of a very mechanistic notion of how mankind can "tame nature." Keepers of the Spring: Reclaiming Our Water in an Age of Globalization; Fred Pearce Island Press, $26

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

February 25, 2005 Los Angeles Times CALIFORNIA Couple Questioned About Ventura County Tiger They had permits for three of the exotic cats but officials saw only two on a recent visit to the new residents. By Amanda Covarrubias and Susannah Rosenblatt, Times Staff Writers State authorities investigating how a 425-pound tiger wound up roaming eastern Ventura County have questioned a Moorpark couple whose menagerie of exotic cats was confiscated from their rental home in the Tierra Rejada Valley earlier this month.    The couple had a state permit for three tigers, though authorities who originally inspected the cages found only two. Officials had been alerted to the presence of exotic cats by neighbors who reported that a bobcat had escaped from the property.    Fish and Game officials said Thursday that after reports of large paw prints in the area surfaced, they returned to interview Abby and Emma Hedengran about the possibility of a missing tiger. Authorities declined to provide details of the questioning, and the couple could not be reached for comment.    When first visiting the couple Feb. 9, the state officials had not yet learned about the prints discovered Feb. 8 at a nursery in the Santa Rosa Valley near Moorpark, according to Steve Martarano, a Fish and Game spokesman.    The tiger that left those tracks was shot dead by trackers Wednesday in a narrow ravine off California 23 in Moorpark.    It is not unusual for big-cat owners to have fewer animals than the number listed on their permits, because some may have died or be on loan for film shoots, Martarano said.	A Siberian tiger eats at a facility in Colton whose ex-proprietor was convicted of animal cruelty. Many who have exotic cat permits provide animals to the film industry. (Irfan Khan / LAT)
The Hedengrans had recently moved two dozen exotic cats from Temecula to the Tierra Rejada Valley rental home without informing Fish and Game as required by state law, Martarano said.    Officials learned about the move earlier this month after neighbors reported the bobcat's escape.    At the time, the couple held a permit to keep 30 animals in Temecula, mostly of the smaller-cat variety, including lynx, a snow leopard and bobcats. The Feb. 9 inspection turned up only 22 exotic cats, including three African lions and the two tigers.    The Hedengrans, who had held the permit since 1998 under the name Wild World/Tiger Creek Foundation, had never had any major violations at the Temecula property, Martarano said.    On the Ventura County land, officials found some animals in makeshift cages on the front and back porches, and smaller cats running loose inside, all in apparent violation of state code. The Ventura County Department of Animal Regulation ordered the couple to remove the cats from the premises within 72 hours.    By Feb. 12, state and local officials had determined that all had been relocated to permitted sanctuaries in Nevada and California, Martarano said. Fish and Game officials learned three days later about the large feline paw prints found in Ventura County, he said.    Although the Hedengrans held an exhibitor's permit, they had the cats just because "the owner said he liked working with endangered species," Martarano said.	Many of the approximately 33 organizations and individuals in the Southern California region that hold permits to keep exotic cats, including lions, tigers and lynx, cater to the movie business. They seldom have trouble keeping their grounds and cages up to code, Martarano said.    "We have to keep our animals healthy and safe, not only for their sake but because we couldn't stay in business," said David McMillan, owner of Worldwide Movie Animals in Saugus, which provides exotic animals to Hollywood.    But Fish and Game has pursued at least 67 cases involving violations of its restricted-species code throughout Southern California since 1998, according to Mike McBride, an assistant chief of enforcement for the agency's southern district, which covers most of the area from Santa Barbara County to Imperial County.    Riverside County tiger sanctuary operator John Weinhart was convicted this week of child endangerment and animal cruelty, two years after authorities seized dozens of cubs and adult tigers from his properties.    When county animal control officials raided Weinhart's Glen Avon compound, they discovered 11 tiger and leopard cubs in an attic, scores of dead tiger cubs in freezers, two alligators in a bathtub and dozens of rotting tiger carcasses littering the property. Weinhart's then-8-year-old son had access to the animals and a refrigerator full of animal tranquilizers.    Weinhart had been charging $7 for tours of his animal center and $20 more for guests to take photos holding tiger cubs.
Animal rehabilitator Chuck Traisi, who has been caring for Weinhart's 50-plus big cats since 2003, said the property smelled of rancid meat and "fecal buildup" when he took over.    "This place is horrible — and there are places worse than this," he said Thursday. "The exotic animal industry in this country is a disgusting disgrace."    Traisi, who left his San Diego wildlife center 21 months ago to care for Weinhart's tigers full time, blamed the problem on animal breeders. "A true sanctuary … wouldn't have to exist if people didn't keep breeding" exotic animals, he said. "Whether it's in somebody's backyard or a Las Vegas stage, it's all the same."    The Humane Society of the United States estimates that as many as 10,000 tigers are living in homes and "pseudo-sanctuaries" nationwide.    Most of Weinhart's tigers have been transferred to sanctuaries in California and Colorado The last seven will be moved Saturday to Ark 2000, a sanctuary near San Andreas, east of Sacramento, run by the Performing Animal Welfare Society.    Permits from both Fish and Game and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are needed to own "restricted species" animals, which include most creatures other than typical household pets, according to McBride.    Applicants for permits are required to prove their knowledge of and experience with a wild animal before qualifying, and the state mandates species-specific requirements for cage size and general care, he said.    But because Fish and Game is overburdened by its conservation responsibilities, violators can easily fall through the cracks, McBride said.	"When you get into things like an exotic tiger in a cage, you're asking the same agency that is out there trying to protect the wetlands [to handle] animal welfare situations," McBride said.    In the aftermath of the tiger slaying in Ventura County, Fish and Game officials have come under intense scrutiny by animal rights advocates and the public over whether the animal could have been sedated and moved to a sanctuary instead of shot.    Assemblywoman Audra Strickland (R-Moorpark) said her office got more than 50 phone calls and e-mails from angry constituents. She scheduled a meeting this afternoon with Fish and Game officials.    "There are a lot of questions that need to be answered by the Department of Fish and Game surrounding why this tiger had to be killed and how much of our public safety was in jeopardy while it was roaming around Moorpark," Strickland said. "We have a duty to the public so they can feel safe in their homes."    Moorpark Councilman Keith Millhouse questioned whether state laws should be changed to restrict the ownership of wildlife and whether owners should be required to place identification tags on their animals.    "The owner needs to be prosecuted. And if they didn't violate the law, there's a serious loophole," said Millhouse, who lives less than a mile from where the tiger was shot.    People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals also weighed in, offering up to $2,500 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the tiger's escape.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

