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Tsunami Risk at San Juan Airports P3

Puerto Rico Open P59 P60

W Retreat and Spa Cotto Stops Mayorga Vieques Island P8

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Giant Film & Television Studios Toro Negro Forest for Dominican Republic P6 P47

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The San Juan Weekly available on internet at www.sanjuanweeklypr.com

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The San Juan Weeekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

HELLO! Local News Mainland Education Pets Wine Art Viewpoint Enigmatic Portfolio International Modern Love Health

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People Kitchen Fashion & Beauty Travel Local Travel Science & Technology Business Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

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Michelagniolodi Buonarroti

Explosions at Reactors as Technicians Try to Contain Damage International P28

A OnceUpon-a-Time Romance Modern Love P30

How Not to Get Sick From a Flight Health P32

Galliano Exits

Sculptor, Painter, Architect, Poet Art P17

Vesuvius, Volcano Still Erupting

Fashion & Beauty P47

Drug Firms to Lose Billions in 2011 as Patents End Business P57

Enigmatic P21

Hoard of Cash Lets QaddaďŹ Extend Fight Against Rebels

With 11 Teams in Expanded Mets SellIs a Bracket,to Big East Its Own PartRegionofAllTeam

International P25

Sports P58 Sports P61

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

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Tsunami Risk

at San Juan Airports

By Secretary Kenneth Mc Clintock

B

y now, every web-connected citizen of the world has seen the TV or YouTube videos of the tsunami ooding Sendai airport in Japan after the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history. After all, Sendai’s runway is barely 3,800 feet from the beach and only 3 meters above sea level.

Perhaps in Puerto Rico we haven’t realized that Luis Muùoz Marín’s main runway is only 700 feet away from Isla Verde beach, totally unprotected from an Atlantic Ocean tsunami. Worse yet, it is only 2 meters above sea level. The alternate, shorter South runway is 3,700 feet away from the Atlantic Ocean, the same distance that separates Sendai’s runway from the beach where their tsunami hit, but only one meter above sea level.

Thus, the tsunami water that may ood and disable the main runway would probably drain towards the South runway, disabling them both.

Puerto Rico’s alternate 1930’s downtown airport, the Fernando Ribas Dominicci Isla Grande Airport, borders San Juan Bay and is 3 meters above sea level. Its short runway can’t handle big passenger jet planes but, if not disabled due to protection by its location at the tail end of San Juan Bay, could handle C-130 military cargo planes and other STOL, or short-takeoff-and-landing propeller planes, as well as executive jets in its sole 5,200 foot runway.

In case San Juan ‘s main international and in-town airports were di-

sabled, what alternatives would exist for emergency airlifts?

The former Roosevelt Roads Naval Station airport in Ceiba is a few hundred feet from the beach on Puerto Rico’s east coast and a couple of meters in altitude. The Mercedita Airport in Ponce is over two miles inland from the Caribbean Sea and over 20 feet above sea level and probably safe if a tsunami hit Puerto Rico’s south coast. Puerto Rico’s best bet would be the former Ramey Strategic Air Command base in Aguadilla. Now known as Rafael Hernåndez International

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airport.

As Puerto Rico plans for future natural disasters, the risk of tsunamis disabling its main airports, the product of bad planning in the past, is a major factor that must be addressed.

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March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

1918 Puerto Rico Tsunami

T

he island of Puerto Rico is located along the northern boundary of the Caribbean plate, the expression of which is manifested as the Puerto Rico Trench, located immediately north of the island.

At the Puerto Rico Trench (the deepest location in the Atlantic Ocean), the North American Plate is being obliquely subducted beneath the Caribbean Plate to the south. This oblique subduction is accommodated by a series of active fault zones, which lie very close to Puerto Rico’s northern coast. The presence of these large, active fault zones located just off shore of the island, creates a substantial tsunami threat for the Puerto Rican coast.

On October 11, 1918, the island of Puerto Rico was struck by a magnitude 7.5 earthquake, centered approximately 15 kilometers off island’s northwestern coast, in the Mona Passage. In addition to causing widespread destruction across Puerto Rico, the quake generated a medium sized tsunami that produced runup as high as six meters along the western coast of the island (see figure below).

The tsunami caused an estimated 4 million dollars in property and other damages to the coastal communities of Puerto Rico. Of the 116 people killed

by the earthquake, 40 of those were victims of the tsunami.

At all locations, eyewitnesses to the tsunami indicate that event was marked first by a large withdrawal of water from the shore (the tsunami trough), followed by a large wave (the tsunami crest). The eyewitnesses indicate that this pattern was then repeated one or two more times, but at a smaller scale.

A description of the tsunami’s effects at several locations along Puerto Rico’s coast is included in the following section. Tsunami runup values at these locations are shown on the figure below.

Effects at Locations Along Puerto Rico’s Coast The highest runup values of 6 meters, 4.5 meters, and 5.2 meters occurred at Point Agujereada, Point Borinquen, and Point Jiguero, respectively.

This makes sense, as these locations are closest to the earthquakes epicenter, and probable tsunami source.

Point Borinquen is a topographically low-lying area, and as a result the tsunami inundation reached as far as 100 meters inland. At Point Aguereada, the tsunami destroyed many houses, and killed eight people.

The area surrounding Aguadilla, also located in the northwestern corner of the island, was hit hardest by the tsunami. Though the runup values here of 2.4 to 3.4 meters, were not as great as those elsewhere, the 4 meter waves wiped out a village of huts located along the beach, killing 32 people. The tsunami was also powerful enough to carry several 1000 kilogram limestone blocks up to 75 meters inland from their original location.

At the city of Mayaguez a tsunami runup of 1.5 meters flooded the lower floors of waterfront buildings, and destroyed several native huts located near the shore (see the photographs below). On Mona Island the tsunami generated a four meter runup, destroying a pier. The town of Isabella, located on the northern shore of Puerto Rico just beyond Point Borinquen, reported a 2 meter runup.

Additional runup data from locations along Puerto Rico’s northern and southern shores, indicate that the tsunami’s energy decreased rapidly with distance form the source area. Boqueron, located near the southwestern corner of Puerto Rico, received only one meter waves. Guanica, located on the southern shore, and Isla Caja de Muertos, located just south of the southern coast, received only 0.5 and 1.5 meters of runup, respectively. At Arecibo, located on

the northern shore, the runup was only a maximum of 60 centimeters. The tsunami was not even noticed in San Juan Harbor.

Please click on the photos below for an illustration of damage from the 1918 tsunami.

Though the 1918 tsunami was fairly large at some locations, evidence exists supporting the theory that a much larger tsunami may have struck Puerto Rico in geologically recent time. The results of studies involving bathymetric mapping and seismic reflection profiling of the sea bottom off Puerto Rico’s northern shore, have uncovered evidence of an enormous submarine landslide. The the suspect slide extends across roughly 57 square kilometer area, and evidence indicates that a slide of this side would have involved approximately 1000 cubic kilometers of material (Grindlay 1998).

Assuming that the slide occurred as a single event, an underwater slide of this magnitude would have generated a tsunami of frightening proportions.

The effects of such a tsunami on present day Puerto Rico would be disastrous, and considering that the region is still tectonically active, an event like this could likely occur again at some point in the future.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Giant Film & Television Studios for Dominican Republic T

he Dominican Republic Government entered into a long term agreement with the Indomina Group for the operation of new film and television studios to be built. ‘Pinewood Indomina Studios’ is expected to commence initial operations in 2012.

The state of the art film and television production facilities will initially comprise 5,000 sq m of sound stage space along with 15,000 sq m of associated production support facilities. The 35 acre site will include an 8 acre water effects

facility including a 75m x 75m exterior water tank with natural ocean horizons, blue screen capabilities and a fully equipped diving and marine department. When completed it will be the only tank of its type and size in the region.

Pinewood Studios, home of James Bond files, continued its global expansion with this franchise deal.

Pinewood Shepperton, the British studios group where Dancing on Ice and the latest Harry Potter film have been made, hopes this will give it a foothold in the fast-growing Latin American film and TV market.

Pinewood Indomina Studios is expected to

be open for business in two years’ time, with the construction funded by Indomina Group, a film distribution firm owned by Vicini, a conglomerate controlled by a local sugar dynasty.

The Dominican Republic president, Leonel Antonio Fernández Reyna, broke ground on the 20,000 square metre project.

The 35-acre site includes a 75 metre square tank for filming exterior water scenes. It will give the impression of natural ocean horizons and will come with a diving and marine department.

Ivan Dunleavy, chief executive of Pinewood Shepperton said: “This represents further progress in Pinewood’s strategy to leverage the strength of our brand internationally and specifically to the growing Latino film and television market.

“The Pinewood brand stands for excellence in the global film industry and we have strategically targeted regions of the world where significant incremental growth has been forecast.”

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The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

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March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

University of Puerto Rico Student Violence Must End

By Secretary Kenneth Mc Clintock

P

eaceful disagreement and dialogue are as welcome at the University of Puerto Rico as they are at any public institution in the rest of the United States. However, a small minority of student protestors at one of UPR’s 11 campuses continues to conduct themselves with violence, attacking students, teachers and now the University Chancellor.

Through their actions, this small group is creating an environment where members of the university community are afraid to speak out and fulfill their responsibilities as students and professors. They are also jeopardizing the future for all who rely on the public university system.

The violent student attack on UPR Chancellor Dr. Ana Guadalupe on Monday should be a wake-up call to all who care about the future of the university. According to a Caribbean Business news story account, “…

The violent incident unfolded as students protesting new $800 annual fees barged into a meeting Guadalupe was participating in.... As she was being led out by security personnel, Guadalupe, Río Piedras campus security chief Jorge Rodríguez and other guards were attacked.”

“Rodríguez was beaten and suffered a fractured nose. Guadalupe was targeted by bottle-throwing protesters, was doused with liquids, struck and had her hair pu-

lled as she was escorted to a security vehicle to be driven to safety,” the story continued. “Protesters then smashed out the back and passenger-side windows of the vehicle and at least one woman jumped on the hood of the car before a bloodied Guadalupe was driven to safety.”

This behavior isn’t anyone’s idea of peaceful protest, and this is not an isolated incident.

These students have been violent from the beginning and their tactics continue to escalate. You can be sure this type of violence and intimidation would not be tolerated on any other campus in the country, and we cannot allow it to continue here.

These students hold up a new $400 per semester university fee as their reason for resorting to violence.

Let’s look at the facts of the issue. The fee was instituted by the university administration, which is struggling with fiscal challenges that are comparable to many other universities throughout the United States.

It is important to note that even with this fee, the UPR system is the most affordable public institution of higher education anywhere under the American flag, with tuition and fees averaging less than $1,000 per semester.

In order to help students pay the new fee, the Government of Puerto Rico enacted a new law providing a $30 million scholarship fund to help students in need.

In addition, UPR students are eligible to receive federal Pell Grants, with eligible students receiving up

to $5,500 annually, two and a half times average tuition and fees, an expanded Work-Study program, among other forms of financial aid.

Despite the violence of a few, over 90 percent of students have paid their tuition and fees and are attending classes. It’s time for the protestors, many of whom claim to be members of socialist youth organizations, to renounce Cold War-type violent tactics reminiscent of the 1960’s and let the 90 percent-plus majority of students and professors to study and work in peace.

They must let the University of Puerto Rico remain a vibrant public university system that offers the best in academic excellence for generations to come at a lower cost than any other state university in the nation.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

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Mainland 10

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

At House E.P.A. Hearing, Both Sides Claim Science

By JOHN M. BRODER

S

cience and politics rarely play nicely together, and a House hearing on a bill to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions proved no exception.

Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on energy and power demanded the hearing in the hope of slowing the inexorable progress of the bill, known as the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, which enjoys the near-unanimous support of the Republican House majority.

They appear to have failed. Despite some fireworks, the handful of members from both parties who attended the hearing left with the views they arrived with. The subcommittee is expected to approve the bill later this week.

The measure would overturn the E.P.A.’s finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pose a threat to public health and the environment and would bar the agency from writing any regulations to control them. The bill’s sponsors say that the climate science behind the finding is dubious and that the proposed rules would have a devastating impact on the economy.

In an effort to support the E.P.A.’s

regulatory power, committee Democrats rounded up five eminent academic climatologists who defended the scientific consensus that the planet is warming and that human activities like the burning of fossil fuels are largely responsible. The professors called for swift and concerted action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, although they did not endorse any particular policy means for achieving them.

The Republicans countered with two scientific witnesses who said that while there was strong evidence of a rise in global surface temperatures, the reasons were murky and any response could have adverse unintended effects. Another scientist said that the E.P.A.’s decision to ban the pesticide DDT 40 years ago had led to a huge increase in death and disease in the developing world.

Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington, is one of Congress’s most ardent advocates of strong action to combat global warming. Mr. Inslee brought to the hearing a two-foot-high stack of books and scientific reports, which he placed on his desk as a sort of totem of the robust science behind climate-change theory.

He used his question time to criticize Republicans as suffering from what he called an “allergy to science and scientists.”

He said he was embarrassed that a country that sent a man to the moon and mapped the human genome could be on the verge of enacting a law that overturns a scientific finding based on the testimony of a few scientists who question the extent of human responsibility for altering the climate.

“If Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein were testifying,” Mr. Inslee said, “the Republicans would not accept their views until all the Arctic ice has melted and hell has frozen over, whichever comes first.”

He said the skepticism about global warming in Congress and among the public has been fed by a campaign of disinformation from energy interests. He likened it to the tobacco industry’s efforts to discredit the finding that smoking causes cancer. “People with enormous financial stakes attacked that science,” Mr. Inslee said.

Representative Cory Gardner, a freshman Republican and a skeptic of humancaused global warming, ribbed Mr. Inslee by offering to buy him an e-reader to make his stack of studies more manageable.

The scientists themselves, when given the rare opportunity to speak, tried to steer clear of policy matters and stick to their scientific expertise. One witness, Christopher B. Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, piqued the interest of members on both sides of

the aisle by detailing new research on the adverse effects of rising temperatures on agriculture. Dr. Field said crops had certain temperature thresholds above which yields dropped sharply. For corn, he said, that temperature is 84 degrees, and a single day of 104 degrees causes a 7 percent drop in yield.

Dr. Field said that extreme warming could reduce crop yields by more than 60 percent. “This new information is quite striking,” he said. “Major food crops and cotton show little sensitivity to rising temperatures until you reach a threshold. That’s why people are generally not aware of these sensitivities.”

Representative Morgan Griffith a freshman Republican and an avowed skeptic on climate change, noted that ancient temperature records indicate periods of warming during the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations and again during the rise of the Vikings, and wanted the scientists to explain just how warm it got during those eras.

Mr. Griffith wanted to know why the ice caps on Mars were melting and why he had been taught 40 years ago in middle school that Earth was entering a cooling period.

“What is the optimum temperature for man?” he asked.

The scientists promised to provide written answers.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

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Mainland 12

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Economy Ready for Rising Gas Costs

By JAD MOUAWAD and NICK BUNKLEY

T

he increase in energy prices is beginning to resemble the rise in 2008. But this time, the American economy may be better prepared for higher fuel costs.

Gasoline prices have risen by nearly a third in the last year, and oil costs more than $100 a barrel for the first time in more than two years, driven by fears of extended Middle East supply disruptions and increased demand from an improving global economy.

While the latest surge in energy prices is likely to cause some pain and slow the recovery from the recession, economists say

the spike is unlikely to derail the rebound unless prices rise a lot further.

One big reason is that consumers and businesses have learned lessons from the last oil shock. Many drivers, for example, have given up their gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. Automakers, which are selling more fuel-efficient cars than five years ago, reported higher sales in February even as gas prices rose.

Industries like airlines and trucking, which are most severely affected by fuel prices, have passed on their higher costs almost immediately instead of waiting for the price increases to hammer profits.

And much of the rest of the United

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States economy is far less dependent on oil than it used to be. Oil consumption has dropped more than 5 percent since 2005, while natural gas use has risen 10 percent. A glut of domestic natural gas has kept prices low, providing a lift to industries like chemicals and pharmaceuticals and tempering the price of electricity, much of which is generated from natural gas.

Still, higher oil and gas prices matter.

Daniel Yergin, the oil historian, said the recent increase “forces people into really difficult choices.” He said, “It becomes a thermometer, a register of fear and anxiety.”

Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who became known for his pessimistic forecasts before the financial crisis, told reporters in Dubai on Tuesday that an increase in oil prices to $140 a barrel could even cause some advanced economies to dip back into recession.

The rising price of gas — which averaged $3.57 a gallon nationwide on Monday, according to the government — is already prompting some people to change their habits.

Ronnie Undeberg, 50, of Summerfield, Fla., started driving less in December, when gas hit $3 a gallon. “I started planning my errands,” he said. If gas reaches $4, Mr. Undeberg, a discipline clerk at Lake Weir Middle School, said he would scale back his cable television package and cut his cellphone use.

Higher fuel costs reduce consumers’ discretionary income, which is often spent on such niceties as dining out or the latest electronic devices. Low- and middle-income families are typically hurt most by a higher price for energy because they spend a higher portion of their household budget on gas and heating bills.

It is unclear how long energy prices will stay high. Most oil exports from Libya have stopped amid the fighting there. But Kuwait’s oil minister, Sheik Ahmad al-Abdullah al-Sabah, said that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was discussing whether to hold an emergency meeting soon to increase oil production. Saudi Arabia has also said it would pump more oil to make up for the shortfall in Libyan exports. On Tuesday, oil prices fell slightly to settle at $105.02 a barrel in New York.

Some economists say that the increase in oil prices over the last year, well before the wave of protests in the Middle East and mostly caused by higher demand, may already have cost the United States economy hundreds of thousands of jobs.

One rule of thumb is that each $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil knocks 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points off the growth rate of the economy.

“High oil prices always hurt our economy,” said Lawrence J. Goldstein, an economist at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. “Sometimes they get masked from consumers, but you cannot hide their impact on the economy. What it is going to do is leave us with anemic and sporadic growth that to most Americans will still feel

Sunday March 13 price of liter regular gasoline was 76.9 cents at Total Gas Station versus 89.9 cents at Shell Gas Station in Puerta de Tierra Old San Juan and 94.9 cents at Total Gas Station on Route 156 in Caguas. like a recession.”

But so far, consumers and businesses seem to have adapted to the higher prices much more quickly than in 2008, when gasoline reached an average of $4.11 a gallon and oil topped $145 a barrel. In part, that is because the last oil shock helped prompt a new focus on energy efficiency.

Take automobiles, for example. Congress got hundreds of thousands of the worst gas guzzlers off the road with the cash-forclunkers program. And automakers changed their product mix to emphasize more small cars and fewer sport utility vehicles, reflecting consumer demand and tougher fuelefficiency mandates from the government.

As a result, the industry is better prepared for high gas prices. Mike Jackson, the chief executive of AutoNation, the country’s largest chain of dealerships, said half of the vehicles on his lots are now cars, up from 40 percent in 2008, and just 8 percent are sport utility vehicles, down from 15 percent three years ago.

Drivers like Tival Williams, 39, a selfemployed fashion designer from the Ditmas Park area of Brooklyn, also learned from the last price spike. Mr. Williams dumped his large S.U.V. and now drives a thriftier Mazda CX-9 crossover. “Then I was paying $100 a week” for gas, he said. “Now I’m paying $70 a week.”

Industry executives said higher gas prices are more likely to cause a shift toward smaller cars than to reduce sales overall. If the automakers are wrong, the financial pain will be less severe; after going through its bankruptcy, General Motors has been careful about ramping up production and now has just about two months of inventory at dealerships, down from more than four months in 2008.

Other sectors of the economy so far have weathered the storm. Michael P. Niemira, chief economist for the International Council of Shopping Centers, said anecdotal information from shopping malls across the country “is surprisingly strong.”

“It appears that the consumer is still spending,” he said. But if oil prices stay above $100, “it will erode confidence and discretionary purchasing power,” he said.

The trucking industry may also be better prepared for an oil shock than it was in 2008. Not only have more companies adopted fuel surcharges, they have also tried to find ways to make their fleets more efficient.

Some have begun giving drivers bonuses if they reach particular fuel efficiency targets, for example by driving slower.

Still, such measures can do only so much. “At $3 a gallon, you start to get a little bit of heartburn,” said Bob Costello, chief economist for the American Trucking Associations, an industry group. “Anything over $4, and panic sets in, with companies wondering if they can survive.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

13 Mainland

For Lawmaker Examining Terror, a Pro-I.R.A. Past F

which has done the opposite.

The I.R.A. was responsible for 1,826 of 3,528 deaths during the Northern Irish conflict between 1969 and 2001, including those of several hundred civilians, said the historian Malcolm Sutton “King’s exactly right to say there’s a difference of approach between the I.R.A. and Al Qaeda,” said Tom Parker, a counterterrorism specialist at Amnesty International and a former British military intelligence officer.

“But I personally consider both of them terrorist groups.”

Mr. Parker was at a birthday party for a friend in London in 1990 when the I.R.A. tossed a bomb onto the roof of the rented hall, a historic barracks. Many people, including Mr. Parker, were injured, but none died, by lucky chance of location and quick medical response, he said.

What troubles him, Mr. Parker said, is that Mr. King “understands the pull of ancestral ties. He took a great interest in a terrorist struggle overseas. He’s a guy who could bring real insight to this situation.”

Instead, he said, “he is damaging coopera-

tion from the greatest allies the U.S. has in counterterrorism.”

Some who have been close to Mr. King agree. Niall O’Dowd, an Irish-born New York publisher and writer who worked with him on the peace process in the 1990s, broke publicly with him Monday on his Web site, IrishCentral.com, describing Mr. King’s “strange journey from Irish radical to Muslim inquisitor.”

In Northern Ireland, Mr. O’Dowd said, they saw a Catholic community “demonized” by its Protestant and British critics and worked to bring it to the peace table. Seeing his old friend similarly “demonize” Muslims has shocked him, he said.

“I honestly feel Peter is wrong, and his own experience in Northern Ireland teaches him that,” Mr. O’Dowd said. “He’s a very honest, working-class Irish guy from Queens who’s had an amazing career. Now I see a man turning back on himself, and I don’t know why.”

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or Representative Peter T. King, as he seizes the national spotlight this week with a hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims, it is the most awkward of résumé entries. Long before he became an outspoken voice in Congress about the threat from terrorism, he was a fervent supporter of a terrorist group, the Irish Republican Army.

“We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry,” Mr. King told a proI.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, “If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.”

As Mr. King, a Republican, rose as a Long Island politician in the 1980s, benefiting from strong Irish-American support, the I.R.A. was carrying out a bloody campaign of bombing and sniping, targeting the British Army, Protestant paramilitaries and sometimes pubs and other civilian gathering spots. His statements, along with his close ties to key figures in the military and political wings of the I.R.A., drew the attention of British and American authorities.

A judge in Belfast threw him out of an I.R.A. murder trial, calling him an “obvious collaborator,” said Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist and author of “A Secret History of the I.R.A.” In 1984, Mr. King complained that the Secret Service had investigated him as a “security risk,” Mr. Moloney said.

In later years, by all accounts, Mr. King became an important go-between in talks that led to peace in Northern Ireland, drawing on his personal contacts with leaders of I.R.A.’s political wing, Sinn Fein, and winning plaudits from both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, the former president and the British prime minister.

But as Mr. King, 66, prepares to preside Thursday as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee at the first of a series of hearings on Muslim radicalization, his pro-I.R.A. past gives his many critics an obvious opening. The congressman’s assertions that 85 percent of leaders of American mosques hold extremist views and that Muslims do not cooperate with law enforcement have alarmed Muslim groups, some counterterrorism experts and even a few former allies in Irish-American causes.

Mr. King, son of a New York City police officer and grand-nephew of an I.R.A. member, offers no apologies for his past, which he has celebrated in novels that feature a Irish-American congressman with I.R.A. ties who bears a striking resemblance to the author.

Of comparisons between the terro-

rism of the I.R.A. and that of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, Mr. King said: “I understand why people who are misinformed might see a parallel. The fact is, the I.R.A. never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States.”

He said he does not regret his past pro-I.R.A. statements. The Irish group, he said, was “a legitimate force” battling British repression — analogous to the African National Congress in South Africa or the Zionist Irgun paramilitary in British-ruled Palestine. “It was a dirty war on both sides,” he said of I.R.A. resistance to British rule.

As for the hearings, he noted that counterterrorism officials from the Obama administration have often spoken, especially since a string of largely homegrown plots since 2009, of the threat from American Muslims who take on radical views. “Al Qaeda is recruiting from the Muslim community,” he said. “If they were recruiting from the Irish community, I’d say we should look at that.”

Mr. King’s witnesses at the hearing will feature a fellow House Republican, Frank Wolf of Virginia; Representative Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, who is Muslim; Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim physician and activist who has been sharply critical of some fellow Muslims; and two family members of young men who embraced extremist violence. (The committee’s top Democrat, Representative Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, has invited Leroy Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, who has praised Muslim assistance to law enforcement, and Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, who has many Muslim constituents.)

The furor about the hearing is less about the witness lineup, which does not seem especially incendiary, than about statements by Mr. King that appear to spread blame for terrorism to the entire population of American Muslims.

“This hearing is not focusing on the acts of a criminal fringe but is broad-brushing an entire community,” said Alejandro J. Beutel, policy analyst at the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington.

Mr. Beutel, who has compiled a database of terrorist incidents since 2001, said the problem of radicalization of young Muslims is serious, and his group has helped counter it with a number of measures, including a video featuring nine imams speaking against extremism that has become a Web hit. But he said broadly accusing Muslims of complicity in terrorism will hamstring the fight to prevent extremism, which depends on tips from citizens willing and unafraid to contact authorities.

Even Mr. King’s critics acknowledge a fundamental difference between the violence carried out by the I.R.A., which usually sought with varying success to minimize civilian casualties, and that of Al Qaeda,

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EDUCATION 14

The San Juan Weeekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Tight Budgets Mean Squeeze in Classrooms

By SAM DILLON

M

illions of public school students across the nation are seeing their class sizes swell because of budget cuts and teacher layoffs, undermining a decades-long push by parents, administrators and policy makers to shrink class sizes.

Over the past two years, California, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Utah and Wisconsin have loosened legal restrictions on class size. And Idaho and Texas are debating whether to fit more students in classrooms.

Los Angeles has increased the average size of its ninth-grade English and math classes to 34 from 20. Eleventh- and 12th-grade classes in those two subjects have risen, on average, to 43 students.

“Because many states are facing serious budget gaps, we’ll see more increases this fall,” said Marguerite Roza, a University of Washington professor who has studied the recession’s impact on schools.

The increases are reversing a trend toward smaller classes that stretches back decades. Since the 1980s, teachers and many other educators have embraced research finding that smaller classes foster higher achievement.

Rachael Maher, a math teacher in Charlotte, N.C., said she had experienced the difference between smaller and larger classes. She has watched her seventh-grade classes grow since her school system ran into budget trouble three years ago.

Before, her classes averaged 25 students; this year they average 31.

“They say it doesn’t affect whether kids get what they need, but I completely disagree,” Ms. Maher said. “If you’ve gained five kids, that’s five more papers to grade, five more kids who need makeup work if they’re absent, five more parents

to contact, five more e-mails to answer. It gets overwhelming.”

In Detroit, the authorities are so overwhelmed by financial troubles that they are debating a deficit-reduction proposal that would increase high school class sizes to 60 students. Michigan’s state superintendent of public instruction, Michael P. Flanagan, said that the plan was unlikely to be put into effect, but that “class sizes will be higher than you and I would like.”

In New York City, average elementary class sizes have grown to 23.7 students from 21.8 since 2008, according to official data.

In Utah, one of the few states that collect class size data each year, median class size has increased by several students in many grade levels since 2008. It now ranges from 22 students in kindergarten to 31 students in high school chemistry classes.

“All the budget cuts have started our class sizes on that climb upward,” said Judy W. Park, associate superintendent of the State Office of Education in Utah. “During the last two years, our schools have really seen it.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said a number of surveys had shown that parents cared more about small classes than anything except school safety.

But budget cuts are forcing schools to raise class sizes, putting those who advocate shrinking them on the defensive.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a group that presses for smaller classes in New York and nationally, said many states enacted policies limiting student numbers during the late 1980s and 1990s.

“But now, in the majority of states, you’re seeing definite increases in class sizes because of the recession and budget

cuts,” Ms. Haimson said. “Unfortunately we’ve also seen the rise of a narrative that’s become dominant in education reform that insists that class size doesn’t matter.”

Research that convinced many policy makers of the benefits of small classes was conducted in Tennessee.

Helen Bain, who served as the president of the nation’s largest teachers union in the 1970s, became a strong advocate for the idea. When she was a seventh-grade teacher early in her career, Ms. Bain recalled, her students learned quickly in classes of 15 or 20 students, but less effectively as class sizes grew.

“When it got to 35, I told the principal, ‘I can’t teach this many children,’ ” she said.

In the 1980s, Ms. Bain persuaded Tennessee lawmakers to finance a study comparing classes of 13 to 17 students in kindergarten through third grade with classes of 22 to 25 students. The smaller classes significantly outscored the larger classes on achievement tests.

In the decades since, researchers, including the Princeton economist Alan Krueger, have conducted studies that they say confirm and strengthen the validity of the Tennessee findings.

Others, including Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, have argued that the impact of small classes on achievement has been exaggerated and that giving students a skillful teacher is more costeffective.

Those who support that notion include Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who last Sunday told governors gathered in Washington to consider paying bonuses to the best teachers to take on extra students.

Mr. Duncan said he would prefer to put his own school-age children in a classroom with 28 students led by a “fantastic teacher” than in one with 23 and a “mediocre” teacher.

Bill Gates made a similar argument to the governors, portraying the movement to reduce class sizes as one of the most expensive and fruitless efforts in American education.

The federal Department of Education collects nationwide class size data every few years, and the average has declined steadily for half a century. In 1961, the average elementary school class had 29 students, and the average high school class had 28. In 2007-8, the most recent year with data, the elementary school average was 20, and the high school average was 23.4.

Dr. Roza, who is an adviser to Mr.

Gates, said she had measured a recent decline of half a percent in the total number of employees in American public education. “That’s meant some growth,” she said, but average class sizes have not ballooned.

“Maybe the national average went up one kid,” Dr. Roza said. “But I don’t think we’ve jumped to 30 kids per class.”

The nationwide movement to shrink classes dates to the early 1980s, when Texas passed a law limiting class sizes, to 22 students in elementary grades. Tennessee followed with class-size reduction measures for the early grades.

In 1996, California lawmakers approved a measure to reduce class sizes to 20 for kindergarten through third grade. Today, more than 30 states have some form of programs to reduce class sizes.

But many have been challenged since the recession.

In Texas, the state comptroller in December proposed loosening the class size limit, saying it could save $558 million in teacher salaries. That proposal has found backers in a Legislature that is weighing $10 billion in cuts from public education over two years, but teachers and parent groups are outraged.

In California, which has spent about $20 billion on a class-size reduction program, state officials deferred financing for it in 2009 and reduced penalties to districts that allowed average classes to grow above the limits.

In Florida, where voters in 2002 approved a ballot initiative amending the State Constitution to cap elementary classes at 18 students and high schools at 25, the authorities are struggling with those limits.

“If an elementary gets a 19th student during the year, they have to hire a teacher and split the class, and that makes no sense,” said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.

In November, a ballot initiative that asked voters to repeal class-size limits won a majority, but it fell short of the 60 percent required to overturn a constitutional amendment.

As of late last year, Florida school districts had accumulated $41 million in penalties for exceeding the caps. Palm Beach County’s penalty alone totaled $16.6 million.

This year districts have been appealing the penalties, and state officials have reduced many. Florida lawmakers are debating ways of giving school systems more flexibility without violating the law.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

15

Adding to Income by Caring for Pets That Aren’t Yours here when I started,” Ms. Suhosky said, “and within six months I had 20 clients, and 100 by the end of the first year.”

One reason her business grew rapidly, she said, was that she offered overnight stays. She spends the night at the Davis home eight to 12 times a year, for example, to feed, play with and care for the dogs when the couple is away.

