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December 9 - 15, 2010
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Under FDIC Pressure to Recapitalize, First Bank Rejects Doral Offer
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ith the exodus of 936 deposits, $10 billion in banking capital left our island. The sector had grown beyond the normal levels of our market size thanks to these abnormal deposits. Their departure put pressure on a reduction in the scope of our banking sector. For a short time the selling forward of bundled low interest loans alleviated this pressure. After the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insirance Corporation (FDIC) ruled these activities improper,
either a major recapitalization or reduction of loans by our banks was required. The Puerto Rican Banking Sector has been consolidating over the past years responding to these previous events and related financial difficulties. Overtime it is expected the sector will reduce more accurately reflecting the productive and financial scope of our island. Recent acquisitions of Doral Bank by a Bear Sterns investment fund, of Western Bank by Popular