February 24, 2005 Los Angeles Times COLUMN ONE A New Wrinkle in Workforce An increasing number of Americans are staying employed past age 75, earning income that's a perk for some, a necessity for others. By Catherine Saillant, Times Staff Writer Dressed in painter's whites, Nick Williams points out his toughest job, a two-story Colonial with shingles that he painstakingly scraped, sanded and painted by hand.    "I was on a 32-foot ladder most of the time," said Williams, eyes twinkling. "But I was only 82 then."    Now 10 years older, Williams is still climbing ladders and painting homes all over Ventura. He labors six days a week, a pace he intends to keep until "more than my knees give out."    Far from settling into retirement, Williams and a growing number of people 75 and older are continuing to work, some because they have to, and others, such as Williams, because they want to.    There's the 81-year-old Minnesota schoolteacher who retired after 60 years last summer, only to return to the classroom in September as a substitute. In rural Wyoming, a 93-year-old surveyor pounds his own stakes five days a week.    Ella Clarke Nuite of Georgia has got them all beat. Honored last fall as "America's Oldest Worker," Nuite, 101, still pitches in daily at her family's bottled water business, filling orders and doing the books.	HIGH ATTENDENCE: After three months of retirement, Lucille Decker, 81, came back as a full-time substitute teacher. (-'inevitable usefulness to the life-form') PRIMER ON LIFE: Nick Williams of Ventura has no plans to cut back on his six-day workweeks. "I don't tell people my age, because you probably wouldn't hire a 92-year-old house painter," he says.    For this hardy crowd, work keeps their bodies fit and their minds active. It gives their lives vitality and purpose, they say, while bringing in income that is a bonus for some and a necessity for others.    "My children and many of my friends think I'm crazy," said a grinning Williams, white hair escaping his painter's cap in unruly wisps. "They're probably right."    These older workers are an example of what the U.S. workforce will look like in years to come as people live longer, healthier lives.
The number of employed workers 75 and older grew from 669,000 in 1994 to just under 1 million last year, according to Labor Department statistics. Those numbers will increase as the large baby boom generation ages.    "It's really like a big steamroller that's coming," said Martin Rome, spokesman for Experience Works, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates employment opportunities for seniors.    For many of those older seniors, work is not a choice but a necessity.    Whether outliving retirement savings or facing lower-than-expected investment returns, this population is finding that Social Security isn't enough to cover their bills.    Even before the current debate over Social Security's future, many Americans seemed doubtful they could retire without working at least part time.    In a 2003 survey, the AARP, the nation's largest senior citizens organization, found that 68% of those between the ages of 50 and 70 said they expected to work past normal retirement age. Financial need was the No. 1 reason cited.    In California, 523,000 people older than 65 are still working, said Bonnie Parks, of the state's Employment Development Department. Of those, 144,000 are in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Parks said.    Companies are more open to hiring older people because of labor shortages, Parks said. Recent retirees are being coaxed back to work in the fields of nursing, accounting and retail, she said.	But once workers reach about 75, finding work becomes much more difficult. Employers worry that those in their 80s and 90s might not have the strength or mental capacity to get the job done, said Parks, who runs the employment department's Senior Advocate Office.    "They think that once you get gray hair and wrinkles, the brain stops working," she said. "But like everything else, it depends on the individual. A large segment of the population remains creative and mentally acute into a very late age."    Rome's organization points to Nuite as a prime example of how seniors can successfully stay in the workforce.    The great-grandmother easily rattled off dates from her past and explained nuances of the family water business in a recent interview. Hearing loss is her biggest problem, she said, especially when she uses a telephone that doesn't amplify voices.    A trained dietitian, Nuite did other jobs until she inherited Windsor Spring Water Co. in 1961. She kept the business going after her husband died, Nuite said, delivering 16-pound water-cooler bottles until she turned 80.    Two grandsons now help, and Nuite oversees operations from the 100-acre Civil War-era plantation home that her parents bought in 1930. Windsor Spring's water is drawn from a creek a quarter-mile away.    In addition to the water business, Nuite manages nine rental properties that she bought and rehabbed 20 years ago. Keeping them rented and in good repair takes a lot of her time, she said.
"I wouldn't do it for so long if I didn't enjoy it," she said of her daily schedule. "It's just a part of me."    Deciding when it is time to step aside is more difficult when an employer wants to make the decision for the older worker.    Before 1978, mandatory retirement was widespread in the United States. That year, Congress made it illegal to force a worker out before age 70, and in 1986 compulsory retirement was abolished altogether.    Companies today must show that older workers can no longer perform duties before forcing them out, Parks said. To avoid legal challenges, "golden parachutes" and other financial incentives have become the standard way to usher aging workers out, she said.    In an earlier day, Lucille Decker's teaching career might have ended before she was ready to set down her dry-erase marker. But the 81-year-old resident of Princeton, Minn., said she was never pressured to retire.    It was her decision to finally call it quits last June, Decker said, after 60 years of teaching first grade. But the leisurely pace of retirement didn't last long.    "Miss Decker," as she is known to students, was back in the classroom three months later, as a full-time substitute.    "I like being where the action is," Decker said. "And I just love first grade. They are so eager to learn, and that's when they learn to read. It's so fun to see the light go on when they get it."    A legend at South Elementary in Princeton, Decker has taught not only the parents of the current crop of students but their grandparents too, said longtime school secretary Sandy Lacher.	In recent years, some parents have complained that Decker was too old for the job, Lacher said. But Decker proves them wrong with her energy and readiness to incorporate new classroom methods, she said.    With Decker's help, the school last year won a prestigious state award for reading. In addition to her teaching duties, Decker has served as a reading coach for struggling students.    Normally reserved, Decker goes all out for an annual faculty variety show, Lacher said. One year, she played a high-kicking football player, and another year, she was a singing Spice Girl, complete with short skirt and high boots.    "The audience just waited for Lucille to come on and do her thing," Lacher said.    People who continue working into late age today are mainly professionals, those with their own business or on a second or third career, Rome said.    But for those who must work, the added income means the difference between living and just getting by, Rome said.    Williams, who lives in a Ventura trailer park and buys his clothes at thrift stores, could survive on his $975 monthly Social Security check and his few hundred dollars of investment income.    But that would leave nothing for the pleasures of his life — contributing to favored charities, dining out with friends and traveling.    Each summer, he drives his battered VW van across the country to attend the big cultural festival in Chautauqua, N.Y. His family used to have a lakeshore cottage there, and he can't imagine skipping his annual slate of concerts, ballet performances and lectures, Williams said.
He attributes his spryness to working nearly every day. Maintaining his balance on a 6-foot ladder comes from years of experience, he said.    Sometimes he works for free, such as the year he spent painting — "between jobs" — the Unitarian Church in Ventura that he attends. "The prep work is pretty tough. I can only do it for about five hours a day," Williams said of scraping and sanding. "But it keeps me in shape. I don't complain about whether it hurts me or not, because it benefits me."    Twenty years ago, Williams watched his two older sisters waste away from Alzheimer's disease in their 70s. That's when he decided to stay busy for as long as he could.    "I'll work as long as I'm physically able and as long as people hire me," he said. "I don't tell people my age, because you probably wouldn't hire a 92-year-old house painter."    Lloyd Baker, 93, says his daily labors as a surveyor mean that he can "do what I want and eat what I want." He employs five people at his civil engineering/land surveying firm in Thayne, Wyo.    On a recent morning, Baker had to shovel so much snow before hitting ground that he and his crew got in only three stakes before noon.    To make up for lost time, they ate a quick lunch before heading back into the snow.    "We were supposed to put 20 stakes in, but the snow's been so heavy," he said.	Baker says he still needs the income but that keeping his employees on the job is just as important. So he works five days a week.    "This is the best part of life," said the lean man. "I work all week and dance on the weekends."    Baker had a long career as a civil engineer, helping design dams in Wyoming, Arizona and California. He also taught physics for a few years and then went to work for Bechtel Corp. before retiring in 1973.    He moved back to his native Wyoming to start his small firm and has been at it ever since.    Like the others, Baker attributes his longevity to his active lifestyle. But experts in aging say that keeping a work schedule late into life does not necessarily add years.    A long-term study of people who have lived past 100 shows that the most important factors in determining longevity are family genes, staying lean, not smoking and the ability to handle stress.    "Working doesn't necessarily predict longevity as much as longevity allows people to work longer," said JaeMi Pennington, a research assistant at the New England Centenarian Study in Boston.    All of that is academic to Baker, who says that if he weren't working so hard he'd probably spend his days playing golf or finding a quiet fishing hole.    "Maybe when I'm older," he said.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

Feb 19th 2005 The Economist Magazine Obituary Arthur Miller Arthur Miller, playwright, died on February 10th, aged 89 FOR most of his life, Arthur Miller was a carpenter. At 14, with the money made from delivering bagels on his bike round Harlem, he bought enough wood to build a back porch on the family house. In his old age, living on 360 acres in Connecticut, he made tables, chairs, a bed, a cabinet. To make extra-sure the angles were right, he once consulted a mathematician. He loved making plays—which he did better than any other American of the 20th century, with the possible exception only of Tennessee Williams—for much the same reason. They gave him “an architectural pleasure”. He tried novels occasionally and wrote, in “Timebends” in 1987, a chaotic autobiography. But he revelled in the structure of the drama. He thought of Ibsen and Sophocles, his early influences, as master-carpenters, and of his own best plays as careful constructions of “hard actions, facts, the geometry of relationships”. It was no accident that his male characters were often skilful with their hands, even if they were good at little else. Yet Mr Miller's plays were not conceived as simple artefacts. He meant them to move minds. If they could not do so, there was no point in writing them. His intention was to show the audience, in ordinary characters they might see every day, truths about themselves that they half-knew but would not acknowledge. Realising they were not alone in whatever they foolishly feared or unwisely hoped for, they might find the courage to change.