While overnight pet care can be lucrative for pet sitters, most prefer to sleep in their own beds. Mary and Bob Butcher, retirees who run a pet-sitting service in Navarre, Fla., near Pensacola, make three or four visits daily to a client’s home rather than spend the night away from home.

By ELIZABETH OLSON

J

OHN D’ARIANO had not planned to be a professional pet sitter when he first started thinking a decade ago about his retirement from the Palm Beach County, Fla., school district’s police department.

What he had in mind was investing in a business that operated storage units. He and his wife wanted to keep busy and also be able to pay their $1,200 monthly bill for health insurance.

“I found out the storage business would require mortgaging our house,” he said. “Then one day when I was at first-aid training, a light went off and I started looking into pet-sitting as a business.”

Because he had spent much of his career handling dogs, heading a canine unit with 30 officers and 15 dogs assigned to keep schools free of drugs and weapons, it seemed like a good fit.

After a year of trying it part time, in 2003 he and his wife joined a growing number of other retirees who turned to pet-sitting for supplemental income or a second career.

“You can start on a shoestring if you want,” said Mr. D’Ariano, whose Boynton Beach-based service, A Pet Sitter Plus, began with referrals from veterinarians he knew from his school security days. Nearly a decade later, his business has 400 clients and a six-figure annual revenue.

Pet-sitting services like the D’Arianos’ have flourished as the number of household pets, and the amount of money that Americans spend on them, continue to grow.

There are pet-sitting franchises, like Fetch! Pet Care, but many pet sit-

ters are individuals or couples operating on their own. The charge for a single visit to a pet ranges from $10 to $22, depending on the location, and $45 or more for overnight care. Pet Sitters International, a trade association, said one-third of its 8,000 members made $40,000 a year or more caring for pets in the pets’ homes.

Nearly two-thirds of American households have a pet, and last year they spent an estimated $47.7 billion on them, an increase from $17 billion in 1994, according to a survey conducted in 2009 and 2010 by the American Pet Products Association, in Greenwich, Conn.

Two-adult households tend to view pets almost as if they were children when it comes to providing care and activities.

Those comforts are priorities for Esther Davis, a clinical psychologist in New Mexico. She and her husband, a medical research statistician, have three Maltese and a Norwegian elk hound. They employ Sherry Suhosky, who started Jack Rapid Runners, a pet care and sitting business, after she retired from a 20-year career in the United States Marine Corps.

Ms. Suhosky stops by the Davis household daily and takes the dogs to day care, to grooming or wherever they need to go, including to her own home. “These are my four-legged children,” said Ms. Davis. “I just don’t like to leave them alone.” With customers like the Davises, Ms. Suhosky has built her business, in the town of Placitas, N.M., near Albuquerque, to 600 clients and 70 full- and part-time employees since starting it in 2006.

“There were no other pet sitters

“We feed the pets, take them for a walk, clean the litter or pick up after the dogs, play with them and give them treats,” said Mr. Butcher, who is retired from the Air Force. “And there’s no charge to take the trash out, pick up the mail and newspapers and turn on the lights at night.”

The Butchers, who own Bob and Mary’s Family Pet Sitting, rely on word-of-mouth referrals, meet every client in person and sign a contract guaranteeing their service. They charge $15 for each visit, and the couple

said the business provided them with supplemental income but not a fulltime wage.

But the business is a chance to work together, said Ms. Butcher, a retired saleswoman, who studied the pet-sitting business before taking the leap. A good resource, she found, was “Pet Sitting For Profit,” by Patti J. Moran, (Howell Book House, 1997) one of several books on starting a pet-sitting business.

The couple joined Pet Sitters International, which has a $160 yearly membership fee and offers pet care certification and liability insurance. The 2,000-member National Association of Professional Pet Sitters has a $95 yearly membership and offers certification and partnerships for discounted insurance policies. Mr. D’Ariano, the police officer turned pet sitter, is this year’s president.

Total pet-sitting start-up costs generally are $500 or less because no major equipment purchases are involved, though many communities require a business license.

A main drawback to pet-sitting, the Butchers said, is not being able to travel on holidays like Christmas because that’s when clients need them.

“We’re there when we say we’ll be there,” she said.

Although they also care for many types of pets, including fish and birds, the couple has had no mishaps. Ms. Suhosky, on the other hand, once had to wrestle an escaped boa constrictor out of a closet.

“You get it to crawl up a broomstick, then grab the tail,” she said, “and then you take it slowly back to its terrarium. I take care of llamas, alpacas and just about any creature.”

Wine

16

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

America’s Love of Sherry Smolders

By ERIC ASIMOV

F

OR years, wine writers and other enthusiasts have lamented the public’s indifference to the manifest charms and complexities of sherry. Why doesn’t everyone love sherry, they asked, celebrating it as the most undervalued, underappreciated wine in the world, as it languished in the back pages of wine lists and on the dustiest of retail shelves.

In the last year or so, the drumbeat seems to have been heard. No, sherry hasn’t taken the world by storm. Nobody’s bidding up the prices, which remain highly reasonable, with world-class wines starting around $15 a bottle. But in small specialty shops, in restaurants where ardent sommeliers hold sway and in bars mixing creative high-end cocktails, fuddy-duddy sherry is taking its turn as a new hip thing.

At Tinto Fino, a Spanish wine shop in the East Village of Manhattan, four shelves are now devoted to sherries, with a selection at any given time of 35 to 50 different bottles.

The shop has started a sherry club, and ships all over the country, said Kerin Auth, a proprietor.

“The cocktail thing has been really, really heavy, and the sherry

sippers have been going through the selection quickly,” Ms. Auth said, “so I’m constantly trying to offer more and different sherries.”

It’s one thing for counterculture wine bars like Terroir in New York and restaurant industry hangouts like Nopa in San Francisco to tout the bracingly dry, fragile, sea-breeze flavors of cool, crisp manzanilla, or the rounder, nutlike complexity of an aged amontillado. But the fever (all right, call it a mild warmth) is spreading around the country Much of the interest comes courtesy of the bartending world.

“The sherry cocktail movement is probably the single most meaningful or driving force in the recent resurgence of sherry,” said Steven Olson, a former sommelier whose company, a k a Wine Geek, has been actively promoting sherry for 12 years.

Sherry cocktails can be delicious, and are historical, dating from the mid-19th century. But for many enthusiasts, the best way to drink sherry is on its own.

In Durham, N.C., Vin Rouge, a bistro, departs from its all-French theme to offer manzanilla on a wine list made for shellfish.

“We don’t sell a ton, but people have been putting themselves in

our hands to try things they never thought about, like aged muscadet,” said Michael Maller, the general manager. “They develop this trust, and the next time they come in you recommend a glass of manzanilla, and they’re receptive.”

At the Summit restaurant at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, Tim Baldwin, the wine director, offers five sherries by the glass, but it hasn’t taken off until recently.

“In the last couple of years, it was definitely a hand sell,” he said.

“But the amount of people now coming in and expressing interest has drastically increased.”

Sherry sales remain minute compared with other types of wine.

In 2010, just over 1.7 million liters of sherry were exported to the United States from Spain, according to the Consejo Regulador, sherry’s regulatory body. That’s barely a drip considering Yellow Tail, the inexpensive Australian wine, ships twice that much every month. And about half the shipments were cream sherry, the sweetened commodity that accounts for sherry’s proverbial image as the choice beverage of eccentric old aunts.

Yet, strikingly, shipments of cream sherry to the United States

dropped by nearly 17 percent in 2010, while shipments of serious sherries shot upward — manzanilla by almost 50 percent, for example, amontillado by nearly 60 percent and oloroso practically tripling.

Sales of these sherries continue to be dominated by big brands like González-Byass Tío Pepe fino and Hidalgo-La Gitana’s La Gitana manzanilla, excellent wines despite the scale of production. More enticing to the sherry geeks are the smaller, more artisanal brands. André Tamers of De Maison Selections, which specializes in small sherry producers, says his sherry sales are up around 60 percent this year.

Unlike most wines, sherry is distinguished not by the vineyard so much as by the cellar or warehouse, where yeasts and vintages are mingled together reflecting each cellar’s aging system. The bigger brands blend the sherries of many warehouses, creating a house style, just like the large Champagne producers. These can be delicious, but the single-warehouse sherries, like Lustau’s almacenista series, or smalllot sherries, like those from Equipo Navazos, which single out particular barrels, can be wildly exciting for sherry devotees.

I count myself among them. I like sherry in a white wine glass, moderately chilled for manzanilla and fino, a little less so for amontillado and just cool for dry oloroso. And almost always, I want to drink it with food, whether manzanilla with olives and almonds, a classic Spanish pairing, or, well, the possibilities seem endless.

At Dovetail on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which serves an extensive selection of sherries, Amanda Reade Sturgeon, the sommelier, likes to pair roasted filet mignon with dry oloroso. To me, this is brilliance. An oloroso like Sangre y Trabajadero from Gutiérrez Colosia is bone dry and astonishingly complex, with flavors of cream, caramel, nuts and salt that perfectly set off the caramelized beef exterior.

Other excellent small production sherries to look for include manzanillas from La Cigarrera, Gaspar Florido and Herederos de Argüeso, finos from El Maestro Sierra and just about anything from Equipo Navazos.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

17

ART

Michelagniolodi Buonarroti Sculptor, Painter, Architect, Poet

M

ichelagniolodi Lodovico di Lionardo di Buonarroti Simone was born in Caprese in Tuscany. The son of a civil servant, he attended Latin School and then studied painting in the workshop of the Ghirlandaio brothers and sculpture with Bertoldo, a formal pupil of Donatello. Michelangelo’s early training derived from the great Florentine masters of the Low Renaissance: Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Signorelli. A true Renaissance man, he was gifted as a painter, a

sculptor, an architect, an engineer, and a poet, but his preference was for sculpture with its plastic possibilities for the revelation and exaltation of the human body. By the

time he was fifteen, Michelangelo had attracted the attention of Lorenzo de’Medici and was invited to join the scholars, writers and artists who frequented the Medici

palace. This early experience and exposure to Neoplatonic thought influenced his ideal and concepts throughout his life. Michelangelo began as a sculptor and made his

first statues between 1496 and 1501 in Rome. His first and possibly his only easel painting was painted in about 1503, a tondo of The Holy Family in a closely knit triangular composition. Michelangelo’s life coincided with a period of enormous papal power, and from 1505, when he signed the contract for the tomb of Pope Julius, he was subject to political pressures, wars, papal orders and counter orders. His greatest painting, the decoration of the Sistine Chapel was painted single-handedly between 1508 and 1512. The awe-inspiring work represents scenes of the Continues on page 18

ART

18

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Comes from page 17 Creation and the Old Testament through the story of Noah, and begins with Adam receiving the spark of divine life from God. The symbolic themes, divided architictonically, present a complicated vision, miraculous in its variety and complete unification. In 1537, Michelangelo began his Last Judgment, the fresco on the far wall of the chapel. Here sculptural and architectural vision is replaced by

swirling; space and more pictorial representation of tortured humans corresponding to the artist’s own unhappiness, frustrations, and increasing religious doubts. In this and in his last paintings (1541-50), for the Paolino Chapel, he was no longer the exponent of classicism

but the forerunner of the Mannerist School. Michelangelo’s genius influenced Raphael, whose work sums up the best of the classical Renaissance, and then Correggio, Tintoretto, and countless other painters who have succeeded him through the centuries.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

19

New York Times Editorials Don’t End Agricultural Subsidies, Fix Them

By MARK BITTMAN

A

gricultural subsidies have helped bring us high-fructose corn syrup, factory farming, fast food, a two-soda-a-day habit and its accompanying obesity, the near-demise of family farms, monoculture and a host of other ills.

Like many government programs — what subsidies need is not the ax, but reform that moves them forward. Imagine support designed to encourage a resurgence of small- and medium-size farms producing not corn syrup and animal-feed but food we can touch, see, buy and eat — like apples and carrots — while diminishing handouts to agribusiness and political cronies.

Farm subsidies were created to ameliorate the effects of the Great Depression, which makes it ironic that in an era when more Americans are suffering financially than at any time since, these subsidies are mostly going to those who need them least.

That wasn’t the plan, of course. In the 1930s, prices were fixed on a variety of commodities, and some farmers were paid to reduce their crop yields. The program was supported by a tax on processors of food — now there’s a precedent! — and was intended to be temporary. It worked, sort of: prices rose and more farmers survived. But land became concentrated in the hands of fewer farmers, and agribusiness was born, and with it the sad joke the government paid farmers for not growing crops.

The farm bill, for renewal in 2012, includes an agricultural subsidy portion worth $30 billion, $5 billion which you might call handouts, payments to farmers.

Subsidy-suckers don’t grow fresh fruits and vegetables that should be dominating our diet. If all Americans eat the five servings a day of fruits and vegetables that are recommended, they would discover American agriculture isn’t set up to meet that need. They grow what they’re paid to grow: corn, soy, wheat, cotton and rice.

The first two of these are pillars for the typical American diet — featuring large consumption of meat, never-before-seen junk food and a bizarre avoidance of plants — as well as the fortunes of Pepsi, Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC and others that have relied on cheap corn and soy to build their empires of unhealthful food. Over the years, prices of fresh produce have risen, while those of meat, poultry, sweets, fats and oils, and especially soda, have fallen. Web site Grist citing a Tufts University study, reckons between 1997 and 2005 subsidies saved chicken, pork, beef and HFCS producers $26.5 billion that saved consumers money too — prices for these foods are low — but at what cost to the environment, our food choices and our health?)

Eliminating $5 billion in agricultural payments would level the playing field for farmers who grow non-subsidized crops, but just a bit. There would probably be a decrease in the amount of HFCS in the market, in the 10 billion animals we “process”

Degrees and Dollars

By PAUL KRUGMAN

E

ducation is the key to economic success.

Everyone knows the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill.

That’s why President Obama declared “If we want more good news on the jobs front we’ve got to make investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

Example: the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. Technological progress is reducing demand for highly educated workers.

Legal research isn’t an isolated example. Software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. The idea modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

Since 1990 the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have

grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. The hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a

annually, in the ethanol used to fill gasguzzlers and in the soy from which we chemically extract oil for frying potatoes and chicken. Those are all benefits, which we could compound by taking those billions and using them for things like high-speed rail, fulfilling our promises to public workers, maintaining Pell grants for low-income college students or other worthy causes.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The rage for spending cuts doesn’t extend to the public — according to a recent Pew poll, most people want no cuts or even increased spending in major areas.

That the current system is a joke is barely arguable: wealthy growers are paid even in good years, and may receive drought aid when there’s no drought. It’s become so bizarre some homeowners lucky enough to have bought land that once grew rice now have subsidized lawns. Fortunes have been paid to Fortune 500 companies and gentlemen farmers like David Rockefeller.

Even House Speaker Boehner calls the bill a “slush fund”; the powerful Iowa Farm Bureau suggests that direct payments end; and Glenn Beck is on the bandwagon.

Not surprisingly, many Tea Partiers happily accept subsidies, including Vicky Hartzler (R-MO, $775,000), Stephen Fincher (R-TN, $2.5 million) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN $250,000). No hypocrisy there.

Left and right can agree these payments we don’t need suppose we use this money to steer our agriculture — and our health — in the right direction. A Gallup poll indica-

tes most Americans oppose cutting aid to farmers, and presumably they’re not including David Rockefeller or Michele Bachmann in that protected group; we still think of farmers as stewards of the land, and the closer that sentiment is to reality the better off we’ll be.

By making the program more sensible the money could benefit us all. For example, it could: • Fund research in sustainable agriculture.

• Attract 100,000 farmers Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack claims we need.

• Save farmland from development.

• Provide support for farmers who grow unsubsidized fruits, vegetables and beans, while providing incentives for monoculture commodity farmers to convert their operations to these more desirable foods.

• Level playing field so farms — big enough to supply local supermarkets but small enough to care what and how they grow — can become more competitive.

This money could encourage the development of the kind of agriculture we need, one that prioritizes caring for the land, the people who work it and the people who need the real food that’s grown on it.

We could, of course, finance or even augment the program with new monies, by taking a clue from the ‘30s, when the farm subsidy program began: Let the food giants that have profited so mightily and long from cheap corn and soy — that have not so far been asked to share the pain — pay for it.

category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computeraided medical diagnosis are already here.

And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services

will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

There are things education can’t do.

The notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true having a college degree guarantees you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

We can’t get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

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The San Juan Weeekly

LETTERS Ruby Ridge, Waco, Hormigueros Again, the FBI could’ve easily staked out Filiberto Ojeda and jumped him and handcuffed him because Ojeda had no idea they were coming for him. He’s dead because the federal government wanted him dead.

Justice would’ve been better served had there been a trial. Does the United States stand for Constitutional government or don’t they?

Samaria Salcedo, Caparra Hts.

Whipping Boy of the Right I fail to see why Fidel of Cuba has been such a bad boy. He’s made quality health and quality education available to the people of Cuba. An enviable outcome from where we stand. And while he had some 500 of Batista’s torturers and eye gougers shot, Johnson and Nixon murdered 2 million Vietnamese, surely you won’t tell me we slaughtered them in the name of freedom and democracy.

And 59K Yanks too. And, yes, the fidelistas put dissidents in dungeons, here Mari Bras’s son was assassinated to shut up troublesome Dad, and it worked if you think back. It’s easy to see the straw in the other guy’s eye, as the saying goes.

Guillaumette Tyler, Puerta de Tierra

Alienated in Blue Police in Puerto Rico are not only vicious bullies, they don’t even come close to protecting anybody. A tale in point follows.

Shortly after nightfall the phone rang. It was the neighbor. To let me know a burglar was trying to break into my apartment through the tiny rear balcony of the second-floor walkup.

So I called the cops. After the line rang a while a woman answered and chimed the usual, then she barked “¡Con permiso! “ before I could say anything. In the backgrond I could hear, “That dress is just not right for you, all those laces, you’ll look like a jíbara.”

“Well...maybe I am a jíbara, there’s no shame in coming from Moca and I only have to look good to Mario.”

“But for him what’s under the dress is what matters.” (assorted giggles) I shouted through the mouthpiece that this was an emergency and the female voice came back and blared, “It seems you have no manners, but it’s never too late to learn.” And she hung up on me.

Julián Acevedo, Ocean Park

Public Disservice

Bipartisan Wickedness

M.O. at Commonwealth Government, err, excuse me, Government of Puerto Rico agencies when you go there for some service, after the endless wait and paperwork that make the trees cry, is to ignore you, ask you every imaginable irrelevancy, ditto for whatever you want to know, and then they just about yawn in your face.

All to get you to lose your temper. When you finally do---trust me, you will, they’re experts---and even if it’s just a little bit, they turn violently offended. And when that happens, natch, it’s the end of whatever you went there for.

The macro of it is for people to simply stay away. So the clerks/bureaucrats can spend their afternoons in the delights of office/partisan bochinche and the shared reliving of all those soaps they never, ever miss.

Year before last the media displayed to us Gov. Aníbal Acevedo and Sen. Kenneth McClintock, grinning like monkeys about to be fed, who “in a rare bipartisan effort” had just gotten a law through to authorize gambling machines in all the friquitines of Puerto Rico, mischief that would rake in a few million a year in tax boodle, they gloated.

So Río Piedras now pings, clicks and chimes from the wee hours till late evenings. Our uneducated masses were never taught enough arithmetic to realize that in the long run you inevitably lose and lose a lot at any gambling, as the odds are invariably stacked heavily against you. Incredibly, many believe you can accumulate odds by losing, that you eventually recover and win, your perseverance rewarded. But the Law of Independent Probabilities says that’s out, every bet is independent of any other. And add the desperation of abject poverty, to hope against hope to get something for nothing like the boys at Capitolio do.

How could these two men so cavalierly orchestrate such wickedness?

Mateo Peralta, Guaynabo

Newcomer Unaware To the Editor : Anybody who refers to police here as “Puerto Rico’s finest” has to be a citizen of Jupiter. Welcome to Puerto Rico. May disappointment not sadden you too much.

Crisálida Martínez, San Juan

Existential Anomie To Ex-Rep. Rolando Crespo: In Annie Hall (1977) Woody Allen’s curiosity is spiked into sniffing cocaine when he’s told it costs $2K an ounce. Only then he sneezes on the tray and blows it away. The stuff fills the lives of the idle rich. Legislators come to mind. Old San Juan and Condado are dotted with cozy little night clubs open workday nights for politicians, who else has the time for that? In 1975 my good friend got back from Vietnam, he put his arm around my shoulder and uttered, “This afternoon we’re going to have the time of our lives, I’ve got a whole bag of perico with me.” Like he didn’t consider I might say no. I simply realized I didn’t want to do that. That beyond a beer or a joint reality is where it’s at. You people lead empty lives because you don’t do anything you would feel good about, you’re just a gaggle of shameless parasites.

Frágola Serpieri, Santurce

Jackson Winters, Isla Verde

2nd Amendment & Police Lawlessness On the late WOSO Radio talk shows you hear far-righters rant on and on that if everybody packed a pice, crime would be minimal. I guess they don’t remember the Wild West.

Nevertheless an armed citizenry might well turn out a cornerstone of democracy: In Hispanic places like here, if we all had the same Smith & Wessons the cops do, it stands to reason they’d be respectful of human rights, regardless of one’s station.

And, in any case, the criminals have the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis. In Miami RPGs even.

Jackson Winters, Isla Verde

The San Juan Weekly Send your opinions and ideas to: The San Juan Weeekly PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 Or e-mail us at:

sanjuanweeklypr@gmail.com Telephones: (787) 743-3346 · (787) 743-6537 (787) 743-5606 · Fax (787) 743-5500

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

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Mount Vesuvius Volcano-Still Erupting M

ount Vesuvius is a stratovolcano located at the Bay of Naples. It distance from the city of Naples is about 9 kilometres and is positioned in the east of the city. It is not much far away from the shore. The Mount Vesuvius is credited with having the reputation of being the only volcano on the European mainland to erupt during the course of about 100 years. The two other prominent active volcanoes in Italy are Etna and Stromboli that are volcanic islands.

In history, Mount Vesuvius is notorious for its eruption in AD 79 that contributed to the devastation of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. And the cities failed to ever emerge and to be reconstructed and the looters rest perished the city after

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Comes from pag 21 the damage from eruption. Hence the cities were forgotten for a long time and suddenly rediscovered in the 18th century. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius was so massive that it even changed the course of the ri-

March 17 - 23, 2011

ver Sarno and raised the sea beach, this development led to the Pompeii never being on the river nor at the close to the coast. During the Course Vesuvius also went through the major changes as its slopes remained without any vegetation and its head changed permanently due to

the force of the eruption. Since then, Vesuvius has been reputed for many times and presently is considered as the most dangerous volcanoes in the world due to its population of about 3,000,000 people living at close by areas. It is among the most densely populated volcanic region of the world.

Vesuvius is popular and known for its long and historic and literary tradition. It was observed as a divinity of the genius type at the time of the eruption of 79 AD. It appears as inscribed name Vesuvius as a serpent in the decorative frescos of many lararia, or household shrines that have been survived from the Pompeii.

Vesuvius is a unique “humpbacked” mountain that is consisted of a massive cone (Gran Cono) especially encircled by the steep rim of a summit caldera as generated by the collapse of an earlier and originally much higher structure named Monte Somma. The Gran Cono was produced during the eruption of AD 79.

Therefore, volcano is also termed as

The San Juan Weekly

Somma-Vesuvius or Somma-Vesuvio.

The height of the primary cone has changed considerably by eruptions, but at present it is about 1,281 m (4,202 ft) at present. Monte Somma is 1,149 m (3,770 ft) high, parted from the main cone by the valley of Atrio di Cavallo that is about 3 miles long. The slopes of the mountain are rugged by lava flows but are intensely vegetated, with scrub and forest at higher altitudes and a vineyard as far as one goes down. Vesuvius is as now is even regarded and treated as an active volcano, yet its current activity produces little more than steam from vents at the bottom of the crater.

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The San Juan Weekly

Cristian Castro

By Daniel Morales Pomales

D

espite his youth this superstar has one of the strongest and impressive careers. He was born for the stage! With just a few months after seeing the first light - December 8 in Mexico City - Cristian had his debut in a commercial in the arms of his mother, Mexican actress Veronica Castro. At five years he started in a soap opera. That same year, as an actor alongside Silvia Pinal in Mame, a play which projected his potential. Some time later, with just seven years under the shelter of his mother, aunt and grandmother Beatrice, began as a radio announcer in his own show The Time Of Christian, while he laneded the world debut of the song with the theme “The cock happy” on the popular show Siempre en Domingo. Subsequently involved in the children’s song festival Let’s Play Song created by the renowned Mexican host Raul Velasco.

At age 15, Cristian Castro participated in the OTI Song Festival with the song “16 de diciembre.” While singing and delighting his fans, Castro chooses to return to acting with his role on the soap opera The Secret Intentions.

March 17 - 23, 2011

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In 1991, he recorded his first album, Agua Nueva, which includes the song “No podras” becomes a hit on the continent. Two years later he released his second album, A World Of Time, work that won him his first Grammy nomination. In the mid-90’s he presented El Camino Del Alma, the third album that ranked first in popularity with the song “Mañana”, a composition by Juan Gabriel.

“Amor” single from his fourth album, “El deseo de oir tu voz” voice remained eleven weeks in a row at the top of the Hot Latin Tracks, like the cut “Amarte a tí” which received a nomination for Billboard.

His fifth “Lo mejor de mi”, produced by Rudy Perez, broke record sales, awards, charts and weeks on stations throughout Latin America and the United States. All the singles from this album got first place in Billboard and other major industry charts with songs like “Si tu me amaras,” “Amaneciendo en ti”, “Lloran las rosas” and “Despues de ti?. “ Lo mejor de mi” was nominated for the Billboard Awards and won practically every major award in the industry. He was also recognized in all countries with Gold, Platinum and Double Platinum records depending on the nation.

In 1999, Cristian Castro’s new album, Mi Vida Sin Tu Amor, this time produced by Kike Santander. 2000 was an important year in the internationalization of Mexico. He participated in the Festival of Viña del Mar in Chile getting the highest award the Gaviota de plata .

Azul, a second from Santander, was released in 2001. Topics such as “Yo queria”, “Azul” and “Lloviendoe strellas ” were placed in the top of popularity continuing the impressive track record to make him worthy, again, on a Grammy ® nomination, winning the prize Lo Nuestro as Best Singer.

Cristian’s Greatest Hits, marks a great moment in the career of the singer to record, among other well known duets, the song “The Fly Without Wings” with renowned Irish group West Life,

a theme that appears in the record of the successful pop group important in Europe and North America.

In 2003, Amar es, is classified in the Top Five Latin n Chart and “No hace falta” wass placed in the top major radio o stations in the United States and d Latin America. In August 2004, 4, launched worldwide, Hoy Quiuiero Soñar and in early 2005 hit the he market a collection of his first songs under the title of Gallito Feliz. In late 2005, he released his next big radio “Amor Eterno” from the album Happy Days.

In June 2007, and the hand of Vicente Fernandez, Christian released his album entitled The Indomitable Rancher, a CD / DVD in which the singer shows pride in his Mexican roots.

In his successful musical journey, Cristian Castro has proven to be one of the most admired Latin artists to the public both in the countries of Latin America and Europe. In addition, to having the record of cramming the great halls in their extensive concert tours worldwide, Cristian has made sales of over 10 million albums thus being certified with 62 gold albums and 30 Platinum albums.

El Culpable Soy Yo, the most ambitious album of his career Cristian Castro brings a select group of award-winning producers, including: Kiko Cibrian, who forged his biggest hits early in his career, as well as winning Mexican Latin Grammys ®, Armando Avila. Producer’s Christian Leuzzi and AB Quintanilla III said that since Selena they

The San Juan Weekly had never worked with such a talented singer.

For the new album, containing unreleased tracks conceived between November 2008 and February 2009, Cristian Castro will return to Latin America. The board, recorded in Mexico, Miami and San Diego, will launch the international market with simultaneous printing in the United States, Puerto Rico and Mexico. The album also be released in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Central America is scheduled to go on sale the first week of May. Later will be released in Spain.

“Viva El Principe” by Cristian Castro continues to enjoy itself as the most successful Latin album.

The album is #1 in the U.S. and Puerto Rico for the fourth week. “Viva El Príncipe” available in CD/CD+DVD/Digital.

International super-star CRISTIAN CASTRO again claimed his position at #1 in the U.S. and Puerto Rico for his fourth non-consecutive week with his most recent album VIVA EL PRINCIPE, a tribute Walbum in which he sings the songs immortalized in the 70s and 80s by “The Prince of Song.”

VIVA EL PRINCIPE contains “Las canciones del princgreatest hits, songs that ipe” g more than 40 million copsold m ies.

Today, Cristian is in the midst of a promotional tour mids across United States, Central acro and South America which includes live performances inclu of the region’s most in some s important venues. Cristian imp Castro again showed treCas mendous acting ability he me is rrecognized as one of the largest and most successful lar performers in Latin music. pe Cristian reappears stronCr ger, more mature and ready to recapture the radio charts and international sales.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

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Hoard of Cash Lets Qaddafi Extend Fight Against Rebels

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

T

he Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has “tens of billions” in cash secretly hidden away in Tripoli, allowing him to prolong his fight against rebel forces despite an international freeze on many of the Libyan government’s assets.

Colonel Qaddafi has control over the huge cash deposits, which have been stored at the Libyan Central Bank and other banks around the Libyan capital in recent years.

Since the protests and fighting erupted, the money may have been moved into Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, Bab Al Azizia.

The money — in Libyan dinars, United States dollars and other foreign currencies — allows Colonel Qaddafi to pay his troops, African mercenaries and political supporters in the face of a determined uprising.

The huge cash reserves have diminished the impact of economic sanctions on Colonel Qaddafi. The possibility he could resist the rebellion for a sustained period could place greater pressure on the Obama administration and European leaders, who had hoped that the Libyan leader would be forced from power quickly.

President Obama’s national security team met to discuss how to oust the Libyan leader, including the imposition of a no-

flight zone, but made no decisions.

The United States has relied on imposing financial pain on Qaddafi, freezing $32 billion of Libya’s assets. The United Nations and the European Union have imposed separate sanctions and have frozen assets as well.

Colonel Qaddafi began hoarding liquid assets far earlier. He has built up Libya’s cash reserves in the years since the West began lifting economic sanctions on his government in 2004, following his decision to renounce unconventional weapons and cooperate with the United States in the fight against Al Qaeda. That led to a flood of Western investment in the Libyan oil and natural gas industries, and access to international oil and financial markets.

Colonel Qaddafi feared sanctions would be reimposed and secretly began setting aside cash in Tripoli that could not be seized by Western banks. He used the Libyan Central Bank, which he controls, and private banks in the city. He directed government transactions, including sales on the international oil spot market, be conducted in cash.

Reserves are to prove more critical to Colonel Qaddafi as government’s revenues dwindle from oil production.

With the unrest, Libya is pumping just 300,000 to 400,000 barrels of oil a day, down from 1.8 million barrels a day.

Current levels would be worth about $30 million to $40 million a day, but export markets are virtually closed to the country, as international banks refuse to provide letters of credit for oil company shipments.

“I don’t think they are deriving income from the export market. “The international banks don’t want to touch it.” Still, several small Libyan refineries remain open, and they were probably refining oil for the domestic market and fuel for Colonel Qaddafi’s military operations.

With other sources of income drying up, the Libyan leader is heavily dependent on his pile of cash, and apparently spending it to stay in power. He is making cash payments to political supporters in Tripoli to retain their loyalty, while also buying the services of African mercenaries.

The person close to the government estimated that 3,000 to 4,000 mercenaries from Mali, Niger and a rebel group operating in Darfur, Sudan, the Justice and Equality Movement, have been hired by the Libyan government for at least $1,000 a day apiece. United States intelligence officials said they could not confirm those numbers or amount of payments.

Intelligence officials and other experts credit Colonel Qaddafi with becoming very adept at hiding his money, and said it had

often been difficult to distinguish between the assets of the Libyan government, including its $70 billion sovereign wealth fund, and the Qaddafi family’s assets.