In “Death of a Salesman” (1949), the play that brought him global fame, he displayed in Willy Loman the futility of a salesman's life, the fragility of his dreams, his longing to leave a lasting mark on the world—and also, though Willy could not see it, the persistent strength of his family's love for him. In “A View from the Bridge” (1955) he anatomised, in Eddie Carbone, the unacknowledged terrors of incestuous passion. In several plays, the last written only a year before his death, he tried to unravel his own relationship with Marilyn Monroe, his wife for almost five years. She remained surrounded, however, by “a darkness that perplexed me”. He also plunged into the past in order to illuminate the present. His account of the 17th-century Salem witch trials in “The Crucible” (1953) gave him the metaphor he needed to describe McCarthyism, a plague that touched him

directly when he was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1956 for attending meetings of communist writers. (He refused to name names, was held in contempt of Congress, fined, and had his passport withdrawn.) His play “Broken Glass” (1994), ostensibly about the 1930s, was intended as a commentary on public indifference to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. His audiences did not always notice these parallels, but they were always meant to. Fixing on a star Throughout his work, his message was consistent. Actions had consequences, and the individual was responsible not only for his own acts, but for what he knew others were doing. In “All My Sons” (1947), his clearest statement of this philosophy, a father had secured the future of his family by shipping defective aircraft parts that had caused pilots to die; eventually, his own son reported him. There were moments, Mr Miller wrote, “when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling.” On the other hand, his characters were seldom that strong. Outside forces—destiny, law, political authority, sudden catastrophe—often overwhelmed them. As a child during the Depression, he had seen his father's coat-making business destroyed and his mother, whom he remembered in fox-fur and diamonds, reduced to eking out shovelfuls of coal. His father and his colleagues, he noticed, never blamed anyone but themselves for what had happened. Mr Miller, already imbued with his lifelong socialism, tried to

persuade his shellshocked father to blame the capitalist system too, and accept that profit was wrong. His father, naturally, could not begin to understand him. His career was not all adulation. He had a dry patch in the 1960s, when he felt he did not speak with the accent of the time, and by the 1980s the all-powerful New York critics (whom he loathed) seemed to be tired of him. Constantly, critics objected to his blatant stage moralising: “like neon signs”, one wrote, “in a diner window.” Mr Miller was unapologetic. He had a purpose, he confessed, even beyond teaching. Though he seemed to be didactic, he was in fact asking questions: “How can we be useful?” “Why do we live?” He was, he once admitted, “in love with wonder...the wonder of how things and people got to be what they are.” The aim of each of his plays was to discover which commitment or challenge his main character would accept, and which he would walk away from: “that moment when out of a sky full of stars he fixes on one star.” He remembered his own such moment, when he decided to be a writer. It came when, reading Dostoevsky's “The Brothers Karamazov” as a teenager, he discovered that among the most breathtaking passages were accumulations of hard, simple fact: “the kind of bark on the moonlit trees, the way a window is hinged”. As well as the playwright, it was the carpenter speaking.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

February 18, 2005 Los Angeles Times Toy Concepts Grow Up Fast Electronic makeovers rule the day at the 2005 Toy Fair in New York. 'Kids are getting older younger,' one exec laments. By Melinda Fulmer, By Melinda Fulmer Times Staff Writer NEW YORK — The hottest new products at the American International Toy Fair trade show aren't really toys so much as inexpensive consumer electronics that are kid-friendly and can take a beating.    After years of watching cellphones, MP3 players, video games and digital video cameras steal sales, major toy makers this year are pinching a page from another industry's book.    "I don't even call it the toy business anymore," said Jim Silver, publisher of Toy Wishes magazine. "It's the family entertainment business."    The 2005 Toy Fair, which officially opens on Sunday in New York, is a showcase for what the industry hopes is a turnaround. In 2004, toy sales, which had been soft for years, slid 3% to $20.1 billion, according to market research firm NPD Group, partly because children shunned traditional items in favor of their parents' electronic gear.

American Idol Barbie is unveiled at the toy fair in the Mattel showroom in Manhattan. (Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times)

So Mattel Inc., the world's largest toy maker, plans to sell its first cellphone this June. The $35 My Scene Barbie phone is meant for girls as young as 8. The bright floral device, which requires activation from Verizon Communications Inc., allows girls to download ring tones from the Barbie website.    "Cellphones are by far the No. 1 … electronics [product] requested by girls," said Dan Frechtling, director of marketing for El Segundo-based Mattel. And girls ages 8 to 12 constitute a market that Mattel believes has been underserved by video game companies and consumer electronics giants.    Another new Mattel product is U-Flix, a digital video camera that is set to hit stores in the fall. It allows children to shoot and edit movies on PCs and watch their productions on TV at home. The plastic camera won't compete with top-end grown-up products by Sony Corp. or Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.'s Panasonic, but it's priced for kids at less than $100.    Also coming up is Pixel Chix, a $25 hand-held game intended for girls as young as 5, to compete with Bandai Co.'s popular Tamagotchi digital pet. The Mattel character is a virtual digital friend who lives in a plastic house. When ignored, the digital gal pal fumes and packs her bags on screen. And Mattel's $59.99 Star Station karaoke machine, set for introduction in July, uses a video camera to allow a child to sing songs

On his or her own television, add disco-type effects and then burn the performance to a DVD.    As for No. 2 toy maker Hasbro Inc., it is planning a fall launch for ChatNow, a walkie-talkie that looks like a cellphone and allows kids to call, write text messages and send each other digital pictures from an attached camera within a two-mile radius. A pair of walkie-talkies will retail for $74.99.    "The reality of the toy business is that kids are getting older younger and growing out of [conventional] toys sooner," said Hasbro Senior Vice President Wayne Charness.    The company's toy designers believe that kids don't want to just play a game, they want to interact with characters or become part of the action. So Hasbro has high hopes for its $119 Ion Educational Gaming System, equipped with a small camera that will put kids on a TV screen with cartoon favorites such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Dora the Explorer.    One game asks kids to jump around and use their arms to fling unwanted letters away and carry letters to one side of the screen to spell words; game cartridges cost an extra $17.99.    This toy is part of the growing category of "plug-and-play" games, launched in the last couple of years, that don't require special video game consoles and simply plug into a television's audio-video jack.

Linda Bolton Weiser, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. in New York, said both Mattel and Hasbro had been more skillful than rivals at "trying to make their products more relevant to older kids."    Given that retailers Toys R Us Inc. and KB Toys Inc. are shuttering hundreds of stores, that could help get the toy makers' products into more stores like Best Buy and Circuit City, she said.    Movie tie-ins also play a role in the new products. A $49.99 video game by Hasbro, tied to the May release of "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," allows kids to wave light sabers and fight Darth Vader or other Jedi characters on their TVs.    Jakks Pacific Inc., which pioneered the plug-and-play category with its TV Games Atari game a couple of years ago, now has more than 12 such products, including Spider-Man, Blue's Clues and retro games such as Ms. Pac-Man. Several of Jakks' $20 games were among the top sellers at toy stores this last holiday season.    The Malibu-based firm's stock has fallen sharply recently amid investors' growing concern about a licensing scandal. A former licensing chief at World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. recently pleaded guilty to accepting kickbacks in

exchange for handing out WWE licenses. Jakks makes WWE figures and games.    Jakks is hoping to regain some momentum by launching 20 new game titles this year, including Batman, Mortal Kombat and another based on the popular "Jeopardy" game show. The firm is also launching new cartridges, called Game Keys, that add two extra games to each of its newly released units, priced at just under $10.    To do well in the toy industry, you have to have "innovation or content," said Stephen Berman, Jakks president. "We are constantly rolling out new titles" to keep kids and gaming adults buying.    Even the most old-fashioned of toys, such as stuffed animals, are getting electronic makeovers. Mattel has two new programmable Elmo and Winnie the Pooh plush toys, due out this fall. These $39.99 dolls allow a parent to use computer software and a USB cord to personalize them, so the toy knows the child's name, sings his or her favorite songs and tells the child when it's nap time or bedtime.    "We are seeing a quick turnaround" on these new electronic toys, said NPD analyst David Riley. "It's a shot in the arm for the industry."

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

Feb 12th 2005 The Economist Magazine Drugs in Canada Under the needle VANCOUVER A different kind of addiction LITTLE by little, Canada is groping towards a distinctive approach to drugs, one that focuses on harm reduction rather than the repression favoured by the United States. The federal government is mulling over a bill to decriminalise possession of marijuana. North America's first trial of heroin maintenance—giving addicts free heroin on condition that they accept treatment—got under way on February 10th in Vancouver. Later this spring, it will expand to Toronto and Montreal. An otherwise idyllic city, Vancouver has the worst drug problem in Canada. For years, addiction has been rising, and with it gang killings, violent robberies and break-ins. In 2002, fed-up citizens swept in a reformist city council dedicated to an alternative drug strategy, resting on “four pillars”: harm reduction, treatment, enforcement and prevention. Its first move was to open North America's first safe heroin-injection site, a pilot project which, it is claimed, is curbing disease and deaths among addicts. Now comes the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI), a two-year C$8m ($6.5m) study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, a federal agency. In the three cities, the project will enrol 470 “treatment-resistant” addicts (meaning that they have been addicted for at least five years and have at least twice had treatment without success). Half will receive methadone, an artificial opiate; the others will get daily injections of heroin. After a year, those who have not broken their drug habit will be referred for further treatment. All will get help with health, housing and job training. One aim is to determine whether heroin maintenance is more effective than methadone in helping break addiction. More broadly, NAOMI will test whether heroin maintenance, which is used in Switzerland and the Netherlands, will work in North America. The hope is that if hard-core

Vancouver's potentially productive citizens addicts no longer have to commit crimes to fund their habits they are more likely to become productive citizens and leave drugs behind. In the Swiss and Dutch trials, says Martin Schechter, of the University of British Columbia, the addicts involved “reduced their use of street drugs, their health improved, the level of employment went up and the levels of criminality fell drastically.” Researchers in three American cities were keen to take part in the study but found it too controversial for them to obtain funding. If the scheme turns out to save money as well as lives, Canadians are likely to want it to become permanent. By some counts, the total bill for enforcement of drug laws plus the cost of drug-related property crimes and health care for addicts amounts to at least C$5 billion a year. Researchers reckon that heroin maintenance will be cheaper. NAOMI's promoters expected resistance from police chiefs and the opposition Conservative Party. In fact, reaction has been muted. Both have called for careful evaluation of the research. But while many Canadians agree with trying to reduce the harm associated with drugs, they also want a balanced strategy that includes those other three pillars: treatment, prevention and enforcement.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

Feb 12th 2005 The Economist Magazine Myanmar One last harvest A ban on opium will leave millions of farmers without livelihoods BAO YOU XIANG looks nothing like a drug lord. His neatly combed hair and the well-ironed creases in his trousers do not suggest a man with his own rebel army numbering 20,000, and control over 400,000 opium farmers. For the moment, though, that is still exactly what he is. But it is a part he plans to stop playing in the next few months. The supreme leader of Myanmar's Wa Special Region No. 2 will is allowing his farmers one last harvest—just getting under way—of opium poppies before enforcing an absolute ban on the drug, its cultivation, sale and consumption. After this year, he insists in an interview, “there will be no more poppies in this region. I once said that I would chop off my head if opium is still produced here after the ban. And I will keep my word.” The leafy poppy flower, Papaver somniferum, has grown for generations in this remote corner of the Golden Triangle, fuelling addiction on the other side of the world. For the farmers, opium is often the only way to earn a living. But for Mr Bao, and for Myanmar's beleaguered authorities, it is an embarrassment. Myanmar is the world's second-largest producer of opium, after Afghanistan, and powerful neighbours, like the Chinese, are fed up.

In Kaw Law Su village, every single family grows poppies to survive. With seven daughters, five sons and a handful of chickens to feed, Kya Law says he has no choice. Squatting on the rough deck of his stilted bamboo hut, he explains that poppy is by far the most profitable crop grown in the surrounding hills. In 2003 each household made an average of $250 dollars from opium—a pathetic sum, but still more than two-thirds of their annual income. Kya Law is painfully aware that the next opium harvest will be his last. He also knows he has no choice but to follow Mr Bao's orders. Wa rulers have a fierce reputation and a history of headhunting. In 1995, Mr Bao committed himself to an opium ban during a meeting with the UN and the government in Yangon. If fully enforced, the ban will destroy one of the biggest components of the opium trade in the Golden Triangle, and shrink the world's supply of heroin. Sceptics wonder. The output of opium in the Wa Special Region No. 2 may not have brought great prosperity to the people, but Chairman Bao has made a fortune through the production and trafficking of drugs. His United Wa State Army is built on drug money. His government openly collects a 7% tax on opium from farmers. And his own brother is accused of involvement in the production of methamphetamine pills, which are consumed in epidemic proportions in neighbouring Thailand. Yet Mr Bao swears he is sincere. “Opium is not good for the people,” he says. “For years I have seen how opium is destroying the Wa. It makes my heart bleed. I will ban it to save my people.”

The UN seems to believe Mr Bao. Its Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) monitors opium production in the Wa region, and reports that he has already begun keeping his promise. Last year, the area under poppy cultivation (the best way of measuring output in remote areas, since satellites can be used, along with ground surveys) fell by 18% in Wa Special Region No. 2, where UNODC has provided some help to people trying to live without opium. In Myanmar as a whole, poppy cultivation fell by 18,000 hectares (47,400 acres) last year, or about 29%. For the farmers, though, there will be big problems. In 2003, opium was banned in Kokang Special Region No. 1, just north of the Wa. Deprived of their main income, nearly one-third of the total population—an estimated 60,000 Kokang—left their homes in search of money and food. Health clinics closed down, school enrolment plummeted by 50%, and parents reportedly sent their daughters to brothels in Thailand and their sons to join rebel armies in a bid for survival. “We certainly do not want to repeat this,” says the UNODC representative in Yangon, Jean-Luc Lemahieu. He says the Kokang's hardship is an indication

that the struggle will be three times worse when the Wa and its 400,000 people enforce the opium ban this year. But caring for ex-opium farmers in the pariah state that Myanmar has become is not a popular cause on the international circuit. “There is an impeding humanitarian crisis on hand here because of the cynical attitude of the West,” says Mr Lemahieu, who thinks that donors are well aware of the situation but won't put their money into the country because they fear criticism. By refusing to help the opium farmers, the world may loose a historic chance to tackle the drug trade, he says. Myanmar may repeat the history of Afghanistan, where opium production was put to a complete stop by the Taliban only to explode again after the fall of the regime. In Kaw Law Su village the final harvest is moving closer. “I have nothing. I don't know what to do,” says Kya Law in the soft light from the evening sun. Two of his children are playing at his feet and a few of his neighbours are standing around his hut. He looks at them quietly. “We all worry and fear that we will suffer,” he says at last. “But we are villagers. If they say stop, we just have to stop.”