Mr. Qaddafi’s history of financial dealings indicate that he has “surreptitious accounts and unaccounted sums that are significant enough to give him security even if the world caves in on him,” said David Aufhauser, a top Treasury Department official in President George W. Bush’s administration.

Justice Department documents show that Libya had worked with Swiss banks to launder international banking transactions for years, with “hundreds” of senior Libyan officials allowed to surreptitiously move money.

Tim Niblock, an expert on Libya and professor at the University of Exeter in Britain, said he believed that Colonel Qaddafi had hidden cash as far back as the 1990s.

He said that it was part of a larger effort by the Libyan leader to protect his money from both the international community and his domestic foes.

“He’s always aware that he faces problems from outside and within,” Professor Niblock said. “It would be quite foolish for him to not amass money for an eventuality like this.”

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The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Taking a Risk for Rare Earths

By KEITH BRADSHER

A

colossal construction project here could help determine whether the world can break China’s chokehold on the strategic metals crucial to products as diverse as Apple’s iPhone, Toyota’s Prius and Boeing’s smart bombs.

As many as 2,500 construction workers will soon be racing to finish the world’s largest refinery for so-called rare earth metals — the first rare earth ore processing plant to be built outside China in nearly three decades.

For Malaysia and the world’s most advanced technology companies, the plant is a gamble that the processing can be done safely enough to make the local environmental risks worth the promised global rewards.

Once little known outside chemistry circles, rare earth metals have become increasingly vital to high-tech manufacturing.

But as Malaysia learned the hard way a few decades ago, refining rare earth ore usually leaves thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste behind.

So the world has largely left the dirty work to Chinese refineries — processing factories that are barely regulated and in

some cases illegally operated, and have created vast toxic waste sites.

But other countries’ wariness has meant that China now mines and refines at least 95 percent of the global supply of rare earths. And Beijing has aroused international alarm by wielding that virtual monopoly as a global trade weapon.

Last September, for example, China imposed a two-month embargo on rare earth shipments to Japan during a territorial dispute, and for a short time even blocked some shipments to the United States and Europe. Beijing’s behavior, which has also included lowering the export limit on its rare earths, has helped propel world prices of the material to record highs — and sent industrial countries scrambling for alternatives.

Even now, though, countries with their own rare earth ore deposits are not always eager to play host to the refineries that process them. An American company, Molycorp, plans to reopen an abandoned mine near Death Valley in California; but Molycorp must completely rebuild the adjacent refinery to address environmental concerns.

All of this helps explain why a giant Australian mining company, Lynas, is hurrying to finish a $230 million rare earth refinery here, on the northern outskirts of Malaysia’s industrial port of Kuantan. The plant will refine slightly radioactive ore from the Mount Weld mine deep in the Australian desert, 2,500 miles away. The ore will be trucked to the Australian port of Fremantle and transported by container ship from there.

Within two years, Lynas says, the refinery will be able to meet nearly a third of the world’s demand for rare earth materials — not counting China, which has its own abundant supplies.

Nicholas Curtis, Lynas’s executive chairman, said it would cost four times as much to build and operate such a refinery in Australia, which has much higher labor and construction costs. Australia is also home to an environmentally minded and politically powerful Green party.

Despite the potential hazards, the Malaysian government was eager for investment by Lynas, even offering a 12-year tax holiday. If rare earth prices stay at current lofty levels, the refinery will generate $1.7 billion a year in exports starting late next year, equal to nearly 1 percent of the entire Malaysian economy.

Raja Dato Abdul Aziz bin Raja Adnan, the director general of the Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board, said his country approved the Lynas project only after an interagency review indicated the imported ore and subsequent waste would have low enough levels of radioactivity to

be manageable and safe.

Malaysia had reason to be cautious: Its last rare earth refinery, operated by the Japanese company Mitsubishi Chemical, is now one of Asia’s largest radioactive waste cleanup sites.

“We have learned we shouldn’t give anybody a free hand,” Raja Adnan said.

Despite such assurances, critics are not convinced that the low-level radioactive materials at the Lynas project will be safe.

“The word ‘low’ here is just a matter of perception — it’s a carcinogen,” said Dr. Jayabalan A. Thambyappa, a general practitioner physician and toxicologist. He has treated leukemia victims whose illnesses he and others have attributed to the old Mitsubishi Chemical refinery.

That plant, on the other side of the Malay peninsula, closed in 1992 after years of sometimes violent demonstrations by citizens protesting its polluting effects. Now, in an engineering effort that has largely escaped the outside world’s notice, Mitsubishi is engaged in a $100 million cleanup.

Rare earths, a group of 17 elements, are not radioactive themselves. But virtually every rare earth ore deposit around the world contains, in varying concentrations, a slightly radioactive element called thorium.

Radiation concerns — along with low-cost Chinese competition — eventually forced the closing of all rare earth refineries in Japan. It was during this phase-out that Mitsubishi moved its refining operation to Malaysia, where old tin mines had left behind thousands of tons of semiprocessed slag that was rich in rare earth ore. It also had extremely high levels of radioactive thorium.

The new Lynas refinery, with nearly two dozen interconnected buildings and 50 acres of floor space, will house the latest in pollution control equipment and radiation sensors. A signature feature will be 12 acres of interim storage pools that will be lined with dense plastic and sit atop nearly impermeable clay, to hold the slightly radioactive byproducts until they can be carted away.

But carted to where? That is still an open question.

Building the lined storage pools was one of the promises Lynas had made to win permission to put the refinery here, in an area already environmentally damaged by the chemical plants that line the narrow,

muddy Balok River.

Mr. Curtis, the Lynas chairman, insists that the new factory will be much cleaner and far safer than the old Mitsubishi plant, which “never should have been built,” he said recently, as he led a tour of the sprawling Lynas refinery construction site here.

One big difference, he said, is that the ore being imported from Australia is much less radioactive. It will have only 3 to 5 percent of the thorium per ton found in the tin mine tailings that Mitsubishi had processed. And he said the Lynas factory would also process 10 times as much ore with only twice as many employees — about 450 in all — thanks to automation that will keep workers away from potentially harmful materials.

But the long-term storage of the Lynas plant’s radioactive thorium waste is still unresolved.

After using sulfuric acid to dissolve the rare earths out of the concentrated ore, Lynas plans to mix the radioactive part of the waste with lime. The aim is to dilute it to a thorium concentration of less than 0.05 percent — the maximum permitted under international standards to allow the material to be disposed with few restrictions.

Lynas wants to turn this mixture into large concrete shapes known as tetrapods that are used to build artificial reefs for fish and as sea walls to prevent beach erosion.

Local residents seem to be of two minds about the sprawling plant being built near the river. The river empties into the ocean several miles away, next to an impoverished fishing village, where on a recent evening a small group of fisherman sat at the end of a wooden dock.

Muhamad Ishmail, age 56, said pollution from the chemical factories that started opening upstream in the 1990s had forced local fishing — a river industry for generations — to move primarily out to sea.

Although one of his five children works in the nearby industrial district, Mr. Ishmail said he did not want Lynas or anyone else to open any more factories.

“This river used to be clean, and you could catch fish right here,” he said.

But Muhamad Anuar, 30, said his community needed the reliable paychecks that Lynas might offer. “I have two kids, and I don’t want them to be fishermen,” he said. “It’s a hard job.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

27

Gems From 2008 Paris Theft Found in Drainpipe

By DOREEN CARVAJAL

M

ore than two years after men dressed in wigs and scarves struck the Harry Winston jewelry store in Paris’s golden triangle of upscale shops, the police this week discovered a cache of sparkling diamonds from the theft in a far less glamorous place: a drainpipe in the northern suburbs of the city.

They found one diamond ring the size of a child’s marble, along with 18 other rings and 3 earrings, in a plastic container inside a concrete mold at the home of the man suspected as the mastermind in Seine-Saint-Denis.

The police were saying little about discovery of jewelry valued at $20.6 million other than dryly describing the inventory. “We are saying nothing, nothing,” a police spokeswoman. “The judge is not happy that the information came out.”

The jewelry was part of a record haul during Christmastime 2008, when four men — three dressed as women — robbed the high-end jewelry store in the Eighth Arrondissement at closing time, grabbing their glittering goods within 15 minutes. The theft, which Harry Winston then valued at roughly $110 million, was called the robbery of the century by the French news media because the armed robbers had planned so precisely that they knew the names and addresses of some of the employees.

The men flaunted a hand grenade and, according to witnesses, barked orders in Eastern European accents, leading to widespread speculation that the robbery was a caper of the Pink Panther jewelry theft ring, which has roots in Serbia and is being hunted

by Interpol.

In 2009, though, after an initial search of the house, the police detai-

ned 25 people, ranging in age from 22 to 67, with homegrown roots in the northern suburbs of Paris. Nine of them were later charged, including the man suspected as the mastermind, Daoudi Yahiaoui, 46, who owns the house where the jewels were discovered and who is already in jail, awaiting sentencing in the robbery.

During the first search of the house, the police recovered expensive watches and rings hidden behind a false wall that were later displayed at a news conference. More than $1.4 million in cash was also found in different hiding places, along with a shotgun and a rocket launcher. But investigators were convinced that more jewels were hidden away.

The thieves made one crucial error: leaving behind a purse with traceable DNA. Investigators also dissected the accents heard on security tapes and realized that the robbers did not

have Slavic accents, but the French of the Parisian suburbs. Those clues led them to a chain of local fences, petty criminals and foreign jewelry appraisers, and finally to the jewels themselves.

Since the robbery, Harry Winston reduced the value of the stolen jewelry to the wholesale price of $32 million, receiving a $20 million insurance settlement, according to its annual reports.

But the risk adjusters and insurance syndicates with Lloyd’s of London, Harry Winston’s insurer, posted a $1 million reward immediately after the robbery for information leading to the recovery of the diamonds. The insurance investigators for Lloyd’s, who had always harbored suspicions that the thieves were homegrown, placed a classified notice in the local daily, Le Parisien, which circulates in the outskirts of Paris.

Dalai Lama Gives Up Political Role

By JIM YARDLEY and EDWARD WONG

T

he Dalai Lama announced on Thursday that he would formally relinquish his political leadership role in the Tibetan exile government, a decision intended to strengthen the democratic structure of the Tibetan movement on the eve of elections to choose a new generation of political leaders.

For years, the Tibetan spiritual leader has spoken of his desire to cede political authority, or “retire” as he sometimes put it. But in Thursday’s speech, the Dalai Lama made it official, announcing that he would propose the change during the session of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile that begins next week in Dharamsala, India.

“My desire to devolve authority has nothing to do with a wish to shirk responsibility,” he said, according to a prepared text of his speech. “It is to benefit Tibetans in the long run.”

Analysts who study Tibet said the announcement did not mean the Dalai Lama would cease to be recognized as the overall leader of the Tibetan cause.

He is regarded as the lone figure capable of uniting and mobilizing Tibetans inside and outside of China. But the analysts said that by formally giving up political power, the Dalai Lama, who is 75, is trying to deepen the authority and credibility of the Tibetan movement’s democratic government, which is based in Dharamsala. Later this month, Tibetan exiles are expected to elect a new prime minister.

“This is designed to give more credibility to whoever is elected,” said Tim Johnson, author of the recent book, “Tragedy in Crimson: How the Dalai Lama Conquered the World but Lost the Battle With China.”

Mr. Johnson added: “Tibetan exiles have only reluctantly embraced democracy despite the Dalai Lama’s many urgings. Many would prefer that the Dalai Lama continue to make all major decisions. And he has had to push hard for them to accept someone other than himself as a political leader.”

In Beijing, the Dalai Lama’s announcement was met with blunt criticism by the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu. “We think these are his tricks to deceive the international community,” she said.

In past interviews, the Dalai Lama has signaled his desire to formalize a separation of duties between political and spiritual responsibilities. He has long indicated that Samdhong Rinpoche, a lama who in 2001 became the first directly elected prime minister of the government in exile, has final authority over political matters. “I usually describe him as my boss in the sort of temporal field,” the Dalai Lama told The New York Times in a 2009 interview. “And in the spiritual field, I’m his boss.”

The Dalai Lama delivered his speech Thursday in Dharamsala on the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule, the failed revolt that led to his dramatic escape through the Himalayas into India.

From his perch in Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama has spent the last five decades building the Tibetan movement into a global force, even as Chinese leaders have stymied his desire to reach a political solution that would allow him to return to Tibet.

His speech also coincided with the anniversary of the March 2008 uprisings that erupted across the Tibetan plateau in China after the suppression of a peaceful protest by monks in Lhasa. Riots and protests quickly rippled across Tibetan regions of China before being put down by a brutal security

operation. This week, the Chinese government remained on edge over potential volatility in Tibetan areas and temporarily banned foreigners from traveling to the region.

The political future of the Tibetan movement, and who will lead it, hinges on the unresolved question of who will succeed the 14th Dalai Lama. The uncertainty has created an unusual high-stakes jousting match between the Dalai Lama and Chinese leaders.

The Dalai Lama has suggested that he might choose his successor before he dies, deviating from the historic practice of senior lamas identifying his reincarnation after his death. In response, Chinese leaders, who are officially atheist, have claimed authority to choose his reincarnation.

“We must respect the historical institutions and religious rituals of Tibetan Buddhism,” Padma Choling, the new governor of Tibet, told reporters on Sunday while attending the annual session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing. “I am afraid it is not up to anyone whether to abolish the reincarnation institution or not.”

He added: “Tibetan Buddhism has a history of more than 1,000 years, and the reincarnation institutions of the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama have been carried on for several hundred years.”

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The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Explosions at Reactors as Technicians Try to Contain Damage

By HIROKO TABUCHI and MATTHEW L. WALD

T

he risk of a meltdown spread to a third reactor at a stricken nuclear power plant in Japan as its cooling systems failed, exposing its fuel rods, only hours after a second explosion at a separate reactor blew the roof off a containment building.

The widening problems underscored the difficulties the Japanese authorities are having in bringing several damaged reactors under control three days after a devastating earthquake and a tsunami hit Japan’s northeast coast and shut down the electricity that runs the crucial cooling systems for reactors.

Operators fear that if they cannot establish control, despite increasingly desperate measures to do so, the reactors could experience full meltdowns, which could release catastrophic amounts of radiation. The two reactors where the explosions occurred are both presumed to have already suffered partial meltdowns — a dangerous situation that, if unchecked, could lead to full meltdowns.

The chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, first said that the release of large amounts of radiation was unlikely. But traces of radiation could be released into the atmosphere, and about 500 people who remained within a 12-mile radius of the plant were ordered to take cover indoors temporarily, he said.

The country’s nuclear power watchdog said readings taken soon after the explosion showed no big change in radiation levels around the plant or any damage to the containment vessel, which protects the radioactive material in the reactor.

“I have received reports that the containment vessel is sound,” Mr. Edano said.

“I understand that there is little possibility that radioactive materials are being released in large amounts.”

But later Monday Mr. Edano said cooling systems at a third reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had failed. The water level inside the reactor had fallen, exposing the fuel rods at its core despite emergency efforts to pump seawater into the reactor, he said. Exposure of the rods means they heat up, melting their outer casing and raising the risk of a meltdown.

Problems with the jury-rigged fire hose pumps being used by the workers have added to the crisis by hampering efforts to keep reactors adequately cooled.

Difficulties in gauging exactly how much water remains in the containment vessel, as well as what exactly is occurring at the heart of the reactor, have added to problems at the plant.

“The pump ran out of fuel,” Mr. Edano said, “and the process of inserting water took longer than expected, so the fuel rods were likely exposed from the water for a while.”

Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general at Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said plant workers then renewed efforts to flood the reactor with seawater, and readings suggested that water again covered the fuel rods. Workers were also battling rising pressure within the reactor, Mr. Nishiyama said. They have opened vents in the reactor’s containment vessel, which houses the fuel rods, a measure that could release small amounts of radiation.Higher-than-normal levels of radiation have been detected from at least 22 people evacuated from near the plant, the nuclear safety watchdog said, but it is not clear if the doses they received were dangerous.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant and the Fukushima Daini power station, about 10 miles away, have been under a state of emergency.

Tokyo Electric, which runs both plants, said it had restored the cooling systems at two of three reactors experiencing problems at Daini. That would leave a total of four reactors at the two plants with pumping difficulties. atsuhiko Ishibashi, a nuclear safety expert formerly at the Research Center for Urban Safety and Security at Kobe University, said emergencies at multiple reactors in close proximity posed particular risks. “If an incident were to happen at one reactor that released high amounts radiation, the whole area would become unapproachable,” Mr. Ishibashi said. “Then the other reactors would have to be abandoned, and left to run their disastrous course.”

Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton, said he was not aware of any cases were more than one reactor had problems.

“The whole country was focused on Three Mile Island,” he said, referring to the Pennsylvania nuclear plant accident in 1979. “Here you have Tokyo Electric Power and the Japanese regulators focusing on multiple plants at the same time.”

In what was perhaps the clearest sign

of the rising anxiety over the nuclear crisis, both the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Russian authorities issued statements on Sunday trying to allay fears, saying they did not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach their territory.

Late Sunday night, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Japan had added a third plant, Onagawa, to the list of those under a state of emergency because a low level of radioactive materials had been detected outside its walls.

Bu it quoted Japanese authorities as saying that the radioactivity levels at the Onagawa plant had returned to normal levels and that there appeared to be no leak there.

“The increased level may have been due to a release of radioactive material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant,” the agency said. The Onagawa and Daiichi plants are 75 miles apart. The operator of the Onagawa plant, Tohoku Electric Power, said that levels of radiation there were twice the allowed level, but that they did not pose health risks.

Soon after that announcement, Kyodo News reported that a plant about 75

miles north of Tokyo was having at least some cooling system problems. But a plant spokesman later said a backup pump was working.

The government was testing people who lived near the Daiichi plant, with local officials saying that about 170 residents had probably been exposed. The government earlier said that three workers had radiation illness, but Tokyo Electric said that only one worker was ill.

The problems at Fukushima Daiichi appeared to be the most serious involving a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. A partial meltdown can occur when radioactive fuel rods, which normally are under in water, remain partly uncovered for too long. The longer the fuel is exposed, the closer the reactor comes to a full meltdown.

Technicians are essentially fighting for time while heat generation in the fuel gradually declines, trying to keep the rods covered despite a breakdown in the normal cooling system, which runs off the electrical grid. Since that was knocked out in the earthquake, and diesel generators later failed — possibly because of the tsunami — the operators have used a makeshift system for keeping cool water on the fuel rods.

Now, they pump in new water, let it boil and then vent it to the atmosphere, releasing some radioactive material. But they are having difficulty even with that, and have sometimes allowed the water levels to drop too low, exposing the fuel to steam and air, with resulting fuel damage.

Japanese nuclear officials said operators at the plant had suffered a setback trying to bring one of the reactors under control when a valve malfunction stopped the flow of water and left fuel rods partially uncovered. The delay raised pressure at the reactor.

At a late-night news conference, officials at Tokyo Electric said that the valve had been fixed, but that water levels had not yet begun rising.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

29

Revolts Raise Fear of Migration in Europe

By RACHEL DONADIO and SUZANNE DALEY

U

ntil a few weeks ago, the immigrant transfer center on this tiny Mediterranean island — a kind of Italian Ellis Island — was empty. An extensive European campaign against migration from Africa was considered so effective that the authorities basically shut it down.

But since the Tunisian government collapsed in January, spurring unrest across North Africa, Lampedusa has been bustling. The Italian police tow in boats full of desperate immigrants — about 6,000 refugees in the past two months.

Young men in hooded jackets smoke cigarettes and await transfer to the mainland — a prospect that is striking fear in many European hearts.

The turmoil in Libya and elsewhere in the region has toppled or undermined North African dictators who negotiated a web of benefits from Europe, including aid and diplomatic standing, in return for stopping immigrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean.

Without the assistance of those leaders, many in Europe worry that they will face new waves of illegal immigration not only from the liberated areas in the north, but from much of sub-Saharan Africa as well.

The immigrants would arrive at a time when much of Europe — struggling with high unemployment and lethargic economies — is already awash with antiimmigrant sentiment, and many countries say they are simply incapable of absorbing poor migrants.

“In Italy, there is really a panic,” said Anna Triandafyllidou, a migration expert with the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. “Everything is up in the air, and no one knows what to do.”

Unable to build the kind of border

fence that the United States has erected to keep Mexicans at home, countries like Spain and Italy have spent years forging close relationships with North African leaders, persuading them to prevent migrants from trying to sail the rough seas of the Mediterranean. In return, Morocco, Tunisia and particularly Libya sometimes used brutal tactics to keep immigrants from ever getting near European shores, human rights activists say.

Italy’s agreement with Libya, signed in 2008, was considered especially effective. Italy pledged $5 billion over 20 years in exchange for Libya’s blocking wouldbe immigrants from leaving. Almost overnight immigrants stopped arriving in Lampedusa.

According to the Italian Interior Ministry, in 2008, more than 36,000 immigrants came ashore in Italy — not only from North Africa, but from the Horn of Africa, Niger and Nigeria. After the treaty, that number dropped to 9,500 in 2009 and slowed to a relative trickle in Lampedusa.

Now, detained migrants once again outnumber the island’s local population of 6,000, according to the ministry. At 3 a.m. on Wednesday, an Italian police boat arrived with 55 tired and shivering immigrants who had been pulled from a rickety boat.

Many were wrapped in thermal blankets.

One was taken away on a stretcher.

At one point, there were so many immigrants here that the authorities allowed them to wander the island freely rather than keep them locked up. Inside the center on Wednesday, hundreds of young men, almost all from Tunisia, were eager to tell visitors their message: “We want work.”

“I got a high school degree, I worked fixing cars, but there’s no work,” said Mander Grebis, 25, in halting French, as he stood in a group of young men huddled in front of the center’s one vending machine.

He and the others said they wanted to stay in Italy or to go to France to find jobs.

Italy’s arrangement with Libya was hardly the only one. Spain, too, has over the years enlisted the help of Morocco and other African countries in dealing with immigrants. Experts say it has offered countries equipment for patrolling shorelines and economic aid of all sorts — so that immigrants have fewer reasons to leave and African governments have more reason to help.

Spain offered Senegal money to help repatriate immigrants who were often returned to the Dakar airport but did not have the money or the incentive to return to their villages. At times, the European Union pays for such projects, too.

But human rights advocates say some of these arrangements have abetted the harsh treatment of immigrants, particularly in Libya. In a report published in 2009, Human Rights Watch said that migrants who eventually made it to Malta and Italy described being beaten and robbed of valuables and their documents while in detention in Libya.

The report also said that electric shock batons were used to force migrants off the boats in Libya. And some said they were handed back to traffickers who held them for ransom.

“These agreements,” said Bill Frelick, the author of the report, “are with partner states that often don’t have the same standards as Europe. They often treat migrants in humiliating and denigrating ways.”

In an interview, Senator Lamberto Dini, a former Italian prime minister who helped negotiate Italy’s treaty with Libya, said such reports had “not been proven.”

There have also been disturbing episodes in Morocco. In 2005, 11,000 subSaharan Africans who had been stranded in Morocco after a renewal of the SpanishMoroccan partnership stormed the border fence around the Spanish enclave of Melilla, on the African coast. Some made it across, but several were shot dead. Some

of the immigrants who were eventually turned over to the Moroccan police were then dumped into the Sahara.

But the agreements have been effective. In the past year, control of the African coastline was so tight that immigrants were turning to a wholly different route, showing up on the land border between Greece and Turkey. In recent weeks, Italian officials have warned of a “biblical exodus” in which as many as 300,000 could arrive, though many experts say that number is intended more as a way to stir up passions domestically than as a reflection of any clear reality.

Experts say any number is conjecture given the fluidity of the situation in North Africa and the difficulties involved in distinguishing the number of workers trying to return home from the refugees trying to flee.

In Lampedusa, the immigrants stay for two days before being sent to mainland Italy for more processing to determine if they are seeking political asylum or are instead “economic immigrants” seeking work.

Over the years, aided by sometimes alarmist press coverage of immigrants arriving on boats, Lampedusa has taken hold in the Italian and European popular imagination as the image of out-of-control immigration. In a sign of how crucial Lampedusa has become to that image, especially for some right-wing parties, Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Front, plans to visit the island on Monday.

Tommaso Della Longa, a spokesman for the Italian Red Cross on Lampedusa, said the organization was setting up a field hospital on the dock here to give emergency aid to immigrants after long, rough crossings.

“It’s better to be prepared,” Mr. Della Longa said, “if — and I underline if — the thousands of immigrants that people are talking about arrive.”

modern love

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March 17 - 23, 2011

San Juan Weekly

A Once-Upon-a-Time Romance

By CHARLOTTE SILVER

I

F harried shoppers eating Swedish meatballs ever look out the windows of the cafeteria toward the water, the first thing they will see is a gorgeous and desolate ship, the length of three football fields.

My ex-boyfriend, Steven, got a book deal to write a social history of that ship. His working title: “The Ideal Ship.”

That ship is the United States, the last of the grand American ocean liners, launched in 1952. Its sleek, athletic design was practical yet chic, a splendid feat of American engineering in the halcyon days of postwar abundance, so remote to us now.

The ship on whose decks Grace Kelly, Marlon Brando, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor once lounged has long since been moored at the crude black ledge of this parking lot. It’s a lady-in-waiting, waiting for scrappers.

If, once upon a time, the United States was the ideal ship, then once upon a time ours was the ideal courtship, out of a Salinger story, another time, another country, when that ship glided across the Atlantic and its creamy paint was brand new.

Steven’s book celebrates the last gasp of a time when America still made things and when the future, unquestioned, undimmed, was ours for the taking; when families dressed up to travel and steamer trunks were the fashion.

Our relationship was a rather affected exercise in trying to recapture some of the rituals of that time. We sought a certain romantic formality in what has become an informal and wholly nonromantic world.

In the beginning, I lived in Boston and he lived in Philadelphia. The first weekend I went there, my mother gave me a new suitcase. Before then, I didn’t own a

proper piece of luggage, only the monogrammed L. L. Bean Boat and Tote I had used since freshman year. By the time I started dating Steven, I was 28; with this suitcase, I achieved womanhood. It was fabulously expensive, and the color orange. I called it “Hermès orange,” after the shade of their boxes. This color, the voluptuous bitterness of it, was only appropriate for my first truly adult love affair.

A typical packing list of mine read something like this: Black sweetheart neckline.

Lanvin pumps.

Birth control!

Blue baby-doll.

Freshwater-pearl torsade.

Winter, traditionally a season with all the dreariness and anticlimax of adulthood itself, became with Steven as my escort a happy, gilded time of German Christmas carols, thick cream-laid place cards, butterscotch fur stoles, red corsages. He belonged to one of the oldest men’s singing clubs in the country (by the divine name of the Orpheus Club) at which there were separate coatrooms for “Gentlemen” and “Ladies,” and where long tables were paved thickly with glittering oysters.

What attracted Steven to the United States was its mastery of form. His hero, the naval architect William Francis Gibbs, designed the ship to be made of aluminum, glass, plastic and special fire-repellent materials. Almost nothing was wood; nothing could burn. But what could Gibbs do about the dawning of the jet planes, rocketing into fashion in the ’60s?

That is the problem with depending on form. The most fastidious blueprints — and packing lists — only anticipate so much.

On Valentine’s Day, Steven took me to

see the ship. Before that, I don’t think I had ever fully conceived of it as a she, a lady. But to me that day, the condition of the presentday United States was a distinctly feminine degradation. There was a fierce brown gash down the long white throat of her, and I couldn’t stop staring at it, as if it had been made with real violence in mind.

Steven had made dinner reservations at a French restaurant. But just as we were leaving, we discovered that our Zipcar didn’t work. He called a mechanic to come fix it. For hours we stood shivering in the shadow of the United States.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to press into Steven’s belly and say, “Isn’t this image of us, two tiny people in love, huddling at the foot of America’s greatest ocean liner, absurd?”

But I didn’t say that, because frankly, dramatic irony was often lost on Steven. To him, disaster was seldom funny. To me, it nearly always is.

No, he saw only dinner reservations spoiled, things not going as planned.

Later that night, we ended up getting Chinese food. We drank beer and ate pork-fried dumplings, warming ourselves from the gritty freeze of the parking lot.

Afterward when we made love, it was one of the most contented times ever, contented being different than passionate, most of our lovemaking having been heightened by the urgency and ambrosia of distance. And I thought: “This is it. This is real.”

Nearly a year later, we agreed to meet for lunch at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal. By then, everything had changed.

I was living in New York, and Steven and I were no longer together. He had dumped me the previous summer, when the city was in the midst of a death-grip heat wave. One night not long after, standing at the corner of 57th and Seventh, I gazed up at the roof of Carnegie Hall and briefly, melodramatically, the thought flitted through my head that I wished I could somehow throw myself off.

Now all that was in the past. Recently, Steven had sent me an apology letter, and proposed that we meet up sometime in New York. I chose for us to meet at Grand Central, fancying that its classical grandeur was the ideal backdrop.

I didn’t want to get back together, but, seeking to be the historic preservationist of my own life, I wanted to restore the dignity of the narrative. The breakup had been ragged, and the love affair, on the whole, polished. I wanted an autumnal epilogue, a proper goodbye. Like William Francis Gibbs, like Steven himself, I was pursuing perfect form.

“Meet me under the clock,” I told him, a plaintive lover’s refrain through the generations. I planned to wear my leopard-

skin coat and brand-new Italian sunglasses. But as I say, no blueprint can anticipate everything, and the night before we were scheduled to meet, just after I had returned from having my nails painted the perfect retro coral, he canceled because of the weather.

There was a long time, after Steven dumped me, when if I were on the subway and heard the announcement, “The next stop is 34th Street, Penn Station,” I couldn’t bear it, because the mention of that stop reminded me of the exalted life of travel and promise, of swooning, cinematic train-platform embraces, lost to me forever. I couldn’t bear to travel by Amtrak; couldn’t even bear, that summer, to go in the ocean.

I went off birth control pills and gained weight; the “black sweetheart neckline” cocktail dress I used to wear, on Steven’s arm, at the Orpheus Club no longer fit me. With time, though, I discovered that I was tougher than I thought, and that I would be O.K. BUT as I approach my 30th birthday, I have been thinking of that Valentine’s Day when the man I loved took me to see the United States, and of her melancholy elegance; the affront of that brown gash on her skin. When Steven, the historian, looked at her, he saw her through a sociological, a patriotic lens: the ship that was once a nation’s pride facing the prospect of being reduced to scrap. But I don’t wonder now why I, as a love object soon to be abandoned, saw her as a woman would, for it is women who suffer the pangs of vanished beauty.

And I think: how cruel to have traveled the world over, only to end up busted in a parking lot in South Philly. Her firstclass ballroom, where J.F.K. and Jackie did the fox trot, is ravaged, her observation lounge stripped of blue leather chairs and CinemaScope worldwide views. And she has nothing to look forward to. Would she ever have anything to look forward to again?

That, I think, is the trouble with turning 30. In the decade between when I began traveling with my L. L. Bean Boat and Tote and when my mother gave me the Hermès orange suitcase — from the ages of 18 to 28 — I never doubted that having a grand love affair someday was my due, the sentimental education without which no woman’s life could be richly lived. But what if the grand love affair was already in the past?

These days that suitcase looks the worse for wear. The last time I used it, one of the wheels fell off and went skittering down a squalid city sidewalk, never to be found.

I’m thinking of shopping for a new suitcase. Not orange, though. Maybe violet, or plum. And, for the sake of having something to look forward to, exquisitely, enduringly crafted.

The San Juan Weekly

Drugs’ Benefits Go Beyond Blood Pressure

By RONI CARYN RABIN

A

new analysis suggests that blood pressure drugs may benefit heart disease patients even if they don’t have high blood pressure.

The paper, published in the March 2 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, is an analysis of 25 published studies, and the authors cautioned that randomized controlled trials must be done to confirm the results. (They reported no financial ties to drug makers.)

Patients in the studies were followed for two years on average, and many had blood pressure levels that were normal or slightly above. Compared with similar patients who took dummy pills, those who took so-called antihypertensive medication cut their risk of stroke by 23 percent; heart attack by 20 percent; congestive heart failure by 29 percent; and death by 13 percent.

The study’s lead author, Angela M. Thompson, said that while current guidelines call for treatment when blood pressure is 140/90 or higher, “we know from other studies that there’s a graded relationship between cardiovascular disease risk and blood pressure” — starting when the first number, the systolic reading, is as low as 115.

But Ms. Thompson, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, noted that these cutoff points had changed over time. “So the question is: Is this still the best cutoff point? Or if you lower it a little bit, are people going to obtain more benefit?”

March 17 - 23, 2011

31

Control Yourself!

By C. CLAIBORNE RAY

S

everal studies have found that Kegel exercises, in which the muscles that cut off urinary flow are tensed and then relaxed, can help many people control stress-related urinary incontinence, if the exercises are properly done.

In some studies, surgery was found to be more effective, but it has risks not associated with exercise.

In stress incontinence, pelvic floor muscles that support the bladder are weak and the sphincter muscles around the urethra are not strong enough to prevent leakage during movement. A simple Kegel exercise involves cutting off urine flow for six seconds and resuming urination for six seconds. Urologists recommend doing several cycles several times daily.

In a study published in the journal Gerontology, half of a group of incontinent women in a nursing home were treated with both exercises and bladder training, to increase the interval between urinations. “A significant increase in pelvic floor strength was observed in the treatment group compared to the control group,” with improvement in symptoms, the study reported. Kegel exercises have also been used effectively by men and children.

In other studies, Kegel success rates were higher with supervision and biofeedback, and a studyfound that when exercise treatment was initially successful, there was a 66 percent chance that the results would last for 10 years.

32 March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

How Not to Get Sick From a Flight

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

W

HEN Peter J. Sheldon boards a plane to any destination, his safety routine extends well beyond buckling his seat belt and noting the nearest exit. Once at his seat, he meticulously wipes down the cushions, armrests and tray table with disinfectant wipes. He refuses to touch the in-flight magazines and avoids using the restroom if at all possible. Since he began his in-flight cleansing routine he says he has weathered countless stares from other passengers but has never gotten ill from a flight.

“I’ve become a cautious germ freak,” said Mr. Sheldon, an executive at a commercial cleaning company. As someone who thinks about germs for a living, Mr. Sheldon may be more neurotic than most, yet a look at the growing number of products catering to traveling germaphobes suggests he’s not alone.

A combination of factors, including the H1N1 flare-up of 2009, recent bedbug infestations at hotels and increasingly crowded flights that put passengers in closer proximity to one another, has made people more concerned about the germs and bugs they can pick up while traveling. It has also made them more proactive about protecting themselves. As a result, companies are hawking a growing array of products promising to help, including disposable face masks, antiseptic spritzers, airline seat covers and portable air purifiers.

Magellan’s, a company that specializes in travel products, features a two-page spread on “travel health and hygiene helpers” in its spring catalog, including the Nano UV Scanner ($90), which, according

to the catalog, uses ultraviolet light to kill germs on airplane tray tables, hotel bedding and TV remote controls. It is also selling Flight Spray, a “natural antiseptic” made with turmeric root that “helps prevent viral infections by creating an unsuitable environment for inhaled germs to reproduce” ($15.85). The health and hygiene category has increased 18 percent since 2006, the company says. Among the new offerings this year: a range of bed bug protectors, including organic sprays that are said to kill the critters, and luggage covers.

“Travelers hunker down to see who their neighbors are and are paranoid that they are flying in a sealed infections hospital ward,” said Stanley Weinberg, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Wein Products, which makes a small air filter that hangs around your neck called the Ultra-Mini Air Supply (about $135), which the company says uses ionic technology to reduce pollutants in the air. “Our Air Supply revenue has doubled over the past three years because of infection concerns,” he added.

Concerns among passengers that using such products might brand them as over-the-top neurotics seem to be diminishing, at least according to Angela Aaron, a fashion stylist who created and sells cover slips that fit over airplane seats to reduce exposure to germs. “In the beginning, people thought that you’d have to be phobic to use this product,” she said, but added that interest from both travelers and airline employees alike have encouraged her. “It’s airline stewards and stewardesses who are the most emphatic about what a valid idea they think it is,” Ms. Aaron said.

Although no data exists to suggest that more passengers are getting sick on

Wound Care May Matter More Than Antibiotics

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

P

reventing infection in a wound may depend less on choosing the right antibiotic than on simply keeping it clean.

Researchers writing in the March issue of Pediatrics studied 200 children ages 6 months to 18 years. Each had a skin infection (generally from allergies, diaper rash or eczema), and 137 tested positive for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus, or MRSA. The subjects were randomly assigned to receive either clindamycin, an antibiotic that is effective against MRSA, or cephalexin, one that is less active against it.

After two to three days, 97 percent of those on clindamycin had improved, and so had 94 percent of those on cephalexin. Of the nine whose infections were worse at this point, three were on clindamycin and six on cephalexin, an insignificant difference. There was much less improvement among children under a year old, no matter which drug was given.

The lead author, Dr. Aaron E. Chen, who was with Johns Hopkins when the study was done (he is now at the University of Pennsylvania), said he was not prepared to conclude that antibiotics are useless in treating such infections. But he added: “The most important part is good wound care, drainage of lesions and close follow-up. Antibiotics are probably not as important as we think they are, but we need larger studies to answer that question.”

planes than in the past, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points out on its Web site that “as with other close contact environments, cramped aircraft quarters may facilitate the transmission of influenza virus from person to person or through contact with contaminated surfaces.” And at least one study confirms the obvious: there are germs on planes.

In 2007, Charles P. Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona, swabbed airplane bathrooms and tray tables on eight flights to see what bugs might be lurking onboard.

Four out of six tray tables tested positive for the superbug methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and norovirus, the highly contagious group of viruses that can cause a miserable one- or two-day bout of vomiting, diarrhea and cramping, was found on one tray. Most of the bathrooms he swabbed had E. coli bacteria. Thirty percent of sinks, flush handles and faucet handles had E. coli, as did 20 percent of toilet seats, according to his research.

AIRLINES insist that they work diligently to keep aircraft clean. American Airlines deep-cleans its planes every 30 days on average, washing seat covers and carpets and scrubbing lavatories, bins and tray tables. Southwest introduced a new cleaning regime this year in which it performs a “light” deep-cleanse twice a week and a heavy cleanse each month “where all surfaces, nooks and crannies are thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned,” according to Chris Mainz, a spokesman.

And though many people worry about air quality in planes, it is the shared surfaces touched by passengers throughout the day that often transmit germs. “Cold and flu viruses can survive up to 72 hours on plastic surfaces,” said Dr. Gerba, while noroviruses can survive for two to four weeks.

But germ experts told about these new

products say that many of the offerings may be more effective at subduing psychological fears than in preventing infection. “All you have to do is wash your hands prior to touching your face and also before you eat or drink anything,” said Philip M. Tierno Jr., the director of clinical microbiology and immunology at N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center and the author of “The Secret Life of Germs.” Liberal use of hand sanitizers or disinfectant wipes can also help ward off disease, he said. But other than surgical face masks, which he said might offer some protection against catching a cold from a hacking seatmate, he dismissed most of the products being marketed to travelers as “ineffective” or “inefficient.” For instance, while purifying the air with ions can help reduce airborne pollutants, he said, it can’t protect you from catching a cold. “All the passenger next to you has to do is sneeze, and you’re done,” he said.

Mr. Weinberg of Wein Products, agreed that fliers seated next to a sick passenger are more apt to catch a cold, but countered, “If you can reduce the number of germ particles that reach you, you reduce the probability of inhaling an infective dose.”

Then there are customers like Susan O’Neal, from Scottsdale, Ariz., who travels frequently for philanthropic projects.

She said that the Wein Products Ultra-Mini Air Supply has kept her from getting sick on flights to more than 68 countries. The quiet hum of the battery-operated air filter, which she hangs around her neck when she boards, “makes me feel I’m safe,” she said.

Bottom line: Buying products that make you feel safer and wiping down the airline tray tables and hotel TV remote controls can’t hurt, but they should not be a substitute for diligent hand washing and use of hand sanitizers, which are the best ways to ward off infection.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

33

When Exercise Is Too Much of a Good Thing

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

R

ecently, researchers in Britain set out to study the heart health of a group of dauntingly fit older athletes. Uninterested in sluggards, the scientists recruited only men who had been part of a British national or Olympic team in distance running or rowing, as well as members of the extremely selective 100 Marathon club, which admits runners who, as you might have guessed, have completed at least a hundred marathons.

All of the men had trained and competed throughout their adult lives and continued to work out strenuously. Twelve were age 50 or older, with the oldest age 67; another 17 were relative striplings, ages 26 to 40. The scientists also gathered a group of 20 healthy men over 50, none of them endurance athletes, for comparison. The different groups underwent a new type of magnetic resonance imaging of their hearts that identifies very early signs of fibrosis, or scarring, within the heart muscle. Fibrosis, if it becomes severe, can lead to stiffening or thickening of portions of the heart, which can contribute to irregular heart function and, eventually, heart failure.

The results, published online a few weeks ago in The Journal of Applied Physiology, were rather disquieting. None of the younger athletes or the older nonathletes had fibrosis in their hearts. But half of the older lifelong athletes showed some heart muscle scarring. The affected men were, in each case, those who’d trained the longest and hardest. Spending more years exercising strenuously or completing more marathon or ultramarathon races was, in this study, associated with a greater likelihood of heart damage.

The question of whether years of intense endurance training might, just possibly, be harmful to the heart is hardly new. It arises whenever a seemingly healthy distance runner, cyclist or other endurance athlete suffers a heart attack.

It’s also sometimes invoked by those looking for an excuse not to exercise.

But, to date, science has been hard pressed to establish a clear cause-andeffect link between strenuous exercise and heart damage. A much-discussed 2008 German study of experienced, older marathon runners, for instance, found signs of fibrosis in their hearts more frequently than in a group of less active older men. But some of the racers had taken up regular exercise only late in life, after decades of smoking and other bad health habits. It was impossible to say whether their current heart damage predated their marathon training.

The new study of elite lifelong athletes avoids that pitfall. None of the

athletes were new to exercise. Only one had ever smoked. But even so, the study can’t directly prove that the older athletes’ excruciatingly heavy training loads and decades of elite-level racing caused heart scarring, only that the two were associated with each another.

But another new study, this time in laboratory rats, provides the first solid evidence of a direct link between certain kinds of prolonged exercise and subtle heart damage. For the study, published in the journal Circulation, Canadian and Spanish scientists prodded young, healthy male rats to run at an intense pace, day after day, for three months, which is the equivalent of about 10 years in human terms. The training was deliberately designed to mimic many years of serious marathon training in people, said Dr. Stanley Nattel, a cardiologist who is director of the electrophysiology research program at the Montreal Heart Institute Research Center and a senior author of the study.

The rats had begun their regimens with perfectly normal hearts. At the end of the training period, heart scans showed that most of the rodents had developed diffuse scarring and some structural changes, similar to the changes seen in the human endurance athletes. A control group of unexercised rats had developed no such remodeling of their hearts. The researchers also could manually induce arrhythmias, or disruptions of the heart’s natural electrical rhythm, much more readily in the running rats than in the unexercised animals. Interestingly, when the animals stopped running, their hearts returned to normal within eight weeks.

Most of the fibrosis and other apparent damage disappeared.

What does all of this mean for those of us who dutifully run or otherwise make ourselves sweat several times a week? Probably not much, realistically, said Dr. Paul Thompson, the chief of car-

diology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut and an expert on sports cardiology.

He was one of the peer reviewers for the British athlete study.

“How many people are going to join the 100 Marathon club” or undertake a comparable amount of training? he asked. “Not many. Too much exercise has not been a big problem in America. Most people just run to stay in shape, and for them, the evidence is quite strong that endurance exercise is good” for the heart, he said.

Dr. Nattel agrees. “There is no doubt that exercise in general is very good for heart health,” he said. But the emerging science does suggest that there may be a threshold of distance, intensity or duration beyond which exercise can have undesirable effects.

Unfortunately, it remains impossible, at the moment, to predict just what that threshold is for any given person, and which athletes might be most vulnerable to heart problems as a result of excessive exercise, said Dr. Paul Volders, a cardiologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who wrote an editorial accompanying the recent rat study.

“Let’s say we ask 100 people, all

same age, all same gender, to start a marathon training program at the age of 20 years,” Dr. Volders wrote in an e-mail.

If the runners continued their training uninterrupted for 30 years and scientists then scanned their hearts, “it is very likely (one may say: for sure) that there will be major differences in the tissue of the chambers of the heart between these people,” he wrote. For some, the changes will be beneficial; for others, probably not.

Similarly, because most of the research has been done in men and male animals, it is unclear whether the hearts of long-term female athletes are affected in the same fashion. But Dr. Nattel said it seems likely that the latest finding would also apply to women.

So for now, the best response to the emerging science of excessive exercise is to just keep exercising, but with a low-level buzz of caution. If your heart occasionally races, which could indicate arrhythmia, or otherwise draws attention to itself, Dr. Nattel said, consult a doctor.

But if you exercise regularly and currently have no symptoms, “I think it’s safe to say that you should keep it up,” Dr. Thompson said.

Back Pain Runs in Families

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

H

eavy lifting, overuse and middle age are some of the most familiar risk factors for lower back pain. But for many people, predicting a lifetime of lumbar trouble could be as simple as consulting the family tree.

A growing number of studies are finding that chronic back pain has a strong genetic component. In the past, researchers who looked at families with multiple back patients had trouble ruling out the environmental factors that relatives often share, like similar lifestyles and careers, or habits like smoking and lack of exercise. Now, however, studies have shown a clear connection.

In one large analysis published in February in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, researchers at the University of Utah used records from a large health and genealogic database to study more than a million Utah residents.

As they scoured the data, they focused on people with herniated or degenerating disks — diagnoses that commonly result in chronic pain.

The data showed that having a second-degree relative (aunt, uncle or grandparent) or third-degree relative (cousin) with the condition increased a person’s risk, regardless of environmental factors. And having an immediate family member raised a person’s risk more than four times.

Other studies have strengthened the hypothesis by identifying at least two versions of a gene that produces a collagen protein and appears closely linked to sciatica and disk herniation.

Development of lower back pain appears to have a genetic component.

34 March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Diet Plan With Hormone Has Fans and Skeptics

By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

E

very morning, Kay Brown engages in a ritual similar to a heroin addict’s, or a diabetic’s: she sticks herself with a syringe. Only hers contains hCG, a pregnancy hormone.

Ms. Brown, 35, is not taking hCG to help her bear a child. She believes that by combining the hormone injections with a 500-calorie-a-day diet, she will achieve a kind of weight-loss nirvana: losing fat in all the right places without feeling tired or hungry. “I had a friend who did it before her wedding,” Ms. Brown said. “She looks great.”

Women like Ms. Brown are streaming into doctors’ offices and weight-loss clinics all over the country, paying upward of $1,000 a month for a consultation, a supply of the hormone and the syringes needed to deliver it. More than 50 years after a doctor at a Roman clinic began promoting hCG as a dieting aid, it is as popular as ever, even though there is scant evidence that it makes any difference.

The regimen combines daily injections with a nearstarvation diet, and patients, mostly women, are often enticed by promises that they can lose about a pound a day without feeling hungry. Perhaps even more seductively, they are frequently told that the hCG will prompt their bodies to carry away and metabolize fat that has been stored where they least want it — in their upper arms, bellies and thighs.

In response to inquiries stirred up by the diet’s popularity, the Food and Drug Administration warned in January that “homeopathic” forms of hCG, like lozenges and sprays, sold over the Internet and in some health food stores, are fraudulent and illegal if they claim weight-loss powers.

The injectable, prescription form of hCG, human chorionic gonadotropin, is approved as a treatment for infertility and other uses, and it is legal for doctors to prescribe it “off-label” for weight loss.

But the F.D.A. has also reiterated a warning, first issued in the mid-1970s, that is required on hCG packaging: It has not been shown to increase weight loss, to cause a more “attractive” distribution of fat or to “decrease hunger and discomfort” from low-calorie diets.

The F.D.A. recently received a report of a patient on the hCG diet who had a pulmonary embolism, said Christopher Kelly, a spokesman for the agency. He said the hormo-

ne carried risks of blood clots, depression, headaches and breast tenderness or enlargement.

Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor at Harvard medical school who researches weight-loss supplements, said that aside from the issue of side effects, the use of hCG as a diet tool was “manipulating people to give them the sense that they’re receiving something that’s powerful and potent and effective, and in fact they’re receiving something that’s nothing better than a placebo.”

But unlike other popular diet supplements, hCG, which is derived from the urine of pregnant women, has acquired an aura of respectability because the injections are available only by prescription.

Ms. Brown’s physician, Lionel Bissoon, a well-known society doctor with an office off Central Park West, charges $1,150 for his hCG program, which covers an examination, injection training, a month’s supply of the hormone and syringes, and blood work to monitor for possible trouble.

“From an anecdotal point of view,” Dr. Bissoon said, “physicians all around the country have seen people losing a tremendous amount of weight with this stuff, and you cannot afford to ignore that.”

Another New York doctor, Scott M. Blyer, offers the hCG diet as an adjunct to his cosmetic surgery practice, working with Jacqueline Fulop-Goodling, an orthodontist, out of her office in Midtown. Dr. Fulop-Goodling does not prescribe hCG, but she counsels patients. They charge $800 for a 40-day course of therapy, half-price for repeat rounds; they also require an EKG to make sure the patient has no heart trouble.

One of Dr. Blyer’s patients, a 30-year-old business consultant named May, who asked that her last name not be used because she was embarrassed to be considering the diet, described herself as an “emotional eater.” She is 5-foot-3 and 130 pounds, but said she hoped to shed 20 pounds in time to be a bridesmaid at an April wedding. “So I have just six weeks,” she said.

Dr. Blyer looked uneasy. “Your legs are thin, your face is thin,” he told her. “You’re a very attractive woman.”

But he reassured her that she would lose weight where she wanted to, in her stomach. The hCG, Dr. Blyer said, “tricks your body into a state of pregnancy; it burns off fat so the fetus can get enough calories, but it protects muscle.”

May eventually decided that she did not need to lose much weight and did not go through with the diet.

Dr. Blyer’s explanation of how the hCG diet works resembles a theory first popularized in the 1950s by A. T. W. Simeons, a doctor in Rome who said he had used it on more than 500 patients, and published a paper about it in The Lancet, the British medical journal, in 1954.

In 1995, a Dutch study in The British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology tried to resolve the question of whether the hCG diet really worked by analyzing 14 randomized clinical trials of the diet. Only two, including one co-written by an advocate of the diet, found that people on hCG lost more weight, felt less hunger and had an improved body shape, compared with people on the same 500-calorie diet who received a placebo, like saline injections.

But several studies concluded that the ritual of the daily injection and the instant gratification of quick weight loss helped motivate people to stay on the diet.

However arcane the theory, some doctors say it is theoretically plausible that hCG would create a more toned body, because it can induce the production of male hormones and increase muscle mass.

“There’s a reason Manny Ramirez took it,” said Dr. Martin Keltz, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan. Mr. Ramirez, the baseball star, was suspended for 50 games in 2009 after evidence surfaced that he had used hCG, which is banned by Major League Baseball.

Dr. Keltz said he thought it was possible to redistribute fat with hCG, but, he added, “there are risks, like cardiovascular risks.”

“I would shy away from them,” he continued.

Then there are the nutritional concerns about a diet that some say mimics anorexia. “The average person is going to eat 1,800 to 3,000 calories,” said Kristen Smith, a bariatric surgery dietitian at Montefiore Medical Center.

“I don’t think it promotes healthy long-term eating habits,” she added.

Doctors who prescribe hCG for dieting say that experience is in their favor, even if the research is not. They point to women like Guldal Caba, a 53-year-old psychologist from Toledo, Ohio, who traveled to New York for treatment from Dr. Bissoon. “It was the fat that needed to go — you know behind my bra, that back fat, my belly,” Dr. Caba said.

Ms. Brown, a theater administrator who is 5-foot-8, said she was thrilled to lose six pounds in seven days, and hopeful about reaching her goal of losing 30, which would bring her close to her ideal weight of 135. She said she did not feel hungry and did not obsess about food as she had years ago, when suffering from anorexia.

“A lot of people have a lot of opinions,” Ms. Brown said, “but I don’t want to be a person who feels like my weight is not under my control.”

March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

35

PEOPLE

The Liberation of Lori Berenson

By JENNIFER EGAN

L

ori Berenson has always loved to walk.

When she was a high-school student in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, she walked home at night from her job at Pasta & Cheese, on the Upper East Side, to the apartment where she grew up, on East 25th Street. When she began her prison sentence in Peru, in 1996, for collaborating with a terrorist group, convicted terrorists had to spend 23½ hours a day inside their cells.

Even then, Berenson walked in the 6-by-9foot space she and another woman shared — two steps forward, two steps backward — for hours. “People ask, what did you miss most?” she said in August, two and a half months after she was released on parole, having served nearly 15 years of a 20-year sentence. “This was definitely it.”

It was after dark, and we were taking a rapid, circuitous walk through a park that clutches the crumbly cliff tops in the Miraflores district of Lima, where Berenson and her 15-month-old son, Salvador, had been living since her release. (Berenson’s parole requires that she remain in Peru until 2015.)

They were sharing an apartment with a family friend and, temporarily, Berenson’s parents, who were visiting from New York.

Berenson had recently separated from her husband — Salvador’s father — whom she’d met in prison while he, too, was serving a sentence for terrorism. Soon after his release in 2003, they married, and Salvador was conceived during a conjugal visit. The boy spent his first year of life with Berenson in the women’s prison in Chorrillos, Lima.

In the gusty winter darkness, bicyclists and skateboarders wheeled along paved paths that snaked among graffiti-carved cacti and fluorescently lighted soccer games. Berenson insisted we wait until dark to go out; since her parole, she has been hounded by strangers who scream obscenities or call her “assassin” and “murderer.” Just that day, on her way back from the playground with her mother and Salvador, “this woman said: ‘You’re under house arrest! You should be in your house!’ She was with a cellphone, taking pictures. I don’t like going to the park, because people stare at you and make you feel as though you’re not welcome.”

Berenson wasn’t under house arrest, but she might as well have been; the media frenzy surrounding her release on May 27 meant that during her first 10 days of freedom, she never went outside. A horde of photographers stormed the car in which she was driven away from the prison — three cameramen thrust themselves into the backseat; more jumped onto the roof, leaving dents; a TV van crashed into the back. Another gantlet awaited her outside her apartment building, surging against the surrounding gate with such pressure that it buckled. For many days, the press lingered outside, interviewing Miraflorans incensed at having Berenson in their midst.

Such an outpouring of rage at a

40-year-old woman, mother to a toddler, who was convicted in her mid-20s of abetting a terrorist plot that never took place, is a measure of the degree to which Peruvians are still traumatized by the violence that convulsed their country during the years when the Shining Path warred with the military and nearly 70,000 Peruvians were killed. It also underscores the fact that terrorism, all but defunct in Peru for more than a decade, is still a hot political issue.

In person, Berenson is an unlikely fulcrum for all this drama. She is slight and mild-mannered, with wire-rimmed glasses, an inquisitive gaze and wavy brown hair that she often wears in a single braid down her back. She dresses simply — often in jeans, occasionally dangly earrings. Her speech is polite and a little stiff, in the manner of both a native English-speaker who has lived much of her life in another language, and a person who resists self-revelation.

When she’s comfortable, a dry sense of humor emerges — a willingness to laugh at her predicament. She is most forthcoming on general topics: Peruvian politics, the economy and its inequities. Personal questions she often greets with a hurried, “Yes, yes, yes,” or “Oh, no, no,” as if she were physically brushing the query away. You feel that she would go to almost any length to avoid exposing her emotional life to a relative stranger: deny its existence — even forget it, as she appeared to when I asked, on our walk, what part of her early life she remembered as especially happy. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought of that.”

Berenson was first detained on Nov. 30, 1995, when she was 26. She and another woman were pulled off a public bus after leaving the Peruvian Congress building.

Berenson had journalist’s credentials and assignments from two American publications; the other woman, whom Berenson said she’d hired as a photographer, was the wife of Nestor Cerpa, a leader of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or M.R.T.A. Within hours of the women’s arrest, police officers raided a house Berenson had rented with a male friend who was an M.R.T.A. member. (She had moved out before the raid.) The police engaged in an 11-hour gun battle with M.R.T.A. fighters who were holed up inside; M.R.T.A. members and one police officer were killed before the M.R.T.A. surrendered. The M.R.T.A. was a much smaller insurgent group than the dominant Shining Path, and historically less violent. But on the top two floors of the house, which Berenson had sublet to another M.R.T.A. leader, the police discovered a large cache of weapons and ammunition, along with evidence of a plan to forcibly seize the Congress and hold its members hostage. Berenson claimed she was innocent: she had known the people by different names, she said, had no idea they were M.R.T.A. members and had never visited the top two floors of the house after subletting them for what she thought was going to be a school.

Radical Progression (From left, top) Berenson at age 8; at M.I.T. in 1988; at her damaging televised appearance after her arrest, 1996. (From left, bottom) Rhoda and Mark Berenson at the U.N., 1996; with her son, Salvador, after her parole was revoked, August 2010; after her release on parole in November 2010 with Aníbal Apari, her lawyer and the father of her son.

Five weeks after her arrest, on Jan. 8, 1996, Berenson was taken to a small auditorium in the headquarters of Dincote, Peru’s antiterrorist police, and presented to the press. Her performance was indelible: she took the stage bellowing in Spanish, hands clenched at her sides, long dark hair tumbling down both sides of her face. After denouncing suffering and injustice in Peru, she denied that she was a terrorist by shouting: “In the M.R.T.A. there are no criminal terrorists. It is a revolutionary movement!”

— words that, to Peruvian ears, amounted to a confession. She looked scary: big, ungoverned and enraged. To this day, clips from that 15-year-old tirade are part of any news story about her on Peruvian TV; stills from it, in which she appears to be baring her teeth, appeared on the front pages of Peruvian newspapers when she was paroled. Her father told me ruefully: “Forty-four seconds, and it ruined her life. It doesn’t take much.”

There are practical explanations for Berenson’s behavior that day; she was told by the military police that there were no microphones and that she would have to shout to be heard. She spent the prior four days in a rat-ridden cell with a woman who had five gunshot wounds; Berenson was strung out and sleepless. Before facing the media, she had no access to her lawyer. She was arrested at a time when the Peruvian government, under President Alberto Fujimori, had achieved a state of hyperefficiency at shutting terrorism down. Fujimori was elected in 1990, at the height of Shining Path aggression, and in 1992 he dissolved the Congress, suspended the Constitution and passed a number of laws that gave the military expanded powers to fight terrorism. The leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, was captured that year. By the time of Berenson’s arrest, thousands of people had been imprisoned for terrorism,

many innocent; Fujimori’s Law of Repentance offered strong incentives to name names, and little evidence was required to convict. (Fujimori himself is now serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations committed during his government’s war against the Shining Path.)

Recalling her mind-set that day, Berenson told me: “I was indignant about the whole judicial process. The lawyer had already told me they were asking for 30 years, no parole. It was like: I have nothing to lose.

I saw such inhumanity, particularly in the case of the people who were wounded.

And thinking that no one would ever hear about it. I just said, Well, I know someone will listen to me if I say something. That was the most naïve and stupid thing I did, was thinking that by saying that, it would be helpful.”

It was helpful to Fujimori, who got credit for locking up a dangerous American who now personified, in the public mind, the irrational violence that had racked Peru.

Cynthia McClintock, a professor of political science at George Washington University who has studied Peru since the 1970s, told me: “That she was going to be behind bars served Fujimori’s purpose of highlighting the success of his intelligence work, and the government’s judicial process. They did a very good job of showing the activists in these movements in their worst way.”

It was also helpful to the prosecution, which upped its request from 30 years to life in prison without parole. Three days later, Berenson was convicted of treason against the Peruvian State for being an M.R.T.A. leader and financier. She was sentenced, along with 22 others, by hooded military judges — then a customary procedure for dealing with accused terrorists. Her parents were not allowed to be present.

Continues on page 36

PEOPLE

36 March 17 - 23, 2011

Comes from page 35 It’s hard not to wonder — as people close to Berenson do — whether things might have unfolded differently for her had she cowered, rather than shouted, before the press, or betrayed even a modicum of the panic and despair most people would have felt in such circumstances. But anyone close to Berenson knows that she would never expose herself in that way — indeed, her toughness may extend to not even perceiving her own vulnerability in the way most people would. “When they sentenced me to life, I started cracking up,” she told me. “It might have been sort of a nervous reaction. They started saying things I supposedly had done, and it was like, What?

What’s going on? It was insane.”

A few days later, she was transferred with a group of about 40 prisoners to the infamous Yanamayo prison in Puno: unheated, at an altitude of 12,000 feet. They were flown in a cargo plane with their heads covered, guarded by armed soldiers, then moved onto a bus. “I don’t remember it being particularly scary,” she told me. “My logic at that time was different: you’re put in this bus, you can’t really hold on because you’re handcuffed behind your back, and you need to hold on because you might fall on your face.” She chuckled, remembering. “And so that was your concern.”

Not perceiving your own vulnerability is a bit like not perceiving physical pain; it may allow you to tolerate extremes that would crush other people — as Berenson certainly has — but it can also hinder your ability to calculate personal risk. For all of her emotional self-protectiveness, at critical junctures Berenson has been unwilling, or possibly unable, to perceive the dangers incurred by her words or actions. “My coming here, in retrospect I can say it wasn’t the best decision,” she told me, with a wry laugh, “but I was fascinated by the diversity of cultures and peoples, and I guess I didn’t see the consequences of not just coming here but getting involved.”

Berenson’s emotional opacity has made her the locus of myriad contradictory visions: to many Peruvians, she is chilly and unrepentant; to Americans who worked for

her release and visited her in prison, she is brave and stoic — almost saintly. But what I heard most often, especially from women, was that Berenson had reminded them of themselves: young, passionate, risk-taking.

Robin Kirk, director of the Duke Human Rights Center, who worked in Peru as a journalist throughout the dangerous upheaval of the 1980s, said she identified with Berenson but also — as a mother — with Berenson’s parents: “Your bright, adventurous child goes off, and you have to be supportive, of course, but what kind of things are going to happen to change their lives?

For me, it was all for the better; I would never have traded that experience in Peru.

And I had good luck.”

Lori Berenson had a middle-class Manhattan childhood. Her parents were professors: Rhoda taught physics at Nassau Community College; Mark taught statistics at Baruch College. Her sister, Kathy, now a research psychologist, is two years older.

When Lori was in kindergarten, the family moved from Queens to an apartment in the East Midtown Plaza housing complex, in the East 20s (her parents still live there), and Lori went to Public School 40 and Junior High School 104. The Berensons were neither overtly political nor religious. “I’m not from a political family at all,” Berenson told me.

By all accounts, Lori was a busy, sociable, highly musical child. She played the lead in junior-high productions of “Annie” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” An organized, diligent student, she was the sort of kid who resists telling her parents exactly what she’s up to. “They come home at 3 o’clock; ‘How was your day?’ ” Rhoda recalled. “For Lori, it was: ‘It was great. I’m leaving.’ ” She continued, “Quite honestly, she does take after me.”

All three female Berensons are profoundly private — to an extent that seems quaint in our self-exposing era. In October, Kathy explained to me why she preferred not to provide childhood anecdotes about Lori: “To some extent, my private memories of me and my sister as a child are all I have left that hasn’t been already given over to this traumatic series of events,” she said, with visible discomfort. “So it’s both

Berenson before a court in Lima, Peru, defending her parole, January 2011.

The San Juan Weekly my private nature and my sense that we’ve already given it all away.”