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

February 4, 2005 Los Angeles Times THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ General Draws Fire for Saying 'It's Fun to Shoot' the Enemy By Esther Schrader, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — The Marine general who led 65,000 Camp Pendleton troops to Baghdad in the first furious push of the Iraq war is drawing criticism after saying of battle, "It's fun to shoot some people."    Lt. Gen. James Mattis made the comments Tuesday at a San Diego forum on tactics in fighting the Bush administration's war on terrorism. The general, known by troops as "Mad Dog" Mattis, is commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va.    His comments were criticized by American Muslims, and the Marines' top commander said he had "counseled" Mattis. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking at a televised news conference after the furor erupted, said he had not seen Mattis' remarks and refused to discuss them.    Seated at a long table next to other military commanders, Mattis told about 200 people at the San Diego Convention Center: "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight, you know. It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."    Mattis added: "You go into Afghanistan, you've got guys who slapped women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."	His comments were met with laughter and applause from many in the audience of the forum, held by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Assn. and the U.S. Naval Institute and sponsored by many top U.S. defense contractors.    But Thursday, after the comments were reported by San Diego television station KNSD, a prominent Muslim civil liberties group called on the Pentagon to discipline Mattis.    "We do not need generals who treat the grim business of war as a sporting event," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "These disturbing remarks are indicative of an apparent indifference to the value of human life."    Awad urged that "appropriate disciplinary action" be taken against Mattis.    Asked about the remarks at a Pentagon news conference, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he would let Mattis address the issue himself.    "All of us who are leaders have a responsibility in our words and our actions to provide the right example all the time for those who look to us for leadership," Pace said.    In a statement issued earlier Thursday, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, did not indicate that Mattis faced any discipline.    "Lt. Gen. Mattis often speaks with a great deal of candor," Hagee said. "I have counseled him concerning his remarks, and he agrees he should have chosen his words more carefully."
Hagee also said, "While I understand that some people may take issue with the comments made by him, I also know he intended to reflect the unfortunate and harsh realities of war."    Hagee and Pace praised the general's service and leadership. "His actions and those of his troops clearly show that he understands the value of proper leadership and the value of human life," Pace said. Hagee called him "one of this country's bravest and most experienced military leaders."    At a Marine camp in Al Asad, Iraq, a cheer went up when a CNN report about Mattis' comments was shown on a mess-hall television Thursday night. Troops started swapping stories about "Mad Dog."    Mattis, 53, has a reputation among the troops he commands as a jaunty, volatile figure fiercely committed to the Marine Corps and to the people he leads.    As the lead commander of Task Force 58, he pushed hundreds of miles into the Afghan desert to establish bases a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Marines under Mattis aided anti-Taliban forces, secured the strategic Kandahar airport and cut off escape routes for Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.    As commanding general of the 1st Marine Division based at Camp Pendleton, Mattis led that force in their advance on Baghdad in 2003, the longest, fastest move of a division-sized unit in Marine Corps history.    Mattis, who is unmarried, has served nine tours of duty in the Mideast.    Mattis' comments came in the context of how to transform the armed forces to fight terrorism beyond Iraq. He questioned future spending on new forms of air and sea warfare. "Our very dominance of certain forms of warfare have driven the enemy into historic forms of warfare that we have not mastered," he said.	He also said it was "almost embarrassing intellectually" that commanders looked to unspecified future wars and enemies to reshape the military, rather than to the insurgents it faced in Iraq.    "Don't patronize this enemy," he said of guerrillas. "They mean business. They mean every word they say. Don't imagine an enemy somewhere in the future and you're going to transform so you can fight him.    "They're killing us now. Their will is not broken. They mean it. If they have their way, there'll be no science or math in school. There'll be no women in school," he said.    Mattis added that it was important to recruit and select the right people and to give them training and language skills so they understood whom they were fighting.    "As much emotional … satisfaction as you get from really whacking somebody [who abused women], the main effort, ladies and gentlemen, is to diminish the conditions that drive people to sign up for these kinds of insurgencies," Mattis said.    Last year, on his second tour in Iraq, Mattis said he embraced a "hearts and minds" posture, lecturing troops to make friends with Iraqis. He laid down strict rules for when troops could fire and required commanders to seek his permission before using artillery.    Soon after the fall of Baghdad, Mattis called for a criminal investigation into how some Marines were treating prisoners, and that led to several courts-martial.    He also led an overhaul of procedures for handling prisoners to avoid mistreatment.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

Goodbye Gutenberg: How a Bronx Teacher Defied 500 Years of Tradition and Launched an Astonishing Renaissance, written and designed by Valerie Kirschenbaum, is one of the most beautiful and amazing books you will ever see. It provides a history of writing -- how words and images have been presented around the world for millennia -- and proposes a renaissance for the future. After savoring hundreds of the color images in _Goodbye Gutenberg_, you may think, This is gorgeous, but what's the point? Ms. Kirschenbaum answers that question systematically, articulately, and passionately. Quite frankly, she is intent on revolution. In attempt to stem the decline in reading and literacy (recently documented in Reading at Risk, a National Endowment for the Arts survey), she hopes to eliminate the dichotomy that has developed between literature and art, between word and image. She makes a strong case, showing how word and image were married in various civilizations dating back to ancient Egypt. The Chinese, for example, had poetry, painting, and calligraphy done by the same person. The Maya had one word, "ts'ib," that referred to painting, drawing, and writing; word and image were one. During the Middle Ages manuscripts were painstakingly and elaborately illustrated and colored by hand. Of course, Ms. Kirschenbaum doesn't simply tell these fascinating tidbits; she shows	examples of ancient writing and uses various colors and fonts to illuminate her own commentary. Gutenberg's printing press changed everything. While movable type led to increased knowledge because book production became cost- effective, it also led to the decline of beauty in books. Except for children's books, cookbooks, and coffee table books, most books today consist of rectangles of black type on white pages. That form is so prevalent that it thrives unquestioned. Ms. Kirschenbaum points out, however, that technology has advanced to the point that color is accessible to us -- even for the *words* in novels, histories, biographies, and other non-fiction books. While this idea may seem alien to us, Ms. Kirschenbaum reports that Faulkner lamented the fact that _The Sound and the Fury_ could not use various colors of type to help readers wend their way through various streams of consciousness. Another result of Gutenberg's press was the translation of literature into the vernacular: English, French, Spanish, and other "languages of the people" replaced Latin. Today's vernacular, Ms. Kirschenbaum contends, is color. Everything around us is color -- the world itself, television, movies, advertising. What besides reading matter tries to capture our attention in black and white? Not only is black ink on a white page monotonous, Ms. Kirschenbaum cites neuroscientists' findings that color and design activate
areas of the brain that are shut down when a person reads in black and white. Ms. Kirschenbaum has applied her theories with high school students in the Bronx. She found that when she colored and otherwise "designed" their literature assignments, students were more engaged; comprehension improved; discussion increased. _Goodbye Gutenberg_ is extensively researched. Ms. Kirschenbaum confesses that her fourteen-page bibliography, conveniently divided into twenty-three categories, does not include all of her 1,000 sources. In addition to presenting the history of print from around the world, she garners support for her proposed renaissance from many disciplines, including education, psychology, neuroscience, literature and writing, art history, and graphic design. _Goodbye Gutenberg_ is the ultimate example of "designer writing," the ultimate marriage of form and content. The medium is the message. The fact that Ms. Kirschenbaum, a high school English and social studies teacher, designed the whole book (requiring 300 *gigabytes* of storage space) on her home computer (with four gigabytes of RAM) substantiates her	claim that such designer writing is both accessible and affordable to the general public. Ms. Kirschenbaum designed her own font for her writing (Edgar Allan Poe also believed that writers should design their fonts and their layouts). "Booklady" is indeed a very readable font. I am amazed at how effortlessly and enjoyably I assimilated the information Ms. Kirschenbaum presents in _Goodbye Gutenberg_. Probably that is because the book was designed by the writer. The information, the organization, the illustrations, the voice, the font, the color -- all blend seamlessly to communicate her message. And that message is that all writing should be so accessible. Published by the Global Renaissance Society, LLC, 2005, 416 pages. Ms. Kirschenbaum is offering _Goodbye Gutenberg_ to _LinguaPhile_ subscribers at a special price. The first book (regularly $47.50) will be $35.00; subsequent books will be $25.00. To get this special price go to http://www.GoodbyeGutenberg.com or call 1- 800-266-5564. Mention that you are "friends of Val."