Mark Berenson, Lori’s father, is the vivid exception: effusive and mercurial, prone to occasional exaggeration and oversharing, he routinely embarrasses his wife and daughters. The writer of many textbooks on statistics and a self-professed workaholic, he berated himself for not having listened enough when Lori might have wanted to talk as a child. “I was not a good parent,” he told me, over his wife’s protests that he was better than most men his age. “I called for them at school, I took them home, but they were talking, and it went in one ear and out the other.” According to Mark, when Lori left for Central America, she made him a mixed tape that began with Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” followed

by Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” — that classic ballad of parental neglect. “She zinged it to me,” he said.

A love of animals prompted Lori to become a vegetarian by age 8 — in 1978 — with such well-reasoned vehemence that her mother and sister soon followed suit.

At 12, she began spending her summers in the Hamptons as a mother’s helper, the first of many jobs she held, and saving serious money.

In 1980, when Lori was 11, three American nuns were murdered in El Salvador.

“That stayed in my head,” she told me. “I remember hearing about it, seeing a movie about it, saying: ‘Wow, it’s terrible, it’s not fair. They were helping poor people.’ I wanted to be a nun. Of course, you can’t do it if you’re not religious. You adopt another kind of religion, I guess, and that was sort of what I did.”

Berenson is not a creator of romantic self-narratives. When she speaks of adopting another kind of religion, she means that at M.I.T., where she arrived in 1987, after graduating from LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, she had a conversion experience. She began working for Prof. Martin Diskin, who was doing research on the policies of granting political asylum to refugees from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. She learned that those who received asylum were likely to be the ones fleeing groups that the United States opposed: the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, or the guerrillas fighting inEl Salvador.

“The others would get sent back to be killed, even though they had been tortured,” she told me. “Why wouldn’t you give someone who’s being pursued refugee status? Politics. My awakening to the world.”

Berenson spoke of this revelation with a forceful clarity I rarely heard in discussions of her personal experience, which she tends to minimize. Her political views, expressed in periodic statements from prison that her parents posted on their FreeLori.org Web site, haven’t measurably changed over the years; on the contrary, her discovery of a world built on oppression, exploitation and imperialism has — in Berenson’s view — been ratified by her experience in Peru. “I realized that behind suffering was politics.

It wasn’t just like, Oh, these people are poor

and they’re destined to suffer. No. There are interests behind that — political, economic — in having a social class be relegated to dying in misery, and being exploited, and being harmed, and suffering repression.”

At M.I.T., Berenson lived in co-ed housing off-campus. Her roommate, Kristen Gardner, still a close friend, recalled: “She had a great sense of humor, she played the guitar. We both had a lot of friends who were involved in politics. Neither of us were big partiers. It was very down-to-earth.”

During spring break of that freshman year, Berenson joined an interfaith religious delegation to El Salvador. “When I got there, there was something about it that I just loved,” she told me. “I loved the hills. I’ve been a city person all of my life, and saying, Wait a minute, this is a different world, and I want to be part of this world.”

She lasted only one more semester at M.I.T. “In high school, I was a dedicated student,” she told me. “I was excessively disciplined. And I just decided it was all wrong — my vocation was something else.”

Mark Berenson recalled her decision with a lingering air of helplessness. “What could we do?” he said. “She had her own money. We taught her to be independent. So we said: ‘O.K. Go.’ Hoping that it wouldn’t be a horror.”

After Christmas break of her sophomore year, Berenson went to El Salvador for three months with a student delegation.

Back in the United States, she worked briefly for the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, or Cispes, in New York and Washington. “And then someone asked me if I would be willing to work with an F.M.L.N. representation in Washington.”

The F.M.L.N., or Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, is now the ruling party of El Salvador; its candidate was elected president in 2009. But in 1989, when Berenson took the job, the F.M.L.N. was an aggregate of five Marxist guerrilla groups locked in a long civil war with the oligarchy of El Salvador. In early 1990, Berenson moved to Nicaragua to work for the F.M.L.N. there. The work was mostly secretarial, but she also had contact with the Salvadoran refugee community. When a cease-fire was declared and peace accords signed in 1992, Berenson moved to San Salvador and became the secretary of one of the F.M.L.N.’s commanding generals, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a signer of the peace accords (he is now vice president of El Salvador). Though she wrote letters home and made occasional visits, she was distant from her parents during her years in Central America. They never knew her exact role with the F.M.L.N. until after her arrest.

Close proximity to a successful guerrilla war, peace negotiation and ensuing political legitimacy must have been a heady experience for a person of 22, but Berenson would acknowledge this only theoretically: “It was feeling like I was part of a project that was going to help resolve problems of inequality — social, economic.” As I puzzled over her reluctance to evoke that triumphant moment, I found myself recalling her sister’s reason for not divul

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The San Juan Weekly

On Parole Lori Berenson at the apartment where she is living in Lima.

The conditions of her parole require her to remain in Peru until 2015 ging childhood memories: that in giving them away, she would diffuse their private power.

By 1994, two years into the peace, Berenson had grown unhappy. She married a Salvadoran economics student, but the marriage quickly foundered. “In civilian life, the urgency wasn’t the same,” she told me.

“Since I had dedicated 12 hours a day — almost 24 hours — exclusively to a project that was positive, once I stopped having that level of dedication, I felt as though there was something wrong.”

Berenson left El Salvador in October 1994, traveled in South America and arrived in Peru in November with plans to stay.

The morning after our walk in August, under the depthless white sky that seems to hang over Lima in winter, I visited Berenson in her apartment, on the corner of a quiet residential street. Parolees are expected to live with family; because Berenson is separated from her husband, her friend Marie Manrique — Salvador’s godmother — is serving that function. Berenson was supposed to have moved into Manrique’s apartment in another neighborhood, but shortly before her release, the antiterrorist police came to the home of Manrique’s landlord and asked whether she knew that Lori Berenson would be moving in. The landlord hadn’t known, and she threatened to evict Manrique. There was a last-minute scramble for new housing; a succession of landlords refused to have Berenson under their roofs.

The current apartment, which came furnished, is more expensive than they’d like (Berenson’s parents pay the rent), and a sixth-floor walk-up is not ideal for a toddler and a stroller, but they were lucky to get it.

Berenson and Salvador share a bedro-

om beside a kitchen alcove, where a flight of steps leads down to the front door. Berenson hadn’t fully unpacked, and several fat woven-plastic bags with black prison markings were barricading the top of the stairs to keep Salvador from tumbling down. He settled for tossing a small car over the bags, listening with satisfaction as it ricocheted down the stairs and smiling impishly. He was 15 months old; a sturdy, sweet-faced boy with dark curls and a fierce attachment to his mother, whom he liked to keep in sight at all times.

Mark and Rhoda Berenson were getting ready to take Salvador to the park, as they did each day. Mark is tall and boyish, with a clipped gray mustache and beard; Rhoda is tiny and serene, clearly the anchor of the two. Together, they form a kind of living encyclopedia of their daughter’s legal history, finishing each other’s sentences as they narrate a litany of close calls, near misses and what ifs. (What if they’d hired the Miami lawyer they refer to as Mr. Slick, who cost $60,000? What if Lori had gone to Oberlin instead of M.I.T.?) Since Berenson’s arrest, they’d devoted themselves to her release, both retiring early from their jobs and, for a time, renting a Washington office to lobby members of Congress. (In recent years, they accepted new teaching positions.)

During the four months in 1998-99 that Berenson spent isolated at Socabaya prison near Arequipa, her parents alternated visits every two weeks: flying to Lima, spending the night on the airport floor, catching another flight at dawn. In fact, Berenson’s greatest source of conflict with her parents arose from her wish that they would do less. At a certain point, she told me, “I just said: ‘To hell with it. It’s over. We lost.’ ” She begged

her parents to suspend their efforts. “It’s very painful to see them wasting their lives away,” she said. “And it just created an expectation of something changing when I knew nothing was going to change.”

From the start, the Berensons’ chief hope was that the United States government would effect their daughter’s release. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who in 1989 worked with the State Department to negotiate the freedom of a young American woman in El Salvador under uncannily similar circumstances, said the State Department’s efforts fell short in Berenson’s case. “The government in Washington didn’t act with alertness in the way that a government committed to protecting its own citizens ought to,” he told me.

But Dennis Jett, who was the United States ambassador to Peru from 1996 to 1999, vigorously rejected the notion that the State Department could have done more. “What leverage do we have over Peru?”he asked.

“I think this is a colonial, somewhat-racist mentality that these countries are always wrong, and all we have to do is apply pressure on any underdeveloped country” and it will deem an American prisoner innocent.

As Mark and Rhoda Berenson prepared to leave for the park with Salvador, he realized that his mother wasn’t going along and began to cry for her. Berenson hugged him tightly at the top of the stairs and kissed him goodbye. Her tenderness with her son is a striking contrast to her usual reserve, and his wish to cling to her was made more poignant by the fact that her parole was in jeopardy. The state prosecutor had appealed it within days of her release in May, challenging whether she’d served enough time (prisoners can reduce their sentences through work or study, and Berenson had done so), as well as whether her psychological reports — which must affirm a prisoner’s rehabilitation — were credible.

If her parole was revoked, she would have to return to jail for five more years. By law, Salvador could remain with her until age 3, but by now he’d grown used to running freely in the park. “He’s had a taste of life outside of prison,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy for him to go back.” Salvador could return to New York with his grandparents (as he would have to in nearly two years), but he was still so small, and nursing overnight.

“I’m tense, and I’m very tense with him,” she told me. “I feel bad about it.” She had been trying, subtly, to prepare Salvador for a possible future separation. “When we’re alone together or he’s going to sleep, I tell him that I love him and I’ll always love him, but I may not be with him physically always,” she said.

There was an enforced intimacy about life in the Chorrillos prison. Berenson was among women from the M.R.T.A., some of whom she’d known from other prisons, and likened to a big family. Her history of good behavior meant that she was allowed to move freely between her cell and a communal courtyard. “I used to be with Salvador from 6 a.m. until about 7 at night, and then sometimes we’d get together to watch

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the news with other inmates from 7 to 8,” Berenson told me. “I’d take him into the cell and close the door, and it’s like a playpen.

I could make his food or mush his banana.” But when she needed to wash clothes or clean the cell, she would avail herself of “aunties,” fellow inmates who enjoyed caring for Salvador. “They’d give him his dinner and a bath, and I would join them at 8:30 or something, depending on how many clothes I had to wash.”

Berenson says she met Salvador’s father, Aníbal Apari, at Yanamayo prison, where Apari was transferred as part of a 15-year sentence for being an M.R.T.A. militant. Now a lawyer who often litigates on behalf of prisoners (despite their separation, he was defending Berenson’s right to parole), Apari is a rangy, thoughtful man, easily moved to laughter. When I spoke with him in his office in December, he affectionately recalled hearing Berenson’s notorious press presentation while in another prison, on a contraband radio. “Of course everyone said, ‘Well, now she’s sunk,’ ” he told me through a translator. “I only heard her; I didn’t see her. I thought it was courageous, a bit ingenuous.”

When Apari was moved to Yanamayo prison a few months later, he spotted Berenson on his second day. Prisoners for terrorism were housed apart and separated by group. He was able to get someone to deliver her a note wrapped in Scotch tape. She sent back a note of her own.

“When you’re in prison, the only way you can show affection is through gestures,” he said. “The authorities allowed us once a week to exchange presents with the women.

Some people sent sweets or candies. I sent a yellow scarf to Lori. It’s cold up there, of course. I saw her with my scarf on — that’s a sign. There was a spontaneous chemistry between us, a natural feeling.” They overlapped at Yanamayo for a year; then Berenson was moved to Socabaya prison. They communicated by mail from that point on; Apari would send a letter via his father in Chile, who would send it to Berenson’s father in New York, who would send it to Berenson in Peru. The cycle took about two months.

When Apari was released on parole, in 2003, they were married while Berenson was at Huacariz prison.

Berenson said, “The idea was that once we were both free, we would celebrate it in a different manner.” Apari was allowed two conjugal visits each month, and for the first four or five years, he visited often. Berenson wouldn’t discuss the details of why the marriage didn’t work out, but she told me: “The last couple of years, he came less. I knew there must be a reason for that.” In their final year, Apari visited only twice, and on one of those visits, Salvador was conceived. The couple separated before their son was born. In retrospect, Berenson said, she wasn’t surprised that the stresses of prison proved too much for them. “We were far away,” she said. “A lot of not being able to express emotions for a long time. It’s very common.”

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Comes from page 37 At the mention of the separation, Apari grew sober, uneasy. “It doesn’t make me happy,” he said, “but these things happen.”

Apari became involved with the M.R.T.A. as a young man through his Lima neighborhood, long before Berenson arrived in Peru. He stressed what I’d heard from others: that the group had come into existence in the early 1980s largely to oppose the neo-Maoist Shining Path. Robin Kirk, who covered the Shining Path as a journalist, told me: “The Shining Path, especially for Latin America, was absolutely new. It was like a cult. The Khmer Rouge in Spanish.” Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor, formed the group in 1970 and served as its prophet and commander in chief, later directing his militants to kill anyone who rejected their principles or failed to do their bidding. There was a scant social program; the vision was simply to wipe out the past and let the future take care of itself.

“In a way, the M.R.T.A. wanted to show that you can have an armed struggle in a different way,” Apari told me. “More like the Sandinistas, like what happened in Cuba, where politics were the most important thing, and weapons were simply a means. When confrontation was impossible to avoid, it should be done respecting the adversary.” This formula proved successful in Latin American countries in addition to El Salvador; the current presidents of Brazil, Uruguay and Nicaragua are all former guerrillas. But the violent unreason of the Shining Path made Peru a different case, and toward the end, many say, the M.R.T.A. began to emulate its more cutthroat rival.

The Peruvian historian Nelson Manrique told me, through a translator: “A lot of the M.R.T.A. leaders were sent to prison, and those who took the lead were the moremilitant leaders, which gave it a different sort of character. They said: ‘We’re acting like little nuns. We’re not growing, and the Shining Path, which is brutal, is growing.’ ” By the time Berenson arrived in Lima in 1994, the Shining Path was severely diminished, and the M.R.T.A. had been reduced to a skeleton crew with one big idea left: to seize a public place, take hostages and demand the release of M.R.T.A. prisoners. A year after Berenson was jailed, the group did exactly that: 14 of its members, led by Nestor Cerpa, stormed the residence of the Japanese ambassador to Peru during a party, and held it, along with 72 hostages, for four months. (Berenson was one of the inmates whose release the M.R.T.A. sought, but none were liberated; the siege ended with a commando raid of the residence by government forces, who killed or executed all 14 M.R.T.A. members.)

Berenson’s life sentence was nullified in 2000 by the Fujimori government, which stated that new evidence had come to light that she was not an M.R.T.A. leader. She was granted a new civilian trial in 2001, although much of the evidence against her was the same. Throughout that three-month trial, which was televised, Berenson asserted her innocence, insisting that she hadn’t

known her various associates were M.R.T.A. members yet also refusing to condemn the group. While this time she was absolved of being a member of the M.R.T.A., she was still convicted of collaboration: renting the house for the group and entering Congress in the guise of a journalist, with the intention of assisting in a takeover. She received a new sentence of 20 years, including time served.

Today, while Berenson refuses to discuss in detail what happened during the year she spent in Peru before her arrest, she does admit that she knew her associates were M.R.T.A. members (without knowing their real names — a customary practice in subversive groups) and willingly helped them to rent the house. “It might not have been intentional, but the bottom line is: I did collaborate with them,” she said.

“Shortly before I was detained, I had the sense that things were out of my control,” she told me, referring to activities in the rented house. “I didn’t imagine what it was, the magnitude of it. But I knew enough to have been able to say, I should get out of this.” Instead, she said, “I avoided the situation. I rented another place. Very head in the sand.”

What she never knew, she still insists, was that weapons were being amassed in the house, or that violent action was being planned. She maintained that her visits to Congress were genuine journalistic explorations. “At that time in Fujimori’s dictatorship, Congress was the only place that there was some sort of democratic process.” She called the notion that she was casing the building for a takeover “ridiculous,” since anything she might have seen there was public knowledge.

No one I spoke with in Peru seems ever to have believed Berenson’s original claim of total ignorance, and such an obvious untruth may have been self-defeating — not just legally, but by further damaging her image. When I asked Berenson why she had hewed to that story during her civilian trial, she told me it was because she was innocent of the charge of posing as a journalist for the purpose of seizing Congress.

More critically, had she admitted any inside knowledge of the group, she said, the Fujimori government would have pressured her to implicate those around her. “They wanted me to say: ‘I condemn them. They are horrible people. They’re terrorists who obliged me to do this.’ Look, I didn’t believe in social justice since I was young to get up there and blame someone else for my own wrongdoings. Maybe I was naïve, maybe I was convinced of things that weren’t true, and I intentionally avoided dealing with reality. But no one put me at gunpoint.” When I pressed her on whether the M.R.T.A. trapped her, she responded, “I was willingly trapped.”

The days I spent with Berenson in August were marked by the drumbeat of her approaching parole hearing, scheduled for Aug. 16. The day before, while her parents took Salvador to the park, she came out to lunch with Marie Manrique and me in a neighborhood far from Miraflores — the

The San Juan Weekly first time she ventured to a restaurant since her release.

Manrique, who is half-Peruvian but grew up in the United States, is Berenson’s age, open-faced and garrulous; she worked for years in human rights and is now studying political journalism. She first read about Berenson in 1996 and began visiting her in prison a few years later.

I asked how her Peruvian friends felt about Manrique’s making Berenson’s parole possible by living with her. Reactions were mixed, she said; she’d just received an e-mail from a friend who referred to Berenson as soberbia, meaning “haughty.”

“You know, I can’t win,” Berenson said unhappily. “I’m quiet, I don’t joke around. I’m just like that.”

“Here’s a question,” Manrique said.

“You didn’t cry.”

She meant that Berenson had never once broken down in public — a fact Peruvians saw as proof of her coldness and lack of remorse.

“I’ve always been a very private person,” Berenson said. “I sometimes have cried in front of people — I haven’t intended to — it’s something I’d definitely avoid doing. For dignity.”

Berenson told us that on the day she left prison last May, she avoided saying goodbye to her fellow inmates — to women she regarded as family — purely to prevent being exposed in an emotional state when she appeared before the phalanx of press that was waiting outside. “I said goodbye from the door, and they said, ‘Oh, you’re coming back,’ and I said, ‘No.’ ” Manrique suggested that letting her emotions show at tomorrow’s hearing — even just a little — would only make her more sympathetic.

“They would just make fun of it,” Berenson said.

“I give that to you,” Manrique said.

“Some press would be like, ‘She’s faking.’

But then other people would be like, ‘O.K., there’s something under that hard veneer, and it’s a person that’s worried about five and a half more years in prison.’ If something cracks for a few seconds, it’s O.K.” Berenson considered. “For me, it

would be much harder to crack and be able to control it,” she said.

At the hearing, she seemed relaxed.

She wore a pair of gray slacks with a matching jacket and silver hoop earrings. It was a small, crammed courtroom. Berenson was allowed five minutes to speak, during which she apologized if her presence in Peru contributed to violence and expressed her wish to be with her family and to raise her son.

Back at the apartment that evening, she was upbeat. “I think I did it better than I’ve ever done before,” she said. “Public speaking is not my strong point.”

Although the three judges would have 15 days to render a decision, Berenson had already begun packing; she felt that the decision would come fast and would probably go against her. Like virtually everyone I spoke to, she believed that the furor around her parole had been politically engineered (her address was printed in newspapers and broadcast on TV) and that politics would most likely land her back in prison.

“Her release fell into the lap of the reactionary right in Peru, and it was like a gift from Santa Claus,” Jo-Marie Burt, an associate professor of political science at George Mason University, told me. “What they try to do is manipulate the fact of Lori’s release, use it politically to discredit the judiciary, which is in the process of prosecuting a handful of members of the armed and police forces for gross abuses of human rights.” These forces are believed to be responsible for roughly 45 percent of the nearly 70,000 killed over two decades of conflict.

I left Berenson’s apartment that night wondering whether she was being alarmist.

But less than 48 hours later, she and Salvador were back in jail; because of the last-minute change in Berenson’s housing, the police had inspected the Miraflores apartment after the court papers had been filed. Berenson would have to remain in prison until the technicality was addressed. Then, assuming that she was paroled again, another hearing would be scheduled to decide the issues.

Berenson turned herself in at the U.S. Embassy; the press was tipped off and mobbed her on the way to a holding cell. Carrying Salvador, she stepped from a car into

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

and sweets. “There is some satisfaction of doing something with your hands: it begins, it ends, you clean up and it’s gone,” she said. But in retrospect, she seemed to regret her utter commitment to that job.

“It was all day and sometimes all night. I think I got so absorbed in the whole thing, I just felt time was passing in vain. I could have done other things — reading, writing.”

Recently, she enrolled in an online translation course at New York University and, with Manrique’s help, was managing to keep pace from jail. As for her broader goal, it was still unclear. “I’m not going to have anything to do with a violent organizaA Moment of Calm Berenson prepared her son for the chance tion,” she told me, “but that that she could have returned to prison. does not mean that I accept the status quo; I have to do something about it.” an aggressive throng of cameras, all of pushing the stroller, for more than an hour.

Berenson was granted which captured his panicked tears and Certainly prison life had improved since parole a second time — still contested, and Berenson’s visible strain as she tried to Fujimori’s reign; for the first year she was therefore conditional — and released from at Yanamayo, Berenson was not allowed a jail on Nov. 5, 2010, two and a half months shield him and push her way to the door.

Berenson and Salvador were still in single visitor. After that, she could see her after her reimprisonment. She and Salvajail two months later, in mid-October. The family for only a half-hour through a do- dor made a quiet return to the Miraflores clerical problem had been quickly solved, uble layer of mesh that made them hard apartment, without the uproar of the last but the state prosecutor was trying other to see and impossible to touch. Prisoners time. When I visited the next month, in legal maneuvers to prevent her from being in for terrorism weren’t allowed music, early December, the sun was finally shiradios or any media — they were utterly ning and the heavy, gray waves below the paroled again.

Salvador had been running a high cut off. In Yanamayo, the guards often Miraflores cliffs were studded with surfers. fever and was on antibiotics; he wept and withheld water; inmates blocked up the When I arrived at Berenson’s apartment, clung to Berenson when she tried to leave drains of the prison yard during storms after dark, she seemed harried and worn him with the woman in the next cell while so they could collect the dirty rainwater. out. She was still awaiting a date for her she went to speak briefly with the prison Berenson joined other prisoners to protest next parole hearing. Salvador was recovedoctor. She’d been having bouts of vertigo these conditions with hunger strikes, but ring from the croup, and her vertigo was so — a recurrent, undiagnosed problem. Sin- now she underplayed the hardships and severe that day that she was afraid to bathe ce her return to jail, it had been so severe spoke warmly of the community: singing him without someone nearby. Her parents that she’d had to crawl sometimes to keep together; calling out chess moves in virtual had gone back to their jobs in New York, games; the euphoria of someone’s being and she was grappling with the problem from falling.

She and Salvador were sharing their released. of trying — without child care — to create At the beginning, many terrorist pri- some kind of routine. cell with another inmate; the bottom bunk, where they slept, had sheets decorated soners, like Berenson, had life sentences.

She’d had fewer confrontations outwith lions, birds and zebras. The front wall “It was somewhat carefree because you doors, she said, but she seemed haunted of the cell was bars draped with linens for didn’t have any concrete sense of the fu- by some recent ones. A woman said, both privacy. A single fluorescent bulb hung ture,” she told me. “In 2003 a lot of people to Berenson and her father, on separate from the ceiling, but natural light came had new trials” and received reduced sen- occasions when they were with Salvador: through frosted hallway windows. Clo- tences. “There was definitely a sense of, “Watch after that kid. Something is going thing hung from hangers attached to loops O.K., this is the amount of time I’m going to happen to him.” Another time, a woman of string suspended from the ceiling. In the to be here.” Berenson’s second trial had with two dogs called Berenson “garbage.” corner opposite the bed was a kind of stall already happened. In 2002, the Inter-Ame“She came up behind me and gave an that seemed to be both toilet and sink; there rican Commission on Human Rights de- order to the dogs, and they were put on the was a hole at the bottom and two wedges clared it unfair and therefore invalid. The alert. Salvador was on the ground, so that on which to place your feet. The water ran Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in really bothered me. She started yelling: cold, but the prison would provide warm Costa Rica, agreed to review the case amid ‘Why are you in this park? You should be widespread expectations that Berenson embarrassed to be in this park.’ ” water to bathe the baby.

After returning with Salvador from could be freed. But in 2004, after heavy loI sat in the living room while Berenthe doctor, Berenson tucked him into his bbying from Peru, the court took the highly son bathed her son in a deep bathroom stroller under a blanket that said, “Te quiero unusual step of reversing its commission sink. He was cranky and fretful. ‘‘Qué quiemucho,” and squatted on the orange con- and upholding the validity of Berenson’s res, bebé. . .?” she asked him gently. She crete floor to read him Dr. Seuss’s “Mister civilian trial. (The court is charged only dried him off and dressed him in a diaper Brown Can Moo!” Then she reclined the seat with assessing due process, not innocence and pajamas, and Salvador lay back in her so he could lie back for his nap and pushed or guilt.) arms on the couch, clutching a handful of During this time, Berenson was ma- her hair as he drank his bottle and began to him into the small, dusty outdoor area ponaging a bakery in the Huacariz prison, in drowse. Berenson carried him to their bed pulated by moth-eaten-looking doves.

Berenson walked back and forth, Cajamarca, supplying the jail with bread and tucked him in.

39

PEOPLE

Mother and son seemed a lonely pair that night, in a dim apartment, surrounded by a city she believed was hostile. “I was much freer in jail, in a certain way,” she said. “I wasn’t ostracized. Is there any way I would ever be able to function in this country? Or have they created a situation such that the only place they want me to function is in jail?”

On Jan. 24, after another hearing before three judges, Berenson’s parole was sustained; by law, she must remain in Lima until 2015, at which point she must leave the country forever. The decision is final.

The press reaction was surprisingly muted, as if the paroxysm of her first release and return to jail with Salvador had drained it of energy.

Last month, about three weeks later, I spoke to Berenson via Skype. It was summer in Peru, and she’d cut her hair to shoulder-length. There was crashing in the background; Salvador was throwing things and crowing joyfully.

Berenson seemed more forthcoming and ready to laugh. The harassment had subsided enough that she’d started taking long walks around Lima with Salvador in his stroller. “As I become familiar with it, I find it more livable,” she said of the city. “It’s incredibly huge. And it’s quite pretty.”

It waws hard, she said, to shake off the dependent state of being a prisoner.

“I’m asking Marie for help because I don’t realize that I can just deal with it,” she said.

“I think most Peruvians who were in jail go out to their families, their friends. My social base in Lima is basically Marie. It’s not rebuilding my place in society — it’s building it from scratch, constructing absolutely everything.”

In the 15 years Berenson spent in prison, her peers have moved from early adulthood into middle age. “The world has changed,” she told me in August. “Internet, giant malls.” Technologically, she’s catching up, and has grown comfortable using e-mail and Skype. But at 41, she is still grappling with the fallout of youthful choices that have ended badly: her vocation; her marriage; her love of Latin America. The passion that fueled her move there seems to have left a kind of void, and beyond the need to support herself and her son, her future remains a blank.

Of course, Berenson’s future won’t really be her own until her parole ends; for now, she is raising Salvador alone in Peru, with limited options. If she ever feels despair or defeat at these conditions, she wouldn’t show it — not at 26, with a life sentence in front of her, and not now.

Her capacity to absorb fear and discomfort is partly what has saved her — and also, most likely, what got her into trouble in the first place. But this is speculation; Berenson resists such storytelling, leaving the rest of us to our own devices in trying to unlock the mystery of her biography. What she can’t elude is our desire to do so: a notoriety she has sustained, uncomfortably, for most of her adulthood. “I am always conscious,” she said, “of who I am.”

Kitchen

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The San Juan Weekly

Egg White Frittata With Leeks Time: 25 minutes 1 tablespoon butter 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons olive oil 1 very large leek, white part only, sliced thin and rinsed well 1 teaspoon thyme leaves Salt and pepper 5 large raw egg whites 3 tablespoons grated pecorino 1/2 cup baby arugula or other salad green 1/4 cup mizuna or other salad green Half a lemon.

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. In a 7-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat, melt the butter with 2 tablespoons olive oil and cook until bubbling.

Add the leek and sautĂŠ until it begins to soften, about 5 minutes. Add the thyme, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 1 more minute.

2. In a small mixing bowl, whisk the egg whites with 2 tablespoons pecorino. Add to the skillet and gently stir together with the leeks for 1 minute, to gently scramble them.

Egg Salad Sandwich Time: 30 minutes 8 large eggs 1/3 cup mayonnaise Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill 4 slices bread.

1. Put the eggs in a medium pan

and cover them with cold water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer 10 minutes. Place pan in the sink under cold running water until the eggs are cool.

2. Peel the eggs. Remove the yolks from 4 of them (save the whites for another use). Chop the 4 yolks

with the 4 remaining whole eggs.

3. In a medium bowl, gently and quickly mix the chopped eggs, mayonnaise, and salt and pepper to taste. Add the dill, mix the egg salad once more, and make into sandwiches.

Yield: 2 sandwiches.

Scrape down sides of the pan.

3. Transfer to the oven and bake until the center of the frittata stiffens (check by gently shaking the pan) and it is fully cooked, about 7 minutes. Transfer to a plate, and sprinkle with the remaining tablespoon pecorino.

4. Toss the arugula and mizuna with the remaining 2 teaspoons olive oil and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper and place on the frittata.

Yield: 1 to 2 servings.

March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

41

Kitchen

Once a Villain, Coconut Oil Charms the Health Food World

By MELISSA CLARK

A

FEW years ago I noticed something odd at the health food store. There, rubbing elbows with the extra-virgin olive oil and cold-pressed canola oil was virtually the last fat I expected to see in such esteemed company: coconut oil.

The last time I checked, coconut oil was supposed to be the devil himself in liquid form, with more poisonous artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising, heart-attack-causing saturated fat than butter, lard or beef tallow.

Its bad reputation caused a panic at the concession stands back in 1994, when the Center for Science in the Public Interest put out a study claiming that a large movie-theater

popcorn, hold the butter, delivered as much saturated fat as six Big Macs.

“Theater popcorn ought to be the Snow White of snack foods, but it’s been turned into Godzilla by being popped in highly saturated coconut oil,” Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the center, a consumer group that focuses on food and nutrition, said at the time.

So given all this greasy baggage, what was coconut oil doing in a health food store? In fact, it has recently become the darling of the natural-foods world. Annual sales growth at Whole Foods “has been in the high double digits for the last five years,” said Errol Schweizer, the chain’s global senior grocery coordinator.

Two groups have helped give

Sautéed Shrimp With Coconut Oil, Ginger and Coriander Time: 10 minutes 2 1/2 tablespoons refined coconut oil 6 scallions, white parts thinly sliced; dark green parts sliced and reserved 1 tablespoon finely chopped peeled ginger 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander 1 pound large shrimp, shelled 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper Lemon wedges, for serving.

1. Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Melt the coconut oil in the pan. Add the white scallion slices, ginger and garlic. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the coriander and cook 30 seconds more.

2. Add the shrimp and salt.

Cook, tossing occasionally, until shrimp are opaque, about 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the green scallion pieces and cook until just wilted, 10 to 15 seconds. Season with lemon juice and black pepper. Serve with lemon wedges.

Yield: 2 to 3 servings.

coconut oil its sparkly new makeover.

One is made up of scientists, many of whom are backtracking on the worst accusations against coconut oil. And the other is the growing number of vegans, who rely on it as a sweet vegetable fat that is solid at room temperature and can create flaky pie crusts, crumbly scones and fluffy cupcake icings, all without butter.

My curiosity stirred, I brought some home and experimented. I quickly learned that virgin coconut oil has a haunting, nutty, vanilla flavor. It’s even milder and richer tasting than butter, sweeter and lighter textured than lard, and without any of the bitterness you sometimes get in olive oil.

Its natural sweetness shines in baked goods and sautés, and is particularly wonderful paired with bitter greens, which soften and mellow under the oil’s gentle touch. And the saturated fat in coconut oil makes it a good choice in pastries, whether you avoid animal fats or simply want to pack a little more coconut flavor into that coconut cream pie.