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

January 30, 2005 Los Angeles Times Maimed, betrayed, forgotten Book Review by Chris Hedges, author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." This essay will appear as the introduction to "Afterwar," to be published next month to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Afterwar Veterans From a World in Conflict Photographs and interviews by Lori Grinker de.MO: 248 pp., $47.50 My father and three of my uncles fought in World War II. I grew up in the shadow of the war. But it was not the romantic war of movies and books, although this romance infected me, but the war of the emotionally and physically maimed. My father, who had been an Army sergeant in North Africa, went to seminary after the war and became a Presbyterian minister. Years after the war he would speak about his rifle and you could almost see his fingers push the gun away. He loathed the military and the lie of war. When our family visited museums he steered us away from the ordered displays of weapons, the rows of muskets and artillery pieces, which gleamed from within cases or roped-off areas.	He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. During a Fourth of July parade in the small farm town where I grew up, he turned to me as the paunchy veterans walked past and said acidly, "Always remember most of those guys were fixing the trucks in the rear." He hated the VFW Hall where these men went mostly to drink. He found their periodic attempts to re-create the comradeship of war, something that of course could never be re-created, pathetic and sad. When I was about 12 he told me that if the Vietnam War was still being fought and I was drafted, he would go to prison with me. To this day I have a vision of sitting in a jail cell with my dad. But it was my Uncle Maurice whom I thought most about as I leafed through the images in Lori Grinker's book "Afterwar." He was in the regular Army in 1939 in the South Pacific and fought there until he was wounded late in the war by a mortar blast. He did not return home with my father's resilience, although he shared my father's anger and sense of betrayal. His life was destroyed by the war. He refused to accept his medals, including his Purple Heart. Maurice would sit around the stove in my grandmother's home and shake as he struggled to ward off the periodic bouts of malaria. He could not talk about the war. And so he drank. He became an acute embarrassment to our family, who lived in a manse where there was no alcohol. He could not hold down a
job. His marriage fell apart. Another uncle hired him to work in his lumber mill, but Maurice would show up late, often drunk, and then disappear on another binge. He drank himself to death in his trailer, but not before borrowing and selling the hunting rifle my grandfather had promised me. There was only one time he ever spoke to me about the war. It was at my grandmother's kitchen table. He spoke in a flat monotone. His eyes seemed to be looking far away, far across the field outside the house, across the snowy peaks of southern Maine, to a world that he could never hope to explain. "We filled our canteens up in a stream once," he said. "When we went around the bend there were 25 dead Japanese in the water." War is always about betrayal. It is about the betrayal of the young by the old, idealists by cynics and finally soldiers by politicians. Those who pay the price, those who are maimed forever by war, are shunted aside, crumpled up and thrown away. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they bring is too painful for us to hear. We prefer the myth of war, the myth of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism, words that in the terror and brutality of combat are empty and meaningless.	It is a measure of the power of this myth that despite the experience of my father and my uncles in war I was seduced by the siren call of war. I longed for adventure, for a life that would allow me to break free from the confines of a farming community. I read about the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War and World War II. I wanted an epic battle against evil to define my own life. Of course I would not return a shell of a man, like my uncle, for as I look back on it, I blamed him for the wounds he received. Now I know better. I had to learn this myself, as each generation learns it anew. I did go to war, not as a soldier, but as a war correspondent, and 20 years later I too battle the demons that defeated my uncle. Perhaps it is hopeless to expect anyone to listen. The myth has a powerful draw. It allows us to be noble, heroic, to rise above our small stations in life. Most war images meant to denounce war fail. They still impart the thrill of violence and power. War images that show scenes of combat become, despite the intention of those who produce them, war porn. And this is why soldiers who have not been to combat buy cases of beer and sit in front of movies like "Platoon," movies meant to condemn war, and yearn for it. It is almost impossible to produce antiwar films or movies or books that portray images of war. It is like trying to produce movies to denounce pornography and showing erotic love scenes. The prurient fascination with violent death overpowers the message.
The best records of war, of what war is and what war does to us, are those that eschew images of combat. This is the power of this book. Born of Lori Grinker's 15-year odyssey through more than 30 countries — some of them newly formed by violent conflict — it serves no ideology. Her subject is not the flag or the nation or even the victim. Instead, it is the real, unromantic life of the veteran whose body and mind are changed forever when they serve nations and movements that are all too ready to sacrifice them. It forces us to see what the state and the press, the handmaiden of the war makers, work so hard to keep from us. If we really knew war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be harder to wage war. This is why the essence of war, which is death, is so carefully hidden from public view. We are not allowed to see dead bodies, at least of our own soldiers, nor do we see the wounds that forever mark a life, the wounds that leave faces and bodies horribly disfigured by burns or shrapnel. War is made palatable. It is sanitized. We are allowed to taste war's perverse and dark thrill, but spared from ever seeing war's consequences. The wounded and the dead are swiftly carted offstage. War, at least the mythic version, is wonderful entertainment. We saw this with the war in Iraq, where the press gave us a visceral thrill and hid from us the effects of bullets, roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. The war was carefully packaged, the way tobacco or liquor companies package their own poisons. We tasted a bit of war's exhilaration, but were safe, spared from seeing the awful effects of its machines.	Only those works, such as this one, which eschew the fascination with violence to give us a look at what weapons do to human bodies, begin to grapple with war's reality. We can only understand war when we turn our attention away from the weapons my father refused to let us see in museums and look at what those weapons do to those on the receiving end. In the modern world, war is largely impersonal, mocking the image of individual heroics. Industrial warfare, waged since World War I, means that thousands of people, who never see their attackers, can die in an instant. The power of these industrial weapons is staggering. They can take down apartment blocks in seconds, burying everyone inside. They can demolish tanks and planes and ships in fiery blasts. The wounds, for those who survive them, are horrific, usually resulting in terrible burns, blindness and loss of limbs. "There were three of us inside, and the jeep caught fire," the Israeli soldier Yossi Arditi says of a Molotov cocktail that exploded in his vehicle. "The fuel tank was full and it was about to explode, my skin was hanging from my arms and face, but I didn't lose my head. I knew nobody could get inside to help me, that my only way out was through the fire to the doors. I wanted to take my gun, but I couldn't touch it because my hands were burning." He spent six months in the hospital. He had surgery every two or three months, about 20 operations, over the next three years.
"People who see me see what war really does," he says. It is this view of war that most cannot stomach, that makes even those who are close to us flee in horror. Saul Alfaro, who lost his leg in the war in El Salvador, speaks about the first and final visit from his girlfriend as he lay in an army hospital bed. "She had been my girlfriend in the military and we had planned to be married," he says. "But when she saw me in the hospital, I don't know exactly what happened, but later they told me when she saw me she began to cry. Afterwards, she ran away and never came back." Those left behind to carry the wounds of war feel, as my uncle did, a sense of abandonment, made all the more painful by the public manifestations of gratitude to veterans. But these are the veterans deemed palatable, those we can look at, those who are willing to go along with the lie that war is about glory and manhood and patriotism. They are trotted out not so much to be honored but to perpetuate the myth. Gary Zuspann, who lives in a special enclosed environment in his parents' home in Waco, Texas, suffering from Gulf War syndrome, speaks of feeling like "a prisoner of war" even after the war has ended.	"Basically they put me on the curb and said, OK, fend for yourself," he says. "I was living in a fantasy world where I thought our government cared about us and they take care of their own. I believed it was in my contract, that if you're maimed or wounded during your service in war, you should be taken care of. Now I'm angry." My family was not unique. We carried the crucible of war. But there were tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of families like ours, families that cared for the human refuse of war. The wounded after war are cloistered away, kept from public view, swept to the sides. I went back to Sarajevo after the war and found that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of war wounded were trapped in rooms in apartment blocks with no elevators and no wheelchairs. Most were young men being cared for by their parents, the glorious heroes left to rot. When the mask of war falls away, when the intoxication with the cause is spent, we fall into despair. This is why suicide so often plagues war veterans. Indeed, more Vietnam veterans may have committed suicide since the war than were killed during it. The very qualities drilled into soldiers in wartime defeat them in peacetime. This is what Homer taught us in "The Iliad," the great book on war, and "The Odyssey," the great book on the awful journey toward recovery from war.
"They program you to have no emotion, like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut off," Steve Annabell, a British veteran from the Falklands War, says. "When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there's no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don't deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the carpet." "To get you to join up they do all these advertisements, they show people skiing down mountains and doing great things. But they don't show you getting shot at and people with their legs blown off or burning to death. They don't show you what really happens…. And they never prepare you for it. They can give you all the training in the world, but it's never the same as the real thing." Those you have most in common with when the war is over are those you fought.	"Nobody comes back from war the same," says Horacio Javier Benitez, who fought the British in the Falklands. "The person, Horacio, who went to war, doesn't exist anymore. It's hard to be enthusiastic about normal life; too much seems inconsequential. You contend with craziness and depression." "Many who served in the Malvinas," he says, using the Argentine name of the islands, "committed suicide, many of my friends." And this, finally, is the power of the book. It looks beyond the nationalist rants that are used to justify war; it looks beyond the seduction of the weapons and the pornography of violence. It focuses on the evil of war. War always begins by calling for the annihilation of the others but ends ultimately in self-annihilation. It corrupts our soul and deforms our bodies. It destroys homes and villages. It grinds into the dirt all that is tender and beautiful and sacred. It is a scourge. It is a plague. And before you agree to wage war, any war, look closely at this book. •