But before I get to the cupcakes, let’s start with the science.

According to Thomas Brenna, a professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell University who has extensively reviewed the literature on coconut oil, a considerable part of its stigma can be traced to one major factor.

“Most of the studies involving coconut oil were done with partially hydrogenated coconut oil, which researchers used because they needed to raise the cholesterol levels of their rabbits in order to collect certain data,” Dr. Brenna said. “Virgin coconut oil, which has not been chemically treated, is a different thing in terms of a health risk perspective. And maybe it isn’t so bad for you after all.”

Partial hydrogenation creates dreaded trans fats. It also destroys many of the good essential fatty acids, antioxidants and other positive components present in virgin coconut oil. And while it’s true that most of the fats in virgin coconut oil are saturated, opinions are changing on whether saturated fats are the arterial villains they were made out to be. “I think we in the nutrition field are beginning to say that saturated fats are not so bad, and the evidence that said they were is not so strong,” Dr. Brenna said.

Chocolate Shell Ice-Cream Topping Time: 5 minutes 7 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped 2 tablespoons virgin coconut oil.

Melt the chocolate in a small metal bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Stir in the coconut oil and heat until dissolved, about 1 minute. Keep the liquid lukewarm until ready to pour over the ice cream. Chocolate will harden into a shell within a few seconds when spooned over ice cream.

Yield: 3/4 cup (good for 4 to 6 scoops).

Plus, it turns out, not all saturated fats are created equal.

Marisa Moore, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, a nonprofit association of nutritionists, said, “Different types of saturated fats behave differently.”

The main saturated fat in coconut oil is lauric acid, a medium chain fatty acid. Lauric acid increases levels of good HDL, or high-density lipoprotein, and bad LDL, or low-density lipoprotein, in the blood, but is not thought to negatively affect the overall ratio of the two.

She went on to say that while it is still uncertain whether coconut oil is actively beneficial the way olive oil is, small amounts probably are not harmful. The new federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that no more than 10 percent of total dietary calories a day come from saturated fat. For a 2,000-calorie diet, that’s about 20 grams.

Any number of health claims have been made for lauric acid. According to proponents, it’s a wonder

Continues on page 24

Kitchen

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March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Coconut Oil Roasted Sweet Potatoes Time: 1 hour 15 minutes 1 1/2 tablespoons virgin coconut oil 1 3/4 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch chunks 2 teaspoons light brown sugar, packed 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg.

Comes from page 23 substance with possible antibacterial, antimicrobial, antiviral properties that could also, in theory, combat H.I.V., clear up acne and speed up your metabolism. Researchers are skeptical.

“There are a lot of claims that coconut oil may have health benefits, but there is no concrete scientific data yet to support this,” said Dr. Daniel Hwang, a research molecular biologist specializing in lauric acid at the Western Human Nutrition Research Center at the University of California, Davis.

But, he added, “Coconut is good food, in moderation.”

It seems safe to say that if I eat it just once in a while, coconut oil probably isn’t going to give me a heart attack, make me thinner or ward off the flu. What I really wanted to know was, how can I cook with it?

This is where the vegan cupcakes come in. Coconut oil can be whipped into a buttercream-like fluffiness while retaining its gentle vanilla flavor.

Elizabeth Schuler, who writes the blog mycommunaltable.com, started baking with coconut oil after her son’s severe allergies to tree nuts, eggs and dairy were diagnosed. She searched out vegan recipes and was surprised by the number that relied on margarine and Crisco, a no-go as far as she was concerned.

“I try to keep a nonprocessedfoods home,” she said.

Then she discovered coconut oil at her local Whole Foods. When her own research led her to conclude that eating it in small amounts is O.K., she started baking cakes and whipping up icings with it. She also uses the oil any time she wants to add a mellow coconut flavor to a dish.

Allison Beck, a natural foods enthusiast, and a blogger and editor at

Coconut Oil Poundcake With Almonds and Lime Zest Time: 1 hour 15 minutes 1/2 cup sliced almonds 1 cup, plus 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 cup virgin coconut oil 3/4 cup milk 3 large eggs Zest of 1 lime 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon salt.

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan.

2. To make the topping, stir together the almonds, 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 tablespoon water in a small bowl.

3. Melt the coconut oil in a

small pan. Pour it into a large bowl and whisk in the remaining sugar, milk, eggs and lime zest.

4. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, nutmeg and salt. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients to combine. Pour the mixture into the loaf pan and smooth with a spatula. Sprinkle the almonds on top. Bake until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 60 minutes.

Allow to cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes before removing from the loaf pan. Cool completely before serving.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings.

thedailymeal.com, fell in love with coconut oil when she saw it used in a Thomas Keller recipe for a chocolate ice cream topping that had a texture nearly identical to that of the commercial product Magic Shell (which also contains coconut oil), but a far richer, more fudgy flavor.

“That sauce is incredible,” Ms. Beck said. “You pour it on ice cream and it hardens immediately.”

She also mixes virgin coconut oil in oatmeal for creaminess and flavor, uses it to sauté greens, and has successfully played around with it in brownies and banana bread.

“It’s amazing in pastry,” said Michele Forbes, the chef at Angelica Kitchen, a venerable vegan restaurant in the East Village. In pies, “it gives a nice flaky crust that stays crisp without being bad for you.”

In my flurry of experimenting, I found that virgin coconut oil had a deep coconut flavor that persists even after cooking. Refined coconut oil, which has been processed enough to raise the temperature at which it begins to smoke, lacks the same coconut profundity, but supposedly works better for stir- and deepfrying. In my recipe testing, however,

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Melt the coconut oil in a small saucepan over low heat.

2. In a large bowl, toss together potatoes, coconut oil, sugar, salt, pepper and nutmeg.

3. Spread the potatoes in an even layer on a large baking sheet.

Roast, tossing occasionally, until soft and caramelized, about 1 hour.

Yield: 2 to 4 servings the smoke point of virgin coconut oil was not a problem.

Melted and cooled, virgin coconut oil worked beautifully in my favorite olive oil poundcake, yielding a loaf with a tight, golden crumb and gentle coconut fragrance that I enhanced with lime zest, almonds and a grating of fresh nutmeg.

I also like coconut oil for sautéing vegetables and aromatics, especially onions. They absorb the sweetness of the oil and pass that lovely nuance on to the whole dish. In one memorable meal, I sautéed scallions in coconut oil, which managed to perfume an entire pan of plump, juicy shrimp spiked with garlic, ginger and coriander.

And I may never go back to olive oil for roasting sweet potatoes, not when coconut oil enhanced their caramelized flavor while adding a delicate coconut essence.

But my favorite new way to use coconut oil is for popcorn. The oil brings out the nutty sweetness of the corn itself while adding a rich creamy sensation, without having to pour melted butter on the top. Of course, the movie theaters knew it all along.

San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

43

FASHION & BEAUTY

John Galliano Exits the Way That He Entered

By CATHY HORYN

I

N the last two months, the editor of French Vogue has resigned; the president of Yves Saint Laurent said she will leave her dream job to run the vanity label of Reed Krakoff, the Coach creative director, whose one dream is apparently to be successful. Gucci Group cut its chief executive loose. The first anniversary, on Feb. 11, of Alexander McQueen’s suicide brought up another loss, another memory. And on the nausea went until, implausibly, John Galliano self-destructed in a liquored-up “I love Hitler” rant — caught, as so many career-enders are these days, on video and circulated on the Web. Some felt the panic more than others and wondered if it was not time for them to get out, too. Some confronted it the only way the modern media world allows, by riding it out and planning to get to the Mugler show early on Wednesday night, because Lady Gaga was expected to model and there would be a scene.

But in this context, the words “the show must go on,” hoisted like a dinky white flag, feel callow.

One thing is for sure: Dior’s chief executive, Sidney Toledano, and his boss, the biggest pencil in the luxury-goods business, Bernard

Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, had to begin dismissal procedures against Mr. Galliano. They couldn’t tolerate the public hating by Mr. Galliano, however out of character his defenders said it was for him.

In circumstances like these, a sensible millionaire designer would have jumped into his chauffeured car and gone to his boss and pleaded insanity, whereupon he would have been given an all-expensepaid trip to rehab.

But that’s just it: Mr. Galliano is not a sensible man, any more than fashion chiefs are missionaries. Last Friday, when Dior suspended him, many fashion writers suspected

that the company was seizing an opportunity to fire him after 15 years on the job. Though he could still dazzle with haute couture, like last summer’s flower-tinted collection, the real business is in accessories and ready-to-wear — and Mr. Galliano’s own eccentric turn-outs at the end of shows were often all editors talked about as they buzzed and buzzed about Phoebe Philo of Céline or someone equally relevant.

“That’s the superficial fashion world talking,” a fashion executive said on Tuesday night.

If Mr. Toledano had wanted an

excuse to fire Mr. Galliano, he could scarcely have ordered up a worse public-relations nightmare, one that could still engulf Dior.

As it is, Mr. Galliano did not contact Dior after the incident last Thursday, nor over the weekend, said a company executive who requested anonymity because of the unusual nature of the situation.

“He was denying it,” the executive said. But the lack of communication between the house and its star designer at such a crucial moment points to deeper strains.

(On Wednesday, the Paris prosecutor announced that Mr. Galliano would stand trial for racial insults. Also on Wednesday, Mr. Galliano released his first statement. It said in part: “I only have myself to blame and I know that I must face up to my own failures and that I must work hard to gain people’s understanding and compassion. To start this process I am seeking help

and all I can hope for in time is to address the personal failure which led to these circumstances and try and earn people’s forgiveness.”)

In a way, luxury groups like LVMH are reaping what they sowed in the mid-’90s, when they hired supremely talented designers like Mr. Galliano, Mr. McQueen and Marc Jacobs (for Louis Vuitton) to energize old labels. Not only was Mr. Galliano seriously gifted, with technical skills and a romantic sensibility that suited Dior’s femininity, he brought to Dior a spot-on sense of vision. And he had an outsize personality, a mixture of a fiery temperament and devil-may-care London, that people could relate to.

In interviews, or during a preview of a collection at the Dior studio, Mr. Galliano always acted the charming host, with cigarettes in supply and people from the ateliers bringing down finished dresses.

Continues on page 32

FASHION & BEAUTY

Comes from page 31 One night, quite late, I watched Mr. Galliano and his closest assistants — Bill Gaytten and the late Steven Robinson — do fittings for a collection inspired, improbably perhaps, by ancient Egyptian ladies and ’50s fashion goddesses.

They worked in front of the studio’s mirrors, speaking quietly among themselves, while people from the house sat on some steps, at some distance. You sensed the pressures on him.

But he may have expressed his personality, and wicked humor, best on the catwalk. The only show I have ever stood to applaud was a Galliano show, six or seven years ago. He used a special casting of sideshow performers — twins, fat people, exceptionally tall people, freaks in most people’s eyes — and he closed

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March 17 - 23, 2011

the show with a supermodel dangling a puppet in his likeness. The manipulated de signer. But who was pulling whose strings? On his return backstage from walking on the runway, he stopped in front of me and gave a little bow. He was delighted to have his work acknowledged, like all designers.

MR. GALLIANO was a controversial choice for Dior when, in 1996, Mr. Arnault moved him from Givenchy. Even though Dior had become comically stiff and pretentious, the French took it seriously.

Who was this English punk with braids? What did he know about couture? I remember going to the Dior ateliers, in 2000, and casually asking the woman who ran the drapery workrooms which of Dior’s designers she liked best: Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré or Mr. Galliano.

She hesitated, then said: “Monsieur Galliano. He changed my eye.”

Initially, Mr. Toledano was alarmed by some of Mr. Galliano’s ideas: the slashed and turned-upside-down garments that appeared in the Matrix collection, in 1999, at Versailles, and the controversial show inspired by Paris tramps. At the time, Dior was still pushing a bourgeois look in its Avenue Montaigne windows and advertisements (and in its Lady Di handbags), while Mr. Galliano was doing his best to destroy all that on the runway. I remember running into Mr. Toledano and Mr. Arnault at Dior one Saturday in 1999 or so, and telling them I didn’t understand what they were trying to do with the label’s style.

“Just wait,” Mr. Arnault said,

San Juan Weekly

ever confident. “You’ll see. It will all come together.”

And it did. In a matter of a year or so, beginning with the saddle bag, hip-hop logo denim, and new ads, created by Mr. Galliano with the photographer Nick Knight, Dior acquired a hot, coherent image. And Mr. Galliano produced some of his most exhilarating shows, like one in July 2003 based on ballet and another in January 2007, swirling with huge skirts and three-dimensional origami embroideries in the shape of birds.

But increasingly one had the feeling that Mr. Galliano was indulged in ways that went beyond the normal — the driver, the bodyguard, the research trips, the vacations, the teams of assistants — and

the last years? Dior wanted more commercial clothes. And isn’t there something horribly detrimental in separating a creative spirit from the actual mechanics of making clothes? It’s no wonder that young designers now question the model of big luxury houses and admire the slow-clothes method of Azzedine Alaïa, who still makes his patterns himself, or even Giorgio Armani, who works all the time.

In one way or another, these whip-lashing events feel like a repudiation of certain beliefs. But the sadness and sense of waste is undeniable. Maybe one good thing that will come out of this is that Mr. Galliano will get some help. On Wednesday, there were news reports that he had left France and entered a rehab center, at the urging of colleagues and friends like Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss. might have caused even the steadiest soul to lose touch with reality. Mr. Toledano is known to have repeatedly encouraged him to seek professional help for some issues (presumably, drinking), but Mr. Galliano’s replies were indirect. Or he said he would go to a spa.

Certainly the demand on designers at big houses to produce multiple collections every year has taken both its creative and personal toll.

“It’s not as if John didn’t have assistants doing the work, finding fabrics,” the Paris executive told me.

“He just had to supply the vision.”

But what was that vision in

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

45 Saturday 10 a.m.

36 Hours in Orlando, Fla.

By SHAILA DEWAN

P

EOPLE who live in the Orlando area will tell you that there is life here beyond the theme parks, gator farms and citrus groves. You can’t go far without stumbling upon a picturesque lake, and the area abounds with small regional museums like the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts in nearby Eatonville. Downtown, the new Amway Center, home of the Orlando Magic, has given a boost to the night-life district on Church Street, and Orlando’s many neighborhoods are home to lounge acts, bars, vintage fast-food joints and brick-paved streets.

Friday 2 p.m.

1) PLUNGE IN Wakeboarding is to water skiing what snowboarding is to downhill skiing — in other words, the extreme version of the sport — and Orlando likes to call itself the “wakeboarding capital of the world.” At the Orlando Watersports Complex (8615 Florida Rock Road; 407-251-3100; orlandowatersports.com), a beginner’s cable tow, anchored to poles in the lake, pulls you (and your wakeboard) around at 17 miles per hour ($38 for equipment and a two-hour pass). The patient instructor will give you pointers, and you can watch some of the sports’ best-known hotdoggers navigate the ramps and slides.

5 p.m.

2) HIGH DESIGN Just a few miles from downtown Orlando, Winter Park — considered part of the greater Orlando area — is famous for the brick-paved streets of chichi chocolatiers and boutiques along Park Avenue. But across

the railroad tracks near Hannibal Square, a coda has popped up with a bent toward high design. Amid the new shops and restaurants, you can find Rifle Paper Co. (558 West New England Avenue, Suite 150; 407-622-7679; riflepaperco.com), the fashionable Orlando-based stationer, and the studio and storefront where Makr Carry Goods churns out its minimalist leather bags and iPod cases (444 West New England Avenue, Suite 102; 407-284-0192; makr.com). For a taste of local history, visit the Hannibal Square Heritage Center (642 West New England Avenue; 407-539-2680; hannibalsquareheritagecenter.org), where a collection of photographs and oral histories document the area’s beginnings as a Reconstruction-era community for freed slaves.

7 p.m.

3) DRESS-UP/DRESS-DOWN From the outside, the Ravenous Pig (1234 North Orange Avenue, Winter Park; 407-628-2333; theravenouspig.com) looks like your average strip-mall restaurant. But with attention to detail like housemade sour mix at the bar and much-in-demand cheese biscuits, James and Julie Petrakis have made their three-year-old gastropub one of Orlando’s most popular gathering spots. The menu, like the restaurant, is dress-up/dressdown, with bar fare like mussels and fries dusted with fennel pollen ($15), or more dignified entrees like dryaged strip steak with wild mushroom bread pudding ($27). Reserve a table or hover in the bar.

10 p.m.

4) LOUNGE ACT If the Red Fox Lounge (110 South Orlando Avenue, Winter Park; 407-647-1166) were an amusement

5) TIFFANY EXTRAVAGANZA Louis Comfort Tiffany’s masterpiece was Laurelton Hall, his estate on Long Island, which featured a wisteria blossom window over 30 feet long and a terrace whose columns were crowned in glass daffodils. When the house burned in 1957, Jeannette and Hugh McKean, from Winter Park, rescued those pieces and many more, adding them to what would become the most comprehensive collection of Tiffany glass, jewelry and ceramics in the world. The collection, including the chapel with its stunning peacock mosaic was made for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.

It is housed in the Morse Museum of American Art (445 North Park Avenue, Winter Park; 407-645-5311; morsemuseum.org), where a new wing allows the largest Laurelton Hall pieces, including the daffodil terrace, to be on permanent display.

park, it might be called ToupeeWorld.

This stuck-in-amber hotel bar in a Best Western hotel appeals to a broad cross-section of Orlando, from retirees to young professionals to a drinking club whose members wear identical captain’s hats. The main draw is the consummate lounge act. Mark Noon Wayne and Lorna Lambey deliver 6) A FAST-FOOD ORIGINAL silky, singalong versions of “Sweet Devotees of American fast food Caroline,” “Hava Nagila” and other golden oldies.

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Comes from page 45 in all its glory will not want to miss the roast beef sandwiches and cherry milkshakes at Beefy King, a lunchtime standby for more than four decades (424 North Bumby Avenue; 407-894-2241; beefyking.com). Perch on the old-fashioned swivel chairs and admire the vintage logo of a snorting steer, also available on hot pink T-shirts.

3 p.m.

7) PONTOON TOUR Orlando is not quite an American Venice, but it does have about 100 lakes, many connected by narrow canals. Despite the alligators, the lakes are prime real estate, and at Lake Osceola, you can board a pontoon boat and take an hourlong cruise (312 East Morse Boulevard; 407-644-4056; scenicboattours.com; $12) that will provide glimpses of Spanish colonial-style mansions, azalea gardens, stately Rollins College and moss-laden cypresses. The ride is billed as Florida’s longest continuously running tourist attraction, though you are likely to find plenty of locals aboard. The guide will entertain you with celebrity anecdotes, a smattering of history and a reasonably small number of cheesy jokes. Tours leave on the hour.

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March 17 - 23, 2011

nebar.com), where the servers’ habit of asking for and using your name makes you feel like a regular. With an appetizer of crispy pig’s ear on a salad with peanuts and cilantro ($6), the chef gives a nod to Vietnamese flavors that abound in Orlando. At Infusion Tea (1600 Edgewater Drive; 407-999-5255; infusionorlando.com), choose from dozens of loose teas like “organic monkey-picked oolong” to go along with chocolate-coated Cheerios or a cupcake. Or you can choose among the scarves, vintage aprons and jewelry at the attached artists’ collective.

10 p.m.

9) DIVE BAR HOPPING Stiff drinks and dive bars are an Orlando staple; much of the night life is centered in the ViMi district, for Virginia Drive and Mills Avenue.

Arguably the king of dives is Wally’s Mills Avenue Liquors (1001 North Mills Avenue; 407-896-6975), with a U-shaped bar and tobacco-stained wallpaper with a motif of naked women. Across the street is the concretefloored LMGA, or Lou’s Music, Gaming and Alcohol (1016 North Mills Avenue; 407-898-0009; myspace.com/ unclelousorlando), where the owner, known as Uncle Lou, wears headphones to block out noise of band concerts.

Farther down, Will’s Pub (1042 North 6 p.m.

Mills Avenue; 407-898-5070; myspace.

8)CULTURAL FUSION com/willspub) has pool tables and inThe city of theme parks does die bands, often for a $5 cover. have a studious side, as evidenced in a blossoming neighborhood called Sunday College Park, where the streets have names like Harvard and Vassar and 11 a.m. where Jack Kerouac wrote “Dharma 10) SWEET POTATO HASH Bums.” The main commercial drag, You never know what will turn Edgewater Drive, is chockablock with up on the improvised brunch menu local favorites like K Restaurant (1710 — a slip of notebook paper with a Edgewater Drive; 407-872-2332; kwi- ballpoint scrawl — at Stardust Video

and Coffee (1842 East Winter Park Road, 407-623-3393; stardustrules. com), a hub for Orlando’s artistic class. Zucchini pancakes, maybe, or vegan sweet potato hash with eggs and (real) bacon ($9.50). The Web site advertises “bathroom yoga” and “parking lot bingo,” but you’re more likely to find art installations, an oldfashioned photo booth and a slew of obscure videos and DVDs for rent on the shelves at the far end of this sunny, airy space. There is a full bar for the performances, screenings and lectures that unfold here in the later hours.

2 p.m.

11) FOOL’S GOLD, REAL FINDS Flea markets can offer too many tube socks and T-shirts, while antiques markets can be entirely too stuffy. Renningers Twin Markets in Mount Dora (20651 Highway 441; renningers.com), about a 30-minute drive from downtown, puts the thrill back in the hunt. Just past the main entrance, you can turn right and head to a vast antiques barn crammed with

treasures like meticulously constructed wooden model ships and 19thcentury quilts. Or you can turn left for the flea and farmers’ market, where home-grown orchids and leather motorcycle chaps compete for attention.

Behind that, there is a field where curio dealers set up tables with all manner of bona fide junk, fool’s gold and the occasional real finds that make it clear why so many thrift aficionados make road trips to Florida.

IF YOU GO Newly expanded and remodeled at a cost of $450 million, the 1,641-room Peabody Orlando (9801 International Drive; 407-352-4000; peabodyorlando.com) offers luxury accommodations — and the famous twice-daily duck parade. Doubles from $175 in low season.

The 17-room Eõ Inn and Spa (227 N. Eola Drive; 407-481-8485; eoinn. com) is a budget boutique on swaninfested Lake Eola, a perfect base for exploring Orlando beyond the theme parks. It has a sun terrace with hot tub and an adjoining spa. Rooms are $139 to $229.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

47

Toro Negro Forest I

f you want to see thick, virtually uninhabited tropical jungle as far as the eye can see, so high in the mountains that you can look down on the clouds, Toro Negro Forest (along

Ruta Panorámica on Carr. 143 south of Jayuya) is the place to go. From these heights you can see clouds drift between the peaks below you and you’re surrounded by tangles of wild bamboo, banana trees, hibiscus, enormous ferns, impatiens, elephant ears, flamboyan trees, and seemingly millions of sierra palms, distinguished by their long straight trunks and pale green foliage towering 30–50 feet high.

The roads are steep and twisty, putting a strain on small en-

gines and inducing dizziness— or worse—motion sickness. But it’s one of the most exotic sights you’ll see on the island and well worth the effort.

Toro Negro contains the highest peak on the island, Cerro de Punta, 4,390 feet above sea level, on the northwestern end of the forest. To reach the summit, park in the lot at Carretera 143, km 17, and hike up about 1.5 miles. Cerro Maravilla, along about km 20 on Carretera 143, is 3,800 feet high and is the site of the infa-

mous Cerro Maravilla murders in 1978, in which police officers killed two independenistas who were suspected of planning to sabotage a television transmission tower on the mountain’s summit.

In Toro Negro you can also see one of the island’s highest waterfalls, Salto de Doña Juana (Carr. 149, km 41.5). It can be viewed from the road (it’s on the left if you’re traveling south) if Continues on page 48

48 March 17 - 23, 2011

Comes from page 47 you look way up high. Although it’s not particularly wide, the water propels off the mountaintop with great force, making it a spectacular sight.

The highest peaks of Toro Negro Forest contain dwarf or cloud forest, where the foliage

has been stunted from the constant moisture in the atmosphere.

The southern part of the forest features many rugged rock cliffs, jagged peaks, and waterfalls.

Much of the forest has been subjected to clearing by the logging industry, but long-term reforestation efforts have helped repair some of the damage.

There are 10 trails in the forest, most of which originate from the information office (Carr. 143, km 32.4, 787/867-3040, Mon.–Fri. 7:30 a.m.–4 p.m., Sat.–Sun. and holidays 9 a.m.–5 p.m.). One trail is a 10-minute walk to a natural freshwater pool (open Sat.–Sun. and holidays 9 a.m.–5 p.m. Apr.– Sept., $1 adults, children under 10 free). Another popular hike

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is a 3-km trek to Torre Observación lookout tower. A camping area with toilets and showers but no electricity is a 550-yard hike away.

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March 17 - 23, 2011

49

W Retreat and Spa Vieques Island

By PAOLA SINGER

THE BASICS Vieques, a small island just off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, has seen big changes in the last decade.

Until 2003, most of its 52 square miles were occupied by the United States Navy, which used the base as a bombing range. Almost immediately after the military’s withdrawal, travelers began flocking to this untamed paradise of turquoise waters and white powdered sand beaches. In a clear sign that Vieques is no longer off the radar, the first W Retreat and Spa in North America opened its doors there last March. The brand designed a sprawling property that’s both luxurious and rustic, filled with unpolished wood and colorful details. It also manages to blend in with the lush nature that surrounds it.

LOCATION Right on the beach, set on a low cliff with views of the Atlantic and nearby Culebra Island. The hotel is isolated, but everything in Vieques is a short drive away, including the quaint fishing village of Esperanza and the idyllic Bahía de la Chiva beach. Renting a car is recommended.

THE ROOM My Spectacular room, as the W calls it, was 638 square feet and had big sliding windows facing the palm-

studded pool area and the ocean. Patricia Urquiola, the hotel’s designer, chose a palette of warm tones with splashes of red, fuchsia and aquamarine. One particularly attractive corner was occupied by a “chill chair,” a round chaise longue strewn with bright pillows, with enough legroom for supine TV viewing. The queen

beds proved to be ideal for this activity as well: their espresso-hued headboards were padded and ergonomically shaped. Useful features included an iPod docking station, a cordless phone and a sectional desk that partly rolled out to become a dining table.

THE BATHROOM The bathroom’s oversize, vintage-style steel bathtub and boxy sink were separated from the room by a see-through mesh curtain. It looked very cool but was totally lacking in privacy. The toilet had its own space,

as did the rainfall shower, but their wood sliding doors never seemed to close properly.

AMENITIES Amenities are a W forte, and here the chain fanned all its feathers.

The 6,000-square-foot Away Spa had numerous treatment cabanas, a row

a handsome layout dominated by a high communal table, and a menu created by Alain Ducasse. Everything I tried — including the $16 orecchiette pasta with squash compote — was excellent and reasonably priced.

ROOM SERVICE In-room dining is available at all times. On my last day, I ordered a hamburger for lunch and explained that I was leaving for the airport in an hour. They predicted a 30-minute wait but my food actually arrived sooner. The wedge-cut fries with spicy mayo were tasty; the burger was bland.

BOTTOM LINE

of modern pedicure pods and a salon. My massage felt technically correct, but was not memorable. The best part came right afterward: an al fresco shower, to the sounds of native coquí frogs, on a private patio behind the cabana. Next to the spa was a well-equipped gym, open 24 hours, which faced a coffee shop. MiX on the Beach, the seafront restaurant, had

Aside from a few glitches in the service (a 25-minute wait for breakfast eggs, for example, and a delay at checkout), my stay was thoroughly pleasant. The W Vieques has become a destination in itself, but if visitors fail to leave this stylish cocoon, they are missing world-class diving and snorkeling, authentic bars, a bioluminescent bay and at least a dozen secluded beaches. Doubles start at $379 in low season; $589 in high season.

W Retreat and Spa - Vieques Island, State Road 200, Km. 3.2; (787) 741-4100; wvieques.com.

SCIENCE / TECH 50 March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet

By JAMES GLANZ and JOHN MARKOFF

E

pitaphs for the Mubarak government all note the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons. Quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government’s ferocious counterattack, a dark achievement many thought impossible in the age of global connectedness. In a span of minutes just after midnight on Jan. 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was severed from the Internet.

The blackout was lifted after just five days, and it did not save President Hosni Mubarak. It has mesmerized the worldwide technical community and raised concerns other autocratic governments may possess essentially a kill switch for the Internet.

Internet’s legendary robustness and ability to route around blockages are part of its basic design, even the world’s most renowned network and telecommunications engineers have been perplexed Mubarak succeeded in pulling the maneuver off.

As Egyptian engineers begin to assess fragmentary evidence they are beginning to understand what hit them. The government exploited a devastating combination of vulnerabilities in the national infrastructure.

For all the Internet’s vaunted connectivity, the Egyptian government commanded powerful instruments of control: it owns the pipelines that carry information across the country and out into the world.

Internet experts say similar arrangements are more common in authoritarian countries than is generally recognized. In Syria, for example, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment dominates the infrastructure, and the bulk of the international traffic flows through a single pipeline to Cyprus. Jordan, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries have the same sort of dominant, state-controlled carrier.

Activists in Bahrain and Iran say they have strong evidence of severe Internet slowdowns amid protests. Concerns over the potential for a government shutdown are high in North African countries, most of which rely on a just a small number of fiber-optic lines for most of their international Internet traffic.

The attack in Egypt relied on a double knockout. As in many authoritarian countries, Egypt’s Internet must connect to the outside world through a tiny number of international portals tightly in the grip of the government. In a lightning strike, technicians first cut off nearly all international traffic through those portals.

In theory, the domestic Internet should have survived that strike. The cutoff revealed how dependent Egypt’s internal networks are on information from systems that exist only outside the country — inclu-

ding e-mail servers at Google, Microsoft and Yahoo; data centers in the United States; and the Internet directories called domain name servers, which can be physically located anywhere from Australia to Germany.

Government’s attack not only cut off the outside world, but with its internal systems in a sort of comatose state: servers, cables and fiber-optic lines were largely up and running, but too confused or crippled to carry information save a dribble of local e-mail traffic and domestic Web sites whose Internet circuitry remained accessible.

“They drilled all the way down to the bottom layer of the Internet and stopped all traffic flowing”. “With the scope of their shutdown and the size of their online population, it is an unprecedented event.”

The focal point of the attack was an imposing building at 26 Ramses Street in Cairo, just two and a half miles from the epicenter of the protests, Tahrir Square. At one time purely a telephone network switching center, the building now houses the crucial Internet exchange that serves as the connection point for fiber-optic links provided by five major network companies that provide the bulk of the Internet connectivity going into and out of the country.

One of the government’s strongest levers is Telecom Egypt, a state-owned company owns virtually all the country’s fiber-optic cables; other Internet service providers are forced to lease bandwidth on those cables in order to do business.

Mr. Cowie noted that the shutdown in Egypt did not appear to have diminished the protests — if anything, it inflamed them — and that it would cost untold millions of dollars in lost business and investor confidence in the country. But he added that, inevitably, some autocrats would conclude that Mr. Mubarak had simply waited too long to bring down the curtain.

Speaking of the Egyptian shutdown and the earlier experience in Tunisia, whose censorship methods were less comprehensive, a senior State Department official said that “governments will draw different conclusions.”

“Some may take measures to tighten communications networks,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Others may conclude that these things are woven so deeply into the culture and

commerce of their country that they interfere at their peril. Regardless, it is certainly being widely discussed in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Vulnerable Choke Points In Egypt, where the government still has not explained how the Internet was taken down, engineers across the country are putting together clues from their own observations to understand what happened this time, and to find out whether a future cutoff could be circumvented on a much wider scale than it was when Mr. Mubarak set his attack in motion.

The strength of the Internet is that it has no single point of failure, in contrast to more centralized networks like the traditional telephone network. The routing of each data packet is handled by a web of computers known as routers, so that in principle each packet might take a different route.

The complete message or document is then reassembled at the receiving end.

Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data.