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

January 25, 2005 Los Angeles Times CALIFORNIA Just Before Trial, 1 of 2 Admits Animal Abuse The guilty plea in the case of a Glen Avon exotic-animal sanctuary is to spare a son pain. By Lance Pugmire, Times Staff Writer The former longtime partner of tiger sanctuary operator John Weinhart pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and child endangerment charges Monday, hours before the pair's criminal trial was scheduled to begin in Riverside County.    Marla Jean Smith, 49, said she pleaded guilty to spare their 10-year-old son, a key prosecution witness, the trauma of testifying against her later this week.    Weinhart, 62, and Smith were each charged with 63 counts of animal cruelty and child endangerment after county officials in April 2003 raided Weinhart's Glen Avon compound and found 58 dead tiger cubs, dozens of adult tigers' carcasses and animals that were malnourished.    "She did the right thing for a mom to do," said her attorney, Regina Filippone.    Smith pleaded guilty to all counts and is scheduled to be sentenced March 10.    The plea was accepted by Riverside County Superior Court Judge Ronald Taylor, who then said Smith could get 120 days in jail and three years' probation.    After the plea, Weinhart's trial began and included testimony from one of the county officials who raided his Glen Avon compound.    "I remember the overwhelming smell of dead animals," animal control officer Tammie Belmonte testified. "There were filthy living conditions…. [Outside], there were hundreds of bones scattered, hides of tigers in various stages of decomposition."    Authorities were stunned to discover the 58 tiger cubs stuffed in freezers, dozens of carcasses of full-grown tigers scattered around the property, malnourished animals including tiger and leopard cubs stuffed in an attic, and sick animals. They also found two alligators in a bathtub.    Prosecutors say Weinhart and Smith endangered their son by exposing him to the wild animals and any diseases that could fester in the rotting animals.    The tiger cubs were kept in freezers that also contained frozen foods, and the boy had access to kitchen refrigerators that stored animal tranquilizers, prosecutors said.

"You can see chocolate [Easter] bunnies right on top of rotting meat," Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephanie Weissman told jurors during her opening statement.    Filippone said Smith and the boy lived in a clean home separate from Weinhart's home on the compound. But Smith, in her plea, acknowledged that it was a mistake to allow her son to stray into Weinhart's home and the decrepit property surrounding it.    Smith and Weinhart's relationship lasted 20 years, and they also have a 20-year-old daughter, Filippone said. The attorney said Smith's relationship with Weinhart had ended, describing the April 2003 raid as "the last straw."    Weinhart's attorney, R. Addison Steele II, said, "I'm disappointed, and John's disappointed, as well, that [Smith] didn't want to fight her case. I know she wanted to do this for the sake of her son, but he'll still be called to testify."    Smith will not testify against Weinhart. If convicted on all counts, Weinhart faces a maximum prison sentence of 16 years.    During opening statements, the prosecutor depicted the "graphic, disturbing, suffering" scene animal investigators discovered, noting that the young boy was found watching television a few feet from a tiger whose outdoor cage was "locked" only by a screwdriver used as a pin.    Steele described his client as a lifelong animal person and longtime rescuer who accepted any animal left at his property. Steele said the ailing donkeys, house cats and goat on Weinhart's property were abandoned by others in the days earlier.    "Word had gotten out: If you have an animal in distress, drop him off at John Weinhart's," Steele told jurors.    "He'd try to nurse it back to health first, and if he couldn't, he'd kill it and feed it to his tigers."    Steele insisted the boy had not been in danger, saying there were barriers preventing his access to the tigers and because "he knew to leave [the tranquilizers] alone."    Regarding the frozen cubs and tiger carcasses, Steele said, freezing the cubs allowed for a later post-mortem examination to establish a cause of death and that the full-grown tigers' bones were to be sold later to animal bone collectors.    "It's not illegal for a person to keep dead animals," Steele told jurors.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

January 24, 2005 Los Angeles Times COMMENTARY Why I'm Willing to Defend Hussein Former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark explains his offer to help the deposed dictator. By Ramsey Clark, Ramsey Clark was attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Late last month, I traveled to Amman, Jordan, and met with the family and lawyers of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. I told them that I would help in his defense in any way I could. The news, when it found its way back to the United States, caused something of a stir. A few news reports were inquisitive — and some were skeptical — but most were simply dismissive or derogatory. "There goes Ramsey Clark again," they seemed to say. "Isn't it a shame? He used to be attorney general of the United States and now look at what he's doing." So let me explain why defending Saddam Hussein is in line with what I've stood for all my life and why I think it's the right thing to do now. That Hussein and other former Iraqi officials must have lawyers of their choice to assist them in defending against the criminal charges brought against them ought to be self-evident among a people committed to truth, justice and the rule of law.