China, for example, has built an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project, and in 2009 it shut down cellphone and Internet service amid unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Nepal’s government briefly disconnected from the Internet in the face of civil unrest in 2005, and so did Myanmar’s government in 2007.

But until Jan. 28 in Egypt, no country had revealed that control of those choke points could allow the government to shut down the Internet almost entirely.

There has been intense debate both inside and outside Egypt on whether the cutoff at 26 Ramses Street was accomplished by surgically tampering with the software mechanism that defines how networks at the core of the Internet communicate with one another, or by a blunt approach: simply cutting off the power to the router computers that connect Egypt to the outside world.

But either way, the international portals were shut, and the domestic system reeled from the blow.

The Lines Go Dead The first hints of the blackout had actually emerged the day before, Jan. 27, as opposition leaders prepared for a “Friday of anger,” with huge demonstrations expected. Ahmed ElShabrawy, who runs a company called EgyptNetwork, noticed that the government had begun blocking individual sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Just after midnight on Jan. 28, Mahmoud Amin’s iPhone beeped with an alert that international connections to his consulting company’s Internet system had vanished — and then the iPhone itself stopped receiving e-mail. A few minutes later, Mr. ElShabrawy received an urgent call telling

him that allW Internet lines running to his company were dead.

It was not long before Ayman Bahaa, director of Egyptian Universities Network, which developed the country’s Internet nearly two decades ago, was scrambling to figure out how the system had all but collapsed between the strokes of 12 and 1.

The system had been crushed so completely that when a network engineer who does repairs in Cairo woke in the morning, he said to his family, “I feel we are in the 1800s.”

Over the next five days, the government furiously went about extinguishing nearly all of the Internet links to the outside world that had survived the first assault, data collected by Western network monitors show. Although a few Egyptians managed to post to Facebook or send sporadic e-mails, the vast majority of the country’s Internet subscribers were cut off.

The most telling bit of evidence was that some Internet services inside the country were still working, at least sporadically.

American University in Cairo, frantically trying to relocate students and faculty members away from troubled areas, was unable to use e-mail, cellphones — which were also shut down — or even a radio frequency reserved for security teams. But the university was able to update its Web site, hosted on a server inside Egypt, and at least some people were able to pull up the site and follow the emergency instructions.

“The servers were up,” said Nagwa Nicola, the chief technology officer at American University in Cairo. “You could reach up to the Internet provider itself, but you wouldn’t get out of the country.” Ms. Nicola said that no notice had been given, and she depicted an operation that appeared to have been carried out with great secrecy.

Individual Internet service providers were called and ordered to shut down, as they are required to do by their licensing agreements if the government so decrees.

At least one provider, Vodafone, expressed extreme reluctance to shut down but was told if it did not comply, the government would use its own “off” switch via the Telecom Egypt infrastructure.

After the Internet collapsed, Mr. ElShabrawy, 35, whose company provides Internet service to 2,000 subscribers and develops software for foreign and domestic customers, made urgent inquiries with the Ministry of Communications, to no avail. So he scrambled to re-establish his own communications.

When he, too, noticed that domestic fiber-optic cables were open, he had a moment of exhilaration, remembering that he could link up servers directly and establish messaging using an older system called Internet Relay Chat. But then it dawned on him that he had always assumed he could download the necessary software via the Internet and had saved no copy.

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March 17 - 23, 2011

51 SCIENCE / TECH

On the Left Hand, There Are No Easy Answers

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

H

umans are asymmetric animals.

Early in our embryonic development, the heart turns to the left. The liver develops on the right. The left and right lungs have distinct structure.

There are certain rare syndromes in which the usual asymmetry of organs is reversed — I remember how disconcerting it was the first time I examined a child with dextrocardia, a heart on the right side, and heard the heart sounds in unexpected places. But when it comes to handedness, another basic human asymmetry, which reflects the structure and function of the brain, the reversed pattern is relatively common, and for all that, not easily understood.

Over the centuries, left-handers have been accused of criminality and dealings with the devil, and children have been subjected to “re-education.” In recent years the stigma has largely vanished; among other things, four of our last seven presidents — Ford, the elder Bush, Clinton, Obama — have been left-handed. (Reagan is sometimes cited as ambidextrous.)

But the riddle of what underlies handedness remains. Its proportions — roughly 90 percent of people are right-handed and 10 percent left-handed — stay consistent over time.

“This is really still mysterious,” said Clyde Francks, a geneticist and the lead author of a 2007 study in which Oxford University researchers identified a genetic variant linked to left-handedness.

Hand dominance (whether left or right) is related to brain asymmetry. And that, Dr. Francks said, “is not at all understood; we’re really at the very beginning of understanding what makes the brain asymmetrical.”

Though brain asymmetries exist in our closest primate relatives, there seems to be general consensus that the human brain is more profoundly asymmetric, and that understanding that asymmetry will show us much about who we are and how our brains work.

Brain lateralization, the distribution of function into right and left hemispheres, is crucial for understanding language, thought memory and perhaps even creativity. For many years, handedness has been seen as a possible proxy, an external clue to the balance in the brain between left and right.

For right-handed people, language activity is predominantly on the left side.

Many left-handers also have left-side language dominance, but a significant number have language either more evenly distributed in both hemispheres or else predominantly on the right side of the brain.

Handedness clearly runs in families.

The 2007 paper by the group at Oxford identified a gene, LRRTM1, that they discovered in the course of studying children

with dyslexia, and which turned out to be associated with the development of lefthandedness.

Dr. Francks, who is now at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, recalls that the discovery made headlines and attracted a great deal of attention, the more so because this gene was also found disproportionately in people with schizophrenia, even though none of these connections are simple or well understood. “We’re not looking for a gene for handedness or a gene for schizophrenia,” he said. “We’re looking for subtle relationships.” The gene affects the ways that neurons communicate with one another, he said, but its mechanisms still need to be studied.

Dr. Daniel Geschwind, a professor of human genetics, neurology and psychiatry at University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, is interested in the connections between language and handedness, and the ways that handedness can help us understand the evolution of the human brain. “Handedness has a genetic basis, but like other complex traits — height, weight — it is complex,” he said. “It’s not a single gene that leads to it. There’s a strong environmental component, too. It’s a very tricky problem.”

As with other traits that we are tempted to classify as either/or, handedness is probably better viewed as a spectrum encompassing the very strongly right-handed or left-handed, and a range of those who prefer to use one hand or the other, but have different degrees of comfort and competency with the nondominant hand.

In general, said Dr. Geschwind, lefthanders have less asymmetric brains, with more even distribution over the two hemispheres. “Perhaps a more accurate conceptual way to think about them is as nonright-handers,” he said. “Many of them are much more likely to be ambidextrous and have fine motor abilities with their right hands.”

Because left-handedness has been seen as a key to the complex anatomy of the brain, researchers continue to look for — and debate — links to many other conditions, including immune disorders, learning disabilities and dyslexia, reduced life expectancy and schizophrenia.

None of it turns out to be simple. The idea of links to schizophrenia has been par-

ticularly persistent, but schizophrenia is a complicated and probably heterogeneous disorder, and studies of different populations show different patterns; last year, a study found no increased risk with nonright-handedness for schizophrenia or poorer neurocognition.

In pediatrics, we sometimes worry about children who manifest handedness too early, before their first birthday. The concern is that if a very young child seems to strongly prefer one hand, there may actually be some problem — perhaps some kind of neurological damage — on the other side.

Left-handedness has sometimes been treated as pathological. Cesare Lombroso, the infamous 19th-century physician who identified various facial (and racial) features with criminal traits, also saw left-handedness as evidence of pathology, primitivism, savagery and criminality. And I was brought up with the story that a generation ago, in the bad old days (and in the old country), foolish unenlightened people tried to force left-handed children to convert and use their right hands. My father said that my uncle, his older brother, had had his left hand tied behind his back as a child.

A colleague’s husband, Anthony Gentile, a fund manager who is 41 and grew up outside Cincinnati, told me that though he was always left-handed, he was taught to write with his right hand — though he

can form the letters, he could never learn to hold the pencil correctly in that hand.

“I can hold the pencil properly in my left hand, but I don’t have the coordination to write,” he told me. “It looks like I’m holding the pencil properly, but I am unable to make any letters.”

The percentage of left-handers in the population seems to be relatively constant, at 10 percent. And this goes back to studies of cave paintings, looking at which hands hunters are using to hold their spears, and to archaeological analyses of ancient artifacts. So though there has been prejudice against left-handers, and though there may be some developmental risks, said Dr. Geschwind, “there clearly must be advantages as well. The reason why it maintains that way, nobody knows what it is.”

Indeed, there seems to be a certain fascination with figuring out the areas (like the presidency) in which left-handers seem to shine. Numbers are sometimes quoted about how many architects are left-handed, or how many M.I.T. professors. On the other hand (so to speak), at a moment when we can finally hope for an end to winter, maybe we should celebrate the left-handers whose greatness truly lies in the ways they integrate motor control, strength and the highest kinds of skill and intelligence. Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Whitey Ford, anyone? C. C. Sabathia, Jon Lester, Cliff Lee?

An iPhone App Helps the Blind Identify Currency

By NICK BILTON

F

or the millions of blind people living in the United States, paying for something in cash can pose major challenges because there is no difference between the size and shape of a $1 or $100 bill. To tackle this problem, many blind people set up systems to identify a bill’s value by folding the notes into different sizes and shapes, which then make them easily identifiable later.

A new application, the LookTel Money Reader, available for $2 on the Apple iOS platform, hopes to help solve this problem by taking advantage of the devices camera to “read money” and speak the value of the currency out loud.

According to the company’s Web site, LookTel recognizes all United States currency and can read $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills aloud.

LookTel, which is made by the software company Ipplex, says the app can recognize currency denominations in real-time. This means that users can simply wave their phone in the direction of

the currency and it will speak the bill’s value as it falls into view of the camera.

The application does not require an Internet connection.

The currency reading software will soon be available on other platforms, LookTel said.

Identifying United States currency has long been a problem for the visually impaired. Other countries print currency on different sizes and shapes specifically to help people with sight problems identify the different denominations through touch.

Last year, a federal appellate court ruled that under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Treasury Department must change the currency to make it more accessible to the visually impaired.

The iPhone’s software already offers a number of features to assist the visually impaired. Under the phone’s Settings menu, users can navigate to an Accessibility area, which enables them to enlarge the phone’s graphics and text. Apple also offers Voice Over, which speaks text aloud when the phone’s screen is touched.

SCIENCE / TECH 52 March 17 - 23, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

The Reinvention of Silk

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

A

s some silk researchers see it, if spiders were gregarious vegetarians, the world might be a different place.

For spiders are nature’s master silk makers, and over millions of years of evolution have developed silks that could be useful to people — from sticky toothpastelike mush to strong and stretchy draglines.

“There’s not just one kind of material we’re talking about,” said Cheryl Hayashi, who studies the evolutionary genetics of spider silk at the University of California, Riverside. “You can look in nature, and there are a lot of solutions already made. You want a glue? There’s a silk that’s already a glue.”

For years there has been talk of the bright promise of spider silk: that it might one day be used to make cables that are stronger than those of steel, for example, or bulletproof vests that are more effective than those made of Kevlar.

There has been a big fly in the ointment, however: spiders cannot spin enough of the stuff. Although a typical spider can produce five types of silk, it does not make much of any of them. Obtaining commercial quantities is a practical impossibility — spiders are loners and require a diet of live insects; some are cannibals. In other words, spider ranching is out of the question.

Researchers have worked to overcome this fundamental limitation by trying to unlock the secrets of the spider’s silk-making abilities so silk could be made in the laboratory, or by genetically transferring those abilities to other organisms that could produce silk in quantity. But so far the materials produced lack the full strength, elasticity and other qualities of the real thing.

Some scientists are making an end run around the spider problem and working on reinventing the one silk that is plentiful — that of silkworms. They are reconstituting it to make materials that have the potential to go far beyond the dream of bulletproof vests.

Among these researchers are David Kaplan and others at Tufts University, who-

se creations have potential applications in medicine and other fields. “Here’s a material that’s been around for 5,000 years and used in sutures for about that long,” Dr. Kaplan said. “Yet there’s this untapped territory.”

Dr. Kaplan’s group and colleagues at the University of Illinois and University of Pennsylvania have recently produced electrode arrays, for example, that are printed on flexible, degradable films of silk.

The arrays — so thin they can conform to the nooks and crannies of the surface of the brain — may one day be used to treat epilepsy or other conditions without producing the scarring that larger implanted electrodes do.

For centuries, beginning in China, commercial silk has been produced by cultivating silkworms — the larvae of a moth, Bombyx mori — which, unlike spiders, are content to loll about cheek by jowl, munching on mulberry leaves, spinning the material in quantities large enough to be harvested.

“The advantage of silkworms is that they’re easy to grow,” Dr. Hayashi said.

“They’re vegetarians. And they produce silk conveniently in this cocoon.”

“But if you look at a silkworm, it only has one kind of spinneret,” she added.

“Only one kind of fiber can come out of it.

Spiders have this whole toolbox.”

Efforts to make analogues of spider silks, however, have resulted in materials that are not much different from other polymers, said David Porter, a scientist at the University of Sheffield in England who works with a group at Oxford that studies the biology of silk making.

“The consensus is that almost anybody can make a reasonable silk,” Dr. Porter said. “But you really can’t differentiate it from a good nylon.”

“To differentiate the natural product, really you’ve got to get the advantages that nature builds in,” he added.

Silk is a fibrous protein, produced in glands within the spider or silkworm and some insects. What these creatures do is something no laboratory has been able to

achieve: control the chemistry so exquisitely that the silk, which is a liquid inside the organism, becomes a solid upon leaving it.

Chief among the advantages of natural silk is the way the proteins are organized. They are folded in complex ways that help give each silk its unique properties.

Scientists have not been able to replicate that intricate folding.

“We’re still not getting at the complexity of what’s going on in inside an individual spider,” Dr. Hayashi said. “There’s no lab anywhere in the world where somebody has an artificial silk gland.”

Producing spider-silk proteins in other organisms — bacteria, goats, plants and, most recently, silkworms themselves are among those that have been genetically engineered — has limitations because the process of reconstituting the proteins ruins any folding pattern. “As soon as you extract the silk, you basically randomize the protein structure,” Dr. Porter said. “You destroy all the capacity of that material to do what it wants.”

At Tufts, Dr. Kaplan thinks that eventually, genetically modified plants will produce useful spider-based silk that could be harvested like cotton. Until then, however, he is working with reconstituted silkworm silk, making novel films and other materials.

Dr. Kaplan has been researching silk for 21 years — “sad but true,” he joked — and spent much of the first decade learning about the fundamental mechanisms by which silk assembles.

“We learned how important water is,” he said. “It may sound trivial, but the entire process has been built around controlling water content.”

Over the past decade, Dr. Kaplan’s group has focused on biomedical applications in fields like tissue engineering. In 2005, a postdoctoral researcher in his laboratory developed a water annealing process, reconstituting the silks slowly in a humid environment. “We got these films that were crystal-clear,” Dr. Kaplan said. “No one had ever seen this before with silk.”

That led to thoughts about how to make an artificial cornea from silk. But a cornea has to be permeable, so Dr. Kaplan got the idea to involve a laser scientist down the hall, Fiorenzo Omenetto.

“I said, ‘Take it down to Fio and have him poke some holes in it,’ ” Dr. Kaplan recalled. “That led to a whole optical platform based on silk.”

It also led to a long collaboration with Dr. Omenetto, who has developed ways to pattern silk films, making diffraction gratings and other structures. The grating can act as a substrate for other proteins or compounds, raising the possibility that silk films could be used for implantable biosensors or in drug delivery, with the silk dissolving in the body at a controlled rate to

release the drug.

One advantage with silk, Dr. Omenetto said, is that the process of making films or other structures is “green” — waterbased and at low temperatures. “You can make incredibly sophisticated diffraction gratings out of glass or plastic,” he said.

“But those are made at high temperatures or in a very harsh chemical environment,” conditions that would make it difficult to incorporate drugs or other compounds.

Researchers elsewhere have further developed the idea of using silk films for medical applications. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Eugenia Kharlampieva experimented with depositing silver nanoparticles on films of silk as a way of strengthening them.

“Silk is a wonderful material because it’s biocompatible,” said Dr. Kharlampieva, who is continuing her research at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. “The main drawback is it’s soft. If you want to use it for optical applications, you need to reinforce it.”

The films she uses are extremely thin, and she layers them. “We make this nanocomposite which is flexible, still soft, but mechanically stronger.”

Because the films remain flexible, Dr. Kharlampieva is experimenting with fashioning them into tiny capsules that could contain minute quantities of drugs. Potentially as small as blood cells, they could be used to deliver drugs through the bloodstream.

At Tufts, Dr. Omenetto’s work on patterning silk has led to even more exotic potential applications. Among the latest, developed with colleagues at Boston University, is the idea of using silk as the basis for metamaterials, which can manipulate light or other electromagnetic radiation in ways that nature ordinarily cannot. By producing intricate structures in the films and depositing metal on them, metamaterial antennas may be produced that could be used inside the body as a means of monitoring health — the signal from the antenna changing as conditions inside the body change.

Such applications may be far off, Dr. Omenetto said, but the potential is vast — a fact he realized when he was first asked to poke holes in silk. “It looked like a cool optical material,” he said. “And I haven’t been sleeping that much ever since.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

53

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

By JOHN MARKOFF

W

hen five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

That was in 1978. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, Blackstone Discovery helped analyze 1.5 million documents for $100,000.

They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

David H. Autor, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.”

New jobs, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

“There is no reason to think technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating in computer science and have linguistics. Recently researchers have been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of email from the Enron Corporation.

“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machi-

ne learning department at Carnegie Mellon University. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”

Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.

E-discovery technologies fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”

The basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort documents. Advanced programs filter documents through a web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

The computer pounces capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

It finds “call me” moments when an employee decides to hide a action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.

“It doesn’t use keywords at all,” it’s a means of showing who leaked information, who’s influential in the organization or when a sensitive document like an S.E.C. filing is being edited an unusual number of times, or an unusual number of ways, by an unusual type or number of people.”

The software can also recognize the sentiment in an e-mail message — whether a person is positive or negative, or what the company calls “loud talking” — unusual emphasis might give hints about a stressful situation. The software can detect subtle changes in the style of an e-mail communication.

Shift in e-mail style to formal, can raise a red flag about illegal activity.

“You split fewer infinitives when the F.B.I. might be reading your mail”.

Another e-discovery company in Silicon Valley, Clearwell, has developed software that analyzes documents to find concepts rather than specific keywords, shortening the time required to locate relevant material in litigation.

Last year, Clearwell software was used by the law firm DLA Piper to search through a half-million documents under

a court-imposed deadline of one week.

Clearwell’s software analyzed and sorted 570,000 documents (each document can be many pages) in two days. The law firm used just one more day to identify 3,070 documents that were relevant to the courtordered discovery motion.

Clearwell’s software uses language analysis and a visual way of representing general concepts found in documents to make it possible for a single lawyer to do work that once required hundreds.

“The catch here is information overload,” said Aaref A. Hilaly, Clearwell’s chief executive. “How do you zoom in to just the specific set of documents or facts that are relevant to the specific question?

It’s not about search; it’s about sifting, and that’s what e-discovery software enables.”

For Neil Fraser, a lawyer at Milberg, a law firm based in New York, the Cataphora software provides a way to better understand the internal workings of corporations he sues, particularly when the real decision makers may be hidden from view.

He says the software allows him to find the ex-Pfc. Wintergreens in an organization — a reference to a lowly character in the novel “Catch-22” who wielded great power because he distributed mail to generals and was able to withhold it or dispatch it as he saw fit.

Such tools owe a debt to an unlikely, though appropriate, source: the electronic mail database known as the Enron Corpus.

In October 2003, Andrew McCallum, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, read that the federal government had a collection of more than five million messages from the prosecution of Enron.

He bought a copy of the database for $10,000 and made it freely available to academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy constraints usually

keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said.

The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social groups based on e-mail communication.

Now artificial intelligence software has taken a seat at the negotiating table.

Two months ago, Autonomy, an e-discovery company based in Britain, worked with defense lawyers in a lawsuit brought against a large oil and gas company. The plaintiffs showed up during a pretrial negotiation with a list of words intended to be used to help select documents for use in the lawsuit.

“The plaintiffs asked for 500 keywords to search on,” said Mike Sullivan, chief executive of Autonomy Protect, the company’s e-discovery division.

In response, the defense lawyers used those words to analyze their own documents during the negotiations, and those results helped them bargain more effectively.

Specialists acknowledge the technology has limits. “The documents that the process kicks out still have to be read by someone”.

The shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work once required 500 and the newest generation of software, can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found.

“Think how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss”.

54

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

When Abuse of Older Patients Is Financial

By ELIZABETH OLSON

D

OCTORS with older patients hear clues all the time. Elderly people mention, in passing, that they are missing money or that they signed forms they did not understand. Or maybe they can’t find a treasured possession like a watch or a wedding ring.

But doctors traditionally have not been trained to recognize that confusion or forgetfulness can be signs that the patient is at financial risk, said Dr. Robert W. Parker, chief of community geriatrics in the family medicine department at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.

“We give them another pill, device or test. We don’t always spend time with patients so we get to know their concerns,” said Dr. Parker. “And medical doctors have not wanted to mix medicine and money.”

But now he, along with thousands of other doctors and medical professionals across the country, are taking part in a new effort to screen older patients for financial vulnerability as well as indications they are being exploited financially by family members, friends or strangers.

Although the case of Brooke Astor, the New York philanthropist whose son was convicted of misusing her financial assets alerted people that exploitation can occur at any level of society, most still think of elderly abuse as physical harm. But losing savings or a home to the unscrupulous also can be a severe blow to health and well-being. Three out of five older Americans fear death less than they fear running out of money before they die, according to a study last year by the AARP, the lobby for older Americans.

“Of course, I’ve routinely heard hints from my patients over the years,” said Dr. Parker, “but it wasn’t until I participated in the training that I put those together with early signs of memory loss or confusion.”

Red flags for investment swindles or other financial fraud can be social isolation, bereavement, alcohol or drug abuse or depression, according to the education program being introduced this year in 25 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. It is modeled after a 2008 pilot project at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and is being paid for by the Investor Protection Trust, a nonprofit organization that is financed by fines levied against companies for financial misconduct.

After spotting elderly people at risk, doctors can refer them to state securities regulators and adult services providers for help. The North American Securities Administrators Association and the National Adult Protective Services Association, the group for social workers who handle abuse cases, are backing the program, which provides medical professionals with specific resources to aid their patients.

Each doctor receives a laminated fourpage pocket guide listing the names and

Web sites for groups including the National Center on Elder Abuse and the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys.

Bilking old people is not new, said Steve Irwin, commissioner of the Pennsylvania Securities Commission, which is participating in the program. “Financial fraud is abuse, but it is less recognized and less reported.”

Among the signs listed in the guide of potential financial abuse are overly protective caregivers, changes in ability to take medications, cognitive problems and being fearful, distressed or excessively suspicious.

Some form of cognitive impairment afflicts one-third of people over age 71 in the United States, according to a 2008 Duke University study. Mental impairment makes people more likely to make financial errors and more willing to gamble with their money, said Dr. Robert E. Roush, director of the Texas Consortium Geriatric Education Center at the Baylor College of Medicine.

“People become less risk-averse and become victims of unscrupulous family, friends, people they know from church or real estate agents,” said Dr. Roush, who spearheaded the program.

Dr. Parker agreed, noting that “about half the patients referred to us are cognitively impaired. They may come across as having normal social skills, but when we look more closely, we find they have lost their executive function, or their ability to plan, organize and remember details.”

That loss, according to the National Institute on Aging, can be a precursor of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, where thinking, memory and reasoning deteriorate.

A result of the training, Dr. Parker said, is that “the first thing we now ask on our patient questionnaire is who is managing the money every day and who is paying the bills. Those are important patient signs.”

In Texas, 130 doctors participated in the pilot — with a guarantee that neither they nor their patients would be identified — and found that 55 percent of their patients displayed signs of financial vulnerability and needed a follow-up by other professionals. Dr. Roush cautioned, however, that “we do not know if fraud actually occurred.”

The program encourages doctors to ask patients whether they have trouble paying bills, feel confident about making big financial decisions, give loans or gifts they can not afford or believe their money is dwindling.

Also, the pocket guide lists other indicative questions, like whether the patient runs out of money at the end of the month, whether he or she regrets or worries about recent financial decisions, whether the patient has been asked to change a will or sign over power of attorney to someone else. Patients are provided with a brochure listing

concerns and questions to help assess themselves.

While few elders like to admit they have been scammed, victims of telephone, mail or Internet schemes are numerous. An Investors Protection Trust survey last year found that one in five Americans over 65 years old had been defrauded. Nearly 40 percent said they had received phone call solicitations or letters asking for money, but only 19 percent said their adult children knew about it.

Dr. Parker was among those who missed signs of financial misadventures involving his mother, Rosalee, who sent $40,000 to enter a lottery in Jamaica, at the behest

of friendly phone sales representatives. He discovered the swindle just as his mother, who died last September, was about to send an additional $70,000 to receive her “prize” of a Mercedes-Benz automobile.

She was furious, he noted, when he stepped in to take control of her finances.

Mr. Irwin, at the Pennsylvania Securities Commission, said fraud cases involving elderly people were not uncommon, especially in his state, which has a large number of Social Security recipients.

“We often step in get the cease-anddesist orders,” he said. “But now we are trying to get people alerted earlier, and this program casts the net wider.”

US Banks Say Dodd-Frank Favors Europe’s Banks

BY BEN PROTESS

N

ew financial regulations could increase the bottom lines of banks — just not banks on Wall Street.

The regulations encourage big European banks to steal business from United States rivals, according to a new report by analysts at JPMorgan Chase’s. The rules lose their authority at the United States border, leaving foreign banks to dominate.

Some foreign banks operate United States subsidiaries that insure their deposits with the federal government. Those banks would be subject to the new rules.

Big banks in Britain, Germany and France “benefit from regulatory arbitrage opportunities and gain market shares,” thanks to elements of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory law, the report opportunities arise from Dodd-Frank provisions that force banks to spin off derivatives business, halt proprietary trading and wind down their investments in hedge funds.

European banks face strict limits on executive pay packages, which “could threaten efforts” to attract high-priced talent. But the compensation curbs pose a “significantly less material” threat to profits than the rules facing Wall Street.

Big European investment banks like Barclays and Deutsche Bank “would be the winners” from the Dodd-Frank Act, while Goldman Sachs potentially has the “most to lose from the new rules,” the report said.

Goldman faces its greatest threat from the so-called Volcker Rule. Named after Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who proposed the rule, it prohibits federally insured banks from trading for their own benefit rather than for clients, a tactic known as proprietary trading. The hope, lawmakers said, was to

prevent banks from using their own capital to take risky bets while the government guarantees their deposits.

Goldman was among the first Wall Street giants to wind down its proprietary trading desks after President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law in July.

The bank’s principal strategies group, a proprietary desk whose alumni include a former Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin, recently joined the private equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. JPMorgan Chase has similarly planned to close its proprietary trading business.

The Volcker Rule ultimately could “have a significant impact” on trading revenue, according to the report.

The rule also prohibits American banks from owning more than a 3 percent stake in hedge funds and private equity shops. Morgan Stanley recently sold its majority stake in the hedge fund FrontPoint Partners to comply with the rule.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman are better positioned to comply with another Dodd-Frank rule that requires banks to spin off their derivatives desks into separately capitalized entities. This move will “create regulatory disadvantage” to banks like Bank of America and Citigroup, which are not well prepared for the shakeup, the report said.

The report echoes concerns raised

by Congressional Republicans.

Representative Scott Garrett of New Jersey, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee’s capital markets panel, recently complained that the DoddFrank Act would push business overseas.

“I am concerned,” he said in a March 3 letter to regulators, that some rules “may be setting up a system that encourages regulatory arbitrage, one where American financial companies will be severely disadvantaged.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

55

Making the Most Out of Less

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

J

EFF NELSON, a manager in the Utah Health Department, says he constantly scolds himself for not setting aside more for retirement. “It’s always there, like that squeaky screen door in back that you want to fix , but you never get to,” said Mr. Nelson, 40, the father of a 10-year-old and 7 -year-old. “I feel I have more pressing needs.

I have to make the house payment. I have to make the car payment.”

“I know you’re supposed to save more for retirement,” he added, “but I haven’t even started saving for college for my kids.”

Mr. Nelson, a state employee, may be a couple of decades from retirement, but he is in line to receive a pension someday, and that alone puts him in better shape that many Americans. But as he well knows, it is not likely to be enough. Sad to say, people of Mr. Nelson’s generation, the baby boomers’ children — in their 20s, 30s and 40s — are likely to have an even rougher retirement than their parents, many economists say.

And for the baby boomers themselves, retirement may not seem so rosy as it once did.

This year, the first of the nation’s 79 million baby boomers turn 65, and while millions dream of comfortable retirements, perhaps in Boca Raton, Fla., or Palm Springs, Calif., many will discover they will have a tough time in retirement.

“The baby boomers will be the first generation that will do worse in retirement than their parents,” said Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor and retirement specialist at the New School for Social Research in New York. “And the next generation of retirees will do a lot worse; they fall off a cliff,” largely because so few of them will have the traditional pensions that many of their parents and grandparents had.

Americans planning to retire in five to 10 years could see their golden years tarnished by a confluence of circumstances, including depressed housing prices, soaring health costs and a fitful stock market that has pummeled 401(k) plans. Not only that, company after company has frozen or eliminated its pension plan, and many members of Congress are pushing to scale back Social Security benefits — even though half of the nation’s retirees receive at least 90 percent of their income from Social Security. Its benefits average $14,000 a year. So perhaps it should not be surprising that 45 percent of America’s baby boomers are “at risk,” without enough to maintain their living standards after they retire, according to the nation’s leading center on retirement studies, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Even one development that might seem to be good news — longer life spans — could worsen retirement woes, because more and more people will live for years

after they have spent their nest eggs. For couples retiring now, the chances are 50 percent that one member will live to 92.

But don’t rush to press the panic button, retirement specialists say. Smart planning — and aggressive saving — can go far to ensure a comfortable retirement.

Whether you are 29 or 59, put far more into your retirement accounts, they say. Many recommend that you set aside at least 10 percent of your income.

And knowing how lackadaisical millions of Americans are about saving for retirement — and acknowledging that many are struggling just to make ends meet — many retirement specialists are urging Washington to create a savings vehicle, sometimes called an automatic individual retirement account or guaranteed retirement account, that would supplement Social Security and require workers (and perhaps employers) to contribute several percentage points of employee earnings.

If you have already retired, there are strategies to help make your retirement years more prosperous and secure. Buying an annuity can ensure you a steady income stream until the day you die, above and beyond Social Security. Some advisers also recommend that people 62 and older consider reverse mortgages, though they often offer less money than several years ago because of the decline in housing values.

Another increasingly popular, if unloved, strategy to consider is semiretirement, taking a part-time job or starting a small business to ensure an adequate income.

“No one wants to say longevity is a problem, but you have to finance your retirement for a longer period of time,” said David Certner, the legislative policy director for AARP. “We certainly encourage people to continue working that extra year or two. That means not only are you not drawing down for an extra year or two, but you’re building up your assets another year or two.”

Phyllis Kaplan, of Highland Park, Ill., began receiving early Social Security payments last August, at 63, because she had lost her job as a graphic designer for a pu-

blishing house. She rolled over money from her 401(k) into an I.R.A., but she said that still left her without enough income, even with $1,200 in monthly Social Security benefits.

So Ms. Kaplan started working 10 days a month in a bead shop, making use of her artistic flair.

“I realized I had to continue working because I can’t pay my bills,” said Ms. Kaplan, who has been divorced for 24 years. “I have no pension, and I have to buy health insurance, and this job is helping me develop more of a nest egg.” She noted that Social Security would cut her benefits if she worked more each month.

A new report by McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, is gloomy about retirement. The report, Restoring Americans’ Retirement Security: A Shared Responsibility, says, “The average American family faces a 37 percent shortfall in the income they will need in retirement,” meaning “the average household will face a retirement savings shortfall of nearly $250,000 by the time of retirement.

“Even before the financial crisis that began in the fall of 2008,” causing 401(k) plans to tumble, “Americans were woefully unprepared for retirement.”

Households in the 60-to-65 age group with incomes of $100,000 to $250,000 a year face a 20 percent shortfall in the income needed to maintain their living standards at retirement, the report says, while households 40 to 59 in that income bracket face a 28 percent shortfall.

For households with incomes of $50,000 to $100,000, McKinsey found, those 60 to 65 face a 10 percent gap in the income needed to maintain their living standards in retirement, but those 40 to 59 in that income group face a 37 percent shortfall.

The shortfalls are even larger for those 30 to 39. The McKinsey report says that group faces the biggest challenge, but “they have the greatest ability to recover by changing their behaviors.” “This group,” the report says, “must rely almost entirely on personal savings” because the payouts from traditional defined-benefit pensions “will

provide one-tenth of the retirement income of their parents’ generation.”

At 76, Peter Sonders has some strong retirement advice for younger Americans.

A longtime lab technician at an AnheuserBusch Brewery, Mr. Sonders lives comfortably in retirement in Williamsburg, Va., although he worked 27 years for Rheingold, a beer company that went bankrupt, causing his pension there to wither to $88 a month.

Still, Mr. Sonders boasts that he has managed to put together a solid retirement in a way, he says, that many others can.

“The strategy I would recommend is, you have to save ’till it hurts, because even your regular pension plan can go up in smoke,” said Mr. Sonders, who used to be a trustee on union pension funds. “So save as much as you can, well over 10 percent a year. And don’t speculate too much in what you’re investing. And if you ever get a raise, don’t spend the raise, keep saving it and you usually won’t miss it.”

Retirement specialists say a cascade of unhappy factors has dimmed retirement prospects: Social Security benefits will replace just 28 percent of a recipient’s preretirement income in 2030, on average, down from 39 percent in 2002, according to the Center on Retirement Research. The drop will result largely from the increased Medicare payments and higher income taxes Social Security recipients will have to pay.

Financial planners generally recommend that retirement income be 65 percent to 80 percent of preretirement income to avoid a drop in living standards. Social Security recipients face that decline even without more cuts Congress may make to address the system’s long-term financing problems. One idea is to raise the age for full benefits to 69.

Low interest rates have translated into paltry yields for many bonds and retirement accounts, making it harder to live off interest alone (although low inflation helps keep pensions and savings accounts from eroding).

Not only do fewer than half of privatesector workers participate in a pension or 401(k) plan, but corporations are moving more workers from traditional pensions to the considerably less generous 401(k). At the same time, public-sector workers, many of whom still have generous defined-benefit pensions, are seeing those plans come under attack in New Jersey, Wisconsin and other states.

Jack VanDerhei, research director of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, said, “Unless you’re one of the 40 to 50 percent of the private-sector work force that’s lucky enough to work for an employer that’s sponsoring a retirement plan, the probability that you’ll end up with sufficient money for retirement is de minimis.”

Even many Americans with 401(k) plans face problems because workers have a median of about $30,000 in their accounts, while the 55-to-64 age group just before retirement has a median of $78,000, not much to

Continues on page 56

56 Comes from page 55 live on in addition to Social Security if you retire at 65 and live 20 more years. As a result of the stock market’s slide during the recession, 401(k) plans lost $2.8 trillion in value, tumbling by more than 40 percent — though Wall Street’s recent rise has allowed them to recoup more than half that loss.

Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center on Retirement Research at Boston College, said 401(k) plans were far from ideal for retirement, not least because they are so complicated and many Americans have little investment expertise. Workers, she said, have to decide whether to join their employer’s plan, how much to contribute, how to invest their contributions, when to rebalance, what to do about company stock, whether to roll over accumulations when changing jobs and how to withdraw the money in retirement.

“Every step along the way, a significant fraction of participants make serious mistakes,” she said.

Retirement specialists are overflowing with advice about what to do to prevent a drop in living standards.

For wealthy as well as many middleclass Americans, Mr. VanDerhei, said, “Any overall rule of thumb I give would be silly,

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

but I plead with people, before you retire please go see somebody, please spend a couple of hundred dollars to see a financial planner to discuss the correct drawdown strategy, annuitization and other matters.”

Mr. VanDerhei said annuities were an excellent idea for many people, though using all one’s retirement savings for an annuity “doesn’t make sense for a lot of people.” He also urged people to seriously consider long-term care insurance to help protect against nursing home costs wiping out their savings.

Whether you are wealthy or middle class, retirement specialists emphasize the importance of rebalancing your financial assets as you grow older, moving a higher percentage out of equities and into less volatile investments.

While Americans in their 20s and 30s are not saving nearly enough for retirement, many specialists agree, they see one optimistic sign — two-fifths of the 401(k) balances of new hires is being placed in balanced funds, including target-date funds, those that invest based on when an employee plans to retire, to help provide protection from sudden market volatility.

Recognizing that many 401(k) investors rarely change their own asset allocations, specialists recommend target-date

funds because the fund managers reallocate the funds toward less risky investments as workers age.

For moderate- and low-income Americans, retirement specialists emphasize the importance of saving as much as you can, although those Americans have the least ability to put money aside.

“Basically, people don’t save on their own,” Ms. Munnell said. “They only save through organized institutional mechanisms.

Lecturing people to save doesn’t work.”

The Pension Protection Act of 2006 created incentives for more companies to funnel all their employees into 401(k) plans, but many small businesses have not done so, leaving millions of workers without retirement plans.

Some retirement specialists and advocacy groups, noting that one-third of retirees get 100 percent of their retirement income from Social Security, often just $14,000 a year, say more needs to be done to help low- and moderate-income retirees.

Karen Friedman, executive vice president for the Pension Rights Center, a nonprofit group, is urging Congress to create what are often called guaranteed retirement accounts, to which employees and employers would contribute, with each giving perhaps 3 percent of an employee’s

pay. She also said the federal government should provide a tax subsidy to give workers, especially low-income ones, an incentive to contribute.

“Congress,” Ms. Friedman said, “shouldn’t be focusing on cutting Social Security — that’s the part of the retirement system that works best — but on strengthening the private side of the system to make sure everyone has adequate and secure benefits for retirement.”

But many business groups, as well as Mr. VanDerhei’s institute, oppose requiring employers to contribute 2 percent or 3 percent as part of such a system, arguing that companies already face plenty of government mandates.

Professor Ghilarducci had frank if unpleasant advice about how Americans might deal with the looming problem of saving too little to maintain their living standards in retirement.

Asserting that millions of people have been overspenders who have lived beyond their means, she said: “People do need to save more money for retirement. Unless changes are made to give people better pensions, my advice is to ratchet down your living standards, so when you have less money during retirement you won’t be so disappointed.”

AARP Sues Over Effects of Reverse Mortgages

By DAVID STREITFELD

R

everse mortgages, which pay older homeowners a regular sum against the equity in their house, are supposed to shield borrowers from economic upheaval. But the popular loans have become tangled up in the real estate collapse.

AARP, the seniors’ organization, filed suit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which regulates reverse mortgages. The suit asserts that policy changes by HUD are pushing older homeowners into foreclosure.

The case was filed in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia by the AARP Foundation, the organization’s charitable arm, and the law firm of Mehri & Skalet on behalf of the surviving spouses of three homeowners who had bought reverse mortgages. All three are facing eviction, the suit says.

“HUD has illegally and without notice changed the rules in the middle of the game at the expense of vulnerable older people,” said Jean Constantine-Davis, a senior lawyer at the AARP Foundation.

The lawsuit focuses on reverse mortgages where only one spouse signed the loan document. It argues that HUD shifted course in late 2008, making changes in its procedures so that surviving spouses who are not named on the mortgage must pay the full loan balance to keep the home, even if the property is worth less.

Owners of traditional mortgages often are liable for the difference between

the value of their house after foreclosure and their original loan. Reverse mortgages were intended to be nonrecourse, which means that even if the value of the property shrinks, the most the borrower can lose is the house itself.

It is unclear how many elderly homeowners are facing foreclosure for reasons related to the lawsuit, but Ms. Constantine-Davis said that hundreds and perhaps thousands of elderly people were in positions similar to those of the three plaintiffs.

Nearly a quarter of all homes with mortgages in the United States are worth less the loan. These so-called underwater properties are difficult to sell and impossible to refinance.

The suit accuses HUD of making policy changes that allow underwater homes with reverse mortgages to be sold to strangers in arm’s-length transactions for less than the full mortgage balance, but that require spouses or heirs in some cases to pay the full amount. Finally, the suit says HUD is ignoring its own provisions against displacing a surviving spouse.

A HUD spokeswoman said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

One plaintiff, Delores Jeanne Moore of Covington, Ind., was not on the reverse mortgage because her husband had owned the house before they married. He died in 2008. Under the new HUD rules, the suit says, if Mrs. Moore wants to keep the house, she must pay the balance of the loan, $91,000. But a third-party buyer could get the house for 95 percent of its

appraised value, or about $81,000.

Mrs. Moore’s lender has been seeking to foreclose since August 2009. “When the housing market was constantly ticking upwards, these new provisions would not have mattered so much,” Ms. ConstantineDavis said. “Now it’s a much bigger problem.”

More than half a million people have received reverse mortgages since Congress authorized the program a quarter-century ago. Those who get the cash must be at least 62 and have substantial equity in their houses. Participants receive either a lump sum or monthly payments from lenders.

After their death, the house is sold and the mortgage is paid off.

Robert Bennett, a 69-year-old retired cook at the United States Naval Academy, is also a plaintiff. Three years ago, he and

his wife, Ophelia, replaced the traditional mortgage on their house in Annapolis, Md., with a reverse mortgage so they could make ends meet.

Lenders sometimes encourage only the elder member of a couple to put his or her name on the mortgage because then the payout is greater. Mr. Bennett said he did not realize that his new mortgage had taken his name off the title of the home, which the couple had owned together since 1981.

Mrs. Bennett, who was a decade senior to her husband, died shortly after the new mortgage went into effect. The payments immediately stopped and the mortgage became due and payable.

The lender began foreclosure proceedings and scheduled a sale of the property last month.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

57

Drug Firms Face Billions in Losses in ’11 as Patents End

By DUFF WILSON

A

t the end of November, Pfizer stands to lose a $10-billion-a-year revenue stream when the patent on its blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor expires and cheaper generics begin to cut into the company’s sales.

The loss poses a challenge for Pfizer, shared by every major pharmaceutical company. This year because of patent expirations, the drug industry will lose 10 megamedicines whose combined annual sales neared $50 billion.

This is a reversal for an industry that was the world’s most profitable business sector but is under pressure to reinvent itself and shed its dependence on blockbuster drugs. Drug companies now face: a drought of big drug breakthroughs and research discoveries; pressure from insurers and the government to hold down prices; regulatory vigilance and government investigations; and thousands of layoffs in research and development.

The same concerns apply to drug giants in the United States. They are all struggling with research failures as they scramble to replace their cash cows, like Pfizer’s multimillion-dollar gamble on a replacement for the cholesterollowering drug Lipitor, which failed miserably in clinical trials. Drug companies cut 53,000 jobs last year and 61,000 in 2009, far more than most other sectors, according to the outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“This is panic time, this is truly panic time for the industry,” said Kenneth I. Kaitin, director of the Center for the Study of Drug Development at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “I don’t think there’s a company out there that doesn’t realize they don’t have enough products in the pipeline or the portfolio, don’t have enough revenue to sustain their research and development.”

While industrywide research and development spending has nearly doubled to $45 billion a year over the last decade, the Food and Drug Administration has approved fewer and fewer new drugs. Pfizer and Eli Lilly had major setbacks last year in once-promising Alzheimer’s drug experiments. Merck discontinued one of two major clinical trials testing its top acquisition from its merger with Schering Plough, a blood thinner that caused dangerous amounts of bleeding in some patients.

Drug company executives have begun addressing the calls for reinvention.

“We have to fix our innovative core,” Pfizer’s new president, Ian C. Read, said in an interview recently. To do that, the company is refocusing on smaller niches in cancer, inflammation, neuroscience and branded generics — and slashing as much as 30 percent of its own research and development spending in the next two years as its scientists work on only the most potentially profitable prospects.

Consumers should see a financial benefit as lowercost generics replace the expensive elite drugs, but may suffer in the long term if companies reduce research and do not produce new drugs that meet the public’s needs.

“You don’t lay off R&D if it’s just a cycle,” says Erik Gordon, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan business school who follows the pharmaceutical industry. “That kills progress.”

The federal government is also concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming from the industry. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently proposed a billion-dollar drug development center at the agency.

“We seem to have a systemic problem here,” Dr. Collins said, adding that government research efforts were intended to feed the private sector, not compete with it.

Mr. Read of Pfizer says new products can replace some but not all of the patent losses.

“The hurricane is making landfall,” said Jeremy Batstone-Carr, an analyst at Charles Stanley Securities, but he added that Pfizer is among several drug companies giving solace to shareholders by returning money through stock buybacks and dividends. Pfizer’s best asset, he said, is its $20 billion stockpile of cash. Yet since 2000, Pfizer’s and Merck’s share prices dropped about 60 percent, while the Dow rose 19 percent.

Several of the drug titans have bought competitors with newer products to fill their own sales gaps, essentially paying cash for future revenue as their own research was flagging. In the last two years, Pfizer paid $68 billion for Wyeth, Merck paid $41 billion for Schering-Plough, Roche paid $46 billion for Genentech, and Sanofi-Aventis paid $20 billion for Genzyme.

Henry G. Grabowski, a professor of economics and director of the Duke University program in pharmaceutical health economics, likened the recent pharmaceutical megamergers to those that occurred in the banking and telecommunications industries when they were hit by financial shocks in the 1990s.

But he warned that this wave would not guarantee significant research developments in the long term.

“It’s never been shown that these big horizontal mergers are good for R&D productivity,” Dr. Grabowski said.

“I’m in a show-me mode that they get you any real advances other than some short-term cost efficiencies that wear out.”

As they move beyond the blockbuster model, companies are refining their approach toward personalized medicines and forming more partnerships. Using genetic or other tests, the plan is to sell new drugs not to millions and millions of people, but to those who would most clearly benefit.

Still, the industry faces intense pressure from generic competition and has tried every tactic to ward it off, including extended-release versions of the same medicine and new pills that combine two ingredients. But 75 percent of all prescriptions in the United States are now low-price, lowprofit generic drugs.

At the same time, pharmaceutical companies are being urged by managed care and government health programs to cut prices and improve reimbursement terms for their most profitable pills.

That follows similar practices in Europe, where Germany and the Britain, among other countries, are all increasing pressure for lower drug prices.

“Europe is an ugly place to do business today and will be in five years’ time,” Christopher A. Viehbacher, chief executive of the French drug giant Sanofi-Aventis, said in an interview.

In the United States, Mr. Viehbacher said generic drugs were taking over the primary care market, leaving the best growth potential in specialty markets and in emer-

ging nations like China, Brazil and Indonesia.

Even in those markets, health systems will not be the profit centers that the United States has been. China, emerging this year as the third-largest pharmaceutical market behind the United States and Japan, plans to cut hundreds of drug prices by an average of 40 percent.

The drug industry has long said that Americans fueled the research engine, spending much more per capita on prescriptions than in any other nation, and paying the highest prices for prescribed medicines.

Drug industry lobbyists have beaten back Democratic proposals to set prices at the lower levels of nations like Canada or to allow Medicare to directly negotiate prices.

The industry, by supporting President Obama’s health care overhaul, capped its contribution at $90 billion over 10 years in return for the promise of up to 32 million newly insured customers starting in 2014.

The new law also contains a major threat to drug industry profits in a little-known section that would allow centralized price-setting. Beginning in 2015, an independent board appointed by the president could lower prices across the board in Medicare unless Congress acted each year to overrule it. Medicare pays more than 20 percent of the nation’s retail drug bills.

The industry has also been unsettled by the scores of fraud, bribery and kickback cases involving conduct that federal investigators contend have added billions to the nation’s drug bill. The penalties have been stiff, and the settlements steep.

In 2009, Pfizer paid the largest criminal fine in the nation’s history a $2.3 billion settlement over marketing drugs for unapproved uses. Analysts say larger fraud and foreign bribery cases will come. The drug companies are responding with extra-careful sales training and vows to restrain marketing zeal. The change in corporate culture could cost them: internal documents show the companies have profited from federal approval of a drug for a limited use, then marketing it widely off label.

Other changes will affect the bottom line. Growing restrictions on gifts, fees and trips to influence doctors; curbs on the ghost writing of medical journal articles and more disclosure of negative study results. As the golden age of blockbuster drugs fades, so are the marketing excesses of the past two decades — the tactics that helped bring in immense profits.

Sports

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The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

With 11 Teams in Expanded Bracket, Big East Is a Region All Its Own Young’s sophomore center, Brandon Davies, who was dismissed from the team for violating the university’s honor code.

The No. 3-seeded Cougars could face a serious challenge in their first game from senior-oriented Wofford, the No. 14 seed in the Southeast.

But the story of the day was the Big East, which became the first conference to place 11 teams in the N.C.A.A. tournament. The Big East shattered its previous

Ohio State, Kansas, Pittsburgh and Duke were selected as the four No. 1 seeds.

By MARK VIERA

A

s the N.C.A.A. unveiled the new 68-team format for its men’s basketball tournament Sunday, the defining quality of this year’s field was not the bracket’s redesign, but the record 11 teams from the Big East to earn an invitation.

Although the Big East made a strong overall showing, the conference received only one No. 1 seed, Pittsburgh, which joined Ohio State, Kansas and Duke.

Notre Dame, which was also considered for a top seed, was seeded second in the Southwest.

“They did a great job with their body of work,” Gene Smith, the chairman of the N.C.A.A. tournament’s selection committee, said of the Panthers’ seeding. “The regular season is a gantlet.

That’s when you have to perform week in and week out.”

The top overall seed, Ohio State, has perhaps the most difficult road to the Final Four in Houston. The Buckeyes were placed with No. 2 North Carolina, No. 3 Syracuse and No. 4 Kentucky in the East Region. Pittsburgh, which is in the Southeast Region with No. 2 Florida and No. 3 Brigham Young, could have the easiest path.

Aside from the actual matchups, there was added intrigue surrounding the format of the bracket this year. Last April, the field expanded to 68 teams, from 65 last year, meaning three games were added to the annual play-in game to complete the bracket.

The opening-round game used to feature two teams vying for the final No. 16 seed. Under the new format, the last four at-large teams and the last four automatic qualifiers were matched against one another. The automatic qualifiers will play for No. 16 seeds in the East and Southwest.

As for the last four at-large teams, Southern California will play Virginia Commonwealth for the No. 11 seed in the Southwest Region, and Alabama-Birmingham will face Clemson for the No. 12 seed in the East Region.

U.A.B. and Georgia were perhaps the most surprising entrants in the field.

U.A.B., which won Conference USA’s regular-season title, ranked 31st in the Ratings Percentage Index but had only one victory against a team in the top 50.

Georgia seemed to move from on the fringe to comfortably in, as the No. 10 seed in the East Region.

The last teams left out of the field included Alabama, Colorado, St. Mary’s and Virginia Tech. Among them, Colorado might have had the strongest case; the Buffaloes had six wins against teams in the top 50 of the R.P.I. “Colorado was really close,” Smith said in a conference call. “At the end of the day, when we analyzed all the information and put them against the other teams, they didn’t get enough votes to get in.”

Ohio State and Kansas were clear No. 1 seeds. In particular, the Buckeyes, who have skilled outside players to balance the talented Jared Sullinger on the inside, had emerged as the nation’s best team as they outclassed the Big Ten from start to finish.

Duke, the defending national champion, seemed to go down to the wire to earn a top seed but would have been the heavy national title favorite before its star freshman point guard, Kyrie Irving, was injured early in the season. The Blue Devils defeated North Carolina, which earned a No. 2 seed, in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament final on Sunday.

The selection committee often factors player availability when creating the bracket. Perhaps no player’s departure was more notable than that of Brigham

Jared Sullinger of the Ohio State Buckeyes celebrated with the Big Ten Championship trophy.

record of having eight teams receive bids.

The sheer volume of Big East teams created seeding issues for the selection committee. In the Big East, the 16 teams do not necessarily play each other twice in the regular season. The committee tried to seed Big East teams against conference opponents that they played only once.

Smith acknowledged that the committee probably seeded a few teams out of place in order to try to avoid rematches. Louisville received a No. 4 seed and Georgetown a No. 6 seed in the Southwest Region. West Virginia was seeded fifth and Villanova ninth in the East Region. St. John’s received a No. 6 seed in the Southeast Region.

There are two possible Big East rematches in the third round. No. 3 Connecticut and No. 6 Cincinnati could meet if they win their opening games in the West Region, and No. 3 Syracuse and No. 11 Marquette could face each other if they advance in the East Region. Both of those teams played each other only once in the regular season.

“Placing 11 teams into the N.C.A.A. championship doesn’t happen by accident,” John Marinatto, the commissioner of the Big East, said in an e-mail. “It takes a concerted, consistent and focused effort on the part of our coaches, administrators, and I’m thrilled to see them rewarded in this manner.”

Ben Hansbrough and Notre Dame were seeded second in the Southwest.

The Irish will open against Akron in Chicago on Friday.

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

59

Sports

Michael Bradley Wins Puerto Rico Open M

ichael Bradley took advantage of Troy Matteson’s short par miss on the first extra hole Sunday to win the Puerto Rico Open for the second time in three years.

The 44-year-old Bradley closed with his fourth straight 4-under 68 to match Matteson (72) at 16-under 272 at Trump International Golf Club, then parred the par-5 18th in the playoff for his fourth PGA Tour victory.

Matteson three-putted in the playoff, missing a 3-footer.

“I had almost the same putt in regulation, a little shorter and it went dead straight. And that one just barely broke enough to catch a piece of the hole,” Matteson said. “If I hit it a little easier, it might have barely fallen in the left side. But I hit a good putt. I hit it right where I was looking and that’s all you can do.”

Bradley ended up in the playoff af-

ter missing a 3-footer of his own on 18.

“I don’t know if that was turnabout fair play after that little putt I missed on the 72nd hole,” Bradley said. “But you hate to win a championship like that with somebody else missing a putt like that.

But you know, I’m very happy to be a two time champion of this event now, so I’ll move on to next week.”

Bradley birdied the first two holes in the final round, eagled the par-5 fifth and birdied the seventh to reach 17 under. He bogeyed the 14th, countered with a birdie on 15, then missed the short par

putt on 18 to drop back into a tie.

“It would have been disappointing if I would have ended up losing the tour

Continues on page 60

Sports

60

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Comes from page 59 nament because I missed that putt and then lost in the playoff,” Bradley said. “Would have been disappointing, but I don’t have to worry about it anymore. It worked out, I guess, in my favor.”

Matteson also birdied the first two holes, but dropped strokes on Nos. 4 and 6 and parred the final 12 holes of regulation before losing on the first extra hole.

“Most people would walk off after a second, losing a playoff and maybe be distraught, but I haven’t played good all year, so this is at least a sign of good things to come,” said Matteson, a two-

time winner on the PGA Tour. “I’m not disappointed with my play at all this week.”

Stephen Ames (66) and Hunter Haas (71) tied for third at 14 under, George McNeill (69) followed at 13 under, and Bobby Gates (69) was another stroke back. Angel Cabrera (71) topped a group at 11 under.

Bradley earned $630,000.

“I enjoy the golf course,” Bradley said. “It’s tropical like Florida where I live. I like the greens. I like the layout.

There’s no rhyme or reason why I have played well here. I can’t put a finger on it, but I’m not going to question it. ...

Don’t know why. I don’t want to know why.”

Cotto Stops Mayorga in the 12th Round

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

R

icardo Mayorga wanted to brawl all night long. Miguel Cotto saved his big punching for the final round.

Cotto fought with discipline for 11 rounds before unleashing a vicious left hook in the 12th round Saturday night that put an exclamation point on his successful defense of his 154-pound title against the wild-swinging Mayorga.

The hook dropped Mayorga to the canvas and he quit a few seconds later, ending an entertaining bout between two boxers trying to resurrect their careers.

“It was a really good fight with an amazing finish,” Cotto said.

Cotto was ahead by five points on all three ringside scorecards entering the final round and seemingly headed to a win by decision. But he caught Mayorga in an exchange early in the round and, though Mayorga got up, he told referee Robert Byrd when action resumed that he couldn’t go on.

Mayorga said it wasn’t the effects of the left hook that made him quit, but an injury to his thumb during the exchange.

“I hate the way this fight ended,” Mayorga said. “I tried to finish the final round but the pain in my hand was too

much.”

Cotto made Mayorga fight on his terms much of the night, frustrating the Nicaraguan and piling up points. The fight had plenty of action, but Cotto landed the cleaner and more effective punches as he stuck to his boxing style despite Mayorga begging him to brawl on several occasions.

Cotto, continuing to rebound from a beating at the hands of Manny Pacquiao, improved his record in title fights to 17-2 in the first defense of the title he won from Yuri Foreman last June.

“The game plan was not to get caught up in any of his antics,” Cotto said. “He was very heavy handed, I felt his punches the whole fight.”

Cotto was a big favorite to retain the title, but Mayorga fought a competitive fight and landed well in flurries to the head. He took more punches than he gave out, though, with Cotto outscoring him 249-176 in total punches scored at ringside.

Before the final round, Cotto’s trainer, Emanuel Steward, told his fighter to make sure he kept going forward and that he could stop a tiring Mayorga. He did just that, though Cotto only had to remain on his feet in the final round to win.

“I told myself, keep calm and be myself,” Cotto said. “He has very strong hands and punches that hurt.”

Cotto, who made $1 million, improved to 36-2 with 29 knockouts. Mayorga, who has now lost five of his last nine fights and may be at the end of his career at the age of 37, fell to 29-8-1.

In another fight, Foreman returned to the ring for the first time since losing to Cotto but made it through only six rounds against Pawel Wolak. Foreman lost all six rounds on the ringside scorecards and had taken a beating in the previous two

rounds when his corner called an end to the fight after the sixth round.

“I just didn’t feel it tonight,” said Foreman, a rabbi-in-training. “There were no surprises, but I just didn’t have it.”

Wolak, who improved to 29-1, applied pressure from the opening bell and Foreman didn’t have any answer for him. By the fifth round he was taking big punches to the head and couldn’t keep Wolak away from him.

Foreman, who won his first 28 fights before losing the last two, said he would rest before deciding about his future.

The crowd of 7,247 at the MGM Grand hotel also got to see some NFL action when Baltimore Ravens safety Tommy Zbikowski didn’t let the NFL lockout stop him from making a nice payday.

Fighting for the second time as a pro, Zbikowski barely broke a sweat Saturday night in stopping Richard Bryant in the first round of a scheduled fourround fight on the undercard of the Miguel Cotto-Ricardo Mayorga 154-pound title fight.

Zbikowski, who last fought while still attending Notre Dame, earned $50,000 for what turned out to be just 105 seconds of work. He dropped Bryant with a left hook to the body and referee Russell Mora waved the fight to a close after Bryant got up at the count of seven.

“I was looking to get a little more work but you take a win any way you can get it,” Zbikowski said. “I know I hurt him with the hook, you could feel the air come out.”

Zbikowski, who weighed 193 pounds to 225 for his opponent, plans to fight next on March 26 in Atlantic City.

“I wanted to get the ring rust off in this fight,” he said. “Right now this isn’t a second career for me. It’s a first career.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Games

61

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9 Click the “check sudoku” button to check your sudoku inputs Click the “new sudoku” button and select difficulty to play a new game

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Wordsearch

Answers on page 62

62 March 17 - 23, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

The behaviour of others will baffle you, but stay cool. Family ties may do your head in; but what is new? Stay fun to be around; people love you when you are on form and you might as well have them well disposed towards you. Treat yourself with an image revamp or new wardrobe. Listen to your heart and you will not go far wrong. You need to trust the power of your intuition a little more.

Meet deadlines head-on. Remember the more you have to do, the more you get done. Spend time with your private thoughts; there really is no rush. It is better to achieve something in your own time, than not at all. Be resourceful and use your imagination to its fullest capacity. Think those deep thoughts with the full assurance that a turnaround is on the cards.

Attend to tedious tasks and get generally organized.

Taurus

Scorpio

(April 21-May 21)

All your attempts to find security and peace of mind seem to be falling by the wayside. Do not panic. Stay philosophical and look on the bright side. Things have a habit of working out and you need to act on faith just now. If necessary distract yourself, finish up work and honour those commitments. Use your skills and talents cleverly. Excess energy gets the job done in super quick time. Love is a ‘many splendour thing’... It is about to spring some surprises!

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

In all situations where you are being given shoddy treatment, stand up for yourself! These are destiny moments. You must be on the ball and ever ready to jump at the opportunities which arise. Listen to your heart. It will surely guide you through a complex situation. Ignore petty jealousies and keep communication very straightforward, indeed. Love is great in all its forms. You need to tend to your relationships and make sure you appreciate loved ones fully!

Avoid an overwhelming situation. You may indeed feel a bit stressed, but it will pay to remain vigilant and it is very important not to be too hassled by matters beyond your control. Call on the support of a good friend if necessary and do not be upset about the past. In love, your feelings will be aroused one way or the other. Stay calm if tested and revel in the good times. Get everything lined up in your work or study, but do not ignore genuine love moves. Be bold!

Sagittarius

Cancer

Capricorn

(June 22-July 23)

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Get organized and pace yourself through your work commitments. Embrace tedious tasks and commitments efficiently, but quickly. It is time to think big! Your personal ambitions will soon receive a boost. It is very important that you do not underestimate your talents. You can make the moves you wish for. Focus and see where you get to. In love, choose your moment wisely. You will defeat that which conspires against you.

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Enjoy the company of loved ones and make sure noone feels left out. Domestic bliss is highlighted, but do not be a couch spud! With the work stuff, delegate and relax when you can. Your energy needs to be restored; which can now be done in simple ways. Use your sense of humour to win people over. Socially, you can be the centre of attention, so dress to impress and keep smiling at all costs. Stay grounded and be as sensible as possible. It will all pay off.

Social complications may arise if you panic where a change of time, place or person is concerned. If you are organizing an event, keep your cool. Honour the organic flow and let things unfold naturally. It will pay to steer clear of any kind of dispute; there really is no point; you will not be heard. There is much too much hot air flying around. However, love gets a welcome boost. A bit more trust in the benevolent universe would not go amiss. Be self-confident.

Leo

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)

(July 24-Aug 23)

Talk and communicate to the best of your ability.

It is the only way to get through things at the moment. An understanding needs to be reached. Do not run from your commitments. The sun shines when it is meant to. Find a way! Where there is a will.....! Strengthen those bonds of love. Friends and lovers are really genuine. In tricky situations stop the second-guessing.

Prepare to attract a lot of admiring glances. Keep your sensible hat on when wheeling and dealing.

You will be able to negotiate very effectively now and might as well act confidently. Never mind the recession. Ask for what you need and wish for. Prepare to receive and you will surely get the recognition that you so deserve. Look over your finances and sort out your priorities. You must make time for a friend who needs help. Love is complex in its demands.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

You do not really need to over analyze or read situations in their detail. Simply use your intuitive antennae for the best results. Take people at face value as much as possible, then trust your own instincts for the rest. There is no point making life impossible for yourself. Never mind the complexity of things at the moment. It is all part of life’s fun and entertainment value. Keep a positive outlook and see where you get to. There really is no need to panic. Keep on!

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Just as well you are in the mood to oblige. You should feel quite pleased when resolutions are reached. Strike a balance in all that you do. The twists and turns of life will keep you on your toes. You are well able to detach and keep things in perspective.

Watch and wait as the good vibes return. You will have to trust Life’s process and hope for the best.

Watch out and try your best to clear up those silly misunderstandings.

The San Juan Weekly

Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 61

The San Juan Weekly

March 17 - 23, 2011

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

63

Ziggi

64

March 17 - 23, 2011

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