Both international law and the Constitution of the United States guarantee the right to effective legal representation to any person accused of a crime. This is especially important in a highly politicized situation, where truth and justice can become even harder to achieve. That's certainly the situation today in Iraq. The war has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the widespread destruction of civilian properties essential to life. President Bush, who initiated and oversees the war, has manifested his hatred for Hussein, publicly proclaiming that the death penalty would be appropriate. The United States, and the Bush administration in particular, engineered the demonization of Hussein, and it has a clear political interest in his conviction. Obviously, a fair trial of Hussein will be difficult to ensure — and critically important to the future of democracy in Iraq. This trial will write history, affect the course of violence around the world and have an impact on hopes for reconciliation within Iraq. Hussein has been held illegally for more than a year without once meeting a family member, friend or lawyer of his choice. Though the world has seen him time and again on television — disheveled, apparently disoriented with someone prying deep into his mouth and later alone before some unseen judge — he has been cut off from all communications with the outside world and surrounded by the same U.S. military that mistreated prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Preparation of Hussein's defense cannot begin until lawyers chosen by him obtain immediate, full and confidential access to him so they can review with him events of the last year, the circumstances of his seizure and the details of his treatment. They must then have time to thoroughly discuss the nature and composition of the prosecution and the court, the charges that may be brought against him, and his knowledge, thoughts and instructions concerning the facts of the case. And finally, they must have the time for the enormous task of preparing his defense. The legal team, its assistants and investigators must be able to perform their work safely, without interference, and be assured that their client's condition and the conditions of his confinement enable him to fully participate in every aspect of his defense. International law requires that every criminal court be competent, independent and impartial. The Iraqi Special Tribunal lacks all of these essential qualities. It was illegitimate in its conception — the creation of an illegal occupying power that demonized Saddam Hussein and destroyed the government it now intends to condemn by law. The United States has already destroyed any hope of legitimacy, fairness or even decency by its treatment and isolation of the former president and its creation of the Iraqi Special Tribunal to try him. Among the earliest photographs it released is one showing Hussein sitting submissively on the floor of an empty room with Ahmad Chalabi, the principal U.S. surrogate at that moment, looming over him and a picture of Bush looking down from an otherwise bare wall. The intention of the United States to convict the former leader in an unfair

trial was made starkly clear by the appointment of Chalabi's nephew to organize and lead the court. He had just returned to Iraq to open a law office with a former law partner of Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith, who had urged the U.S. overthrow of the Iraqi government and was a principal architect of U.S. postwar planning. The concept, personnel, funding and functions of the court were chosen and are still controlled by the United States, dependent on its will and partial to its wishes. Reform is impossible. Proceedings before the Iraqi Special Tribunal would corrupt justice both in fact and in appearance and create more hatred and rage in Iraq against the American occupation. Only another court — one that is actually competent, independent and impartial — can lawfully sit in judgment. In a trial of Hussein and other former Iraqi officials, affirmative measures must be taken to prevent prejudice from affecting the conduct of the case and the final judgment of the court. This will be a major challenge. But nothing less is acceptable. Finally, any court that considers criminal charges against Saddam Hussein must have the power and the mandate to consider charges against leaders and military personnel of the U.S., Britain and the other nations that participated in the aggression against Iraq, if equal justice under law is to have meaning. No power, or person, can be above the law. For there to be peace, the days of victor's justice must end. The defense of such a case is a challenge of great importance to truth, the rule of law and peace. A lawyer qualified for the task and able to undertake it, if chosen, should accept such service as his highest duty.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

perryb

7 January 2005 Science Magazine Vol 307, HUMAN ECOLOGY: Learning from the Past to Change Our Future A review by Tim Flannery* Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond Viking Press, New York, 2005. 591 pp. $29.95, C$44. ISBN 0-670-03337-5. Jared Diamond's acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel (1) tells the story of humanity's rise from the hunter-gatherer societies of 13,000 years ago to the organized states in which most of us live today. Collapse is a perfect sequel, for it examines the fate that may be in store for our societies in the next few decades. While he planned the book, Diamond at first thought that it would deal only with human impacts on the environment. Instead, what has emerged is arguably the most incisive study of senescing human civilizations ever written. Five factors guide Diamond's analysis: cumulative environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and society's response to all of these. The book entails a broad-ranging and complex analysis that demands mastery of diverse disciplines--from ecology to climatology, sociology, politics, and history. This is the sort of thing at which Diamond excels, yet Collapse would be nowhere near as powerful a work without his acute understanding of the human condition-- particularly the motivations, limits of perception, methods of organization, and mental flexibility that are the common lot of humanity.

Classic collapse. At Maya sites such as Tikal, the population, number of monuments and buildings, and number of Long Count calendar dates plummeted during the 9th century A.D. CREDIT: MACDUFF EVERTON/CORBIS Diamond begins his analysis on familiar territory: the dairy farms of Montana, where he worked as a farmhand while a student. He has known the landscape and the people of this spectacular region for half a century and during that time has seen a dramatic transformation. Foremost among the changes he chronicles is the "conquest" of the Montana pioneers by wealthy out-of-staters, who in the absence of effective planning laws (some Montana counties even lack building codes and zoning laws) have built dude ranches, housing estates, and industrial developments at their whim. The result is that many former ranchers are now landless menial workers who labor in the estates of the wealthy new settlers--an outcome that has engendered considerable soul-searching. As Diamond puts it, "Montanans are beginning to realize that two of their most cherished attitudes are in direct opposition: their pro-individual-rights anti-government-regulation attitude, and their pride in their quality of life." This conflict of values is a key theme to which he returns again and again throughout the book.

The bulk of Collapse is taken up by considerations of societies that have failed (including Easter Island, the Classic Maya, and the Greenland Norse) and of societies such as the Tikopians, Tokugawa-era Japanese, and Icelanders, which have survived against the odds. Diamond places great store on the capacity of environmental conditions to shape society, which some may see as a bias toward environmental determinism. However, his fifth factor--how people react to environmental challenges--puts paid to such ideas. The Greenland Norse provide an example of particular relevance to our contemporary world. Inhabitants of a new and different land, they clung to a Christian, European lifestyle that ultimately doomed them to extinction. "It was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth," Diamond says of the decisions that doomed them. Diamond frames the Rwandan genocide as a contemporary example of a society in collapse. It was not, he argues, simply a racially motivated massacre, for the murders also occurred in areas where just one ethnic group (Hutu or Tutsi) was present. The real tension was over land. With median farm size declining from 0.89 acres in 1988 to 0.72 acres in 1992 and with inequality increasing, large sections of Rwandan society were driven to desperation in a classic Malthusian tragedy. The last chapters of Collapse are devoted to the contemporary developed world. The perilous state of the Australian environment gives Diamond reason to suspect that Australia may be the first developed state to collapse under environmental pressures. This may seem absurd to many affluent Australians, but Diamond demonstrates convincingly that societies typically collapse

when at the height of their dynamism and affluence, because that is precisely when resource demand is greatest. One thing, however, is on Australia's side: its people are forging a new relationship with their land and in the process discarding cultural baggage such as sheep grazing, which came from England and in the past was a source of great wealth. This Diamond sees as a great positive because "the values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs." In the final chapter, Diamond reflects on his own society, the United States. Many of his friends make great sacrifices so that their children can attend the best (and most expensive) schools, yet they barely give a thought to the environment in which their children will mature. The situation has now become so dire, Diamond believes, that huge changes to our societies will probably occur within the next few decades. Yet he is a cautious optimist who sees in growing environmental awareness and new technology reason to hope that we can triumph over adversity. Diamond's book will doubtless spawn many sceptics and naysayers, including the likes of the CEO of one American mining company who believes that "God will soon arrive on Earth, hence if we can just postpone land reclamation for another 5 or 10 years it will then be irrelevant anyway." Yet the fact that one of the world's most original thinkers has chosen to pen this mammoth work when his career is at its apogee is itself a persuasive argument that Collapse must be taken seriously. It is probably the most important book you will ever read.

[-back to options at the top(*1)]

[-back to options at the top(*1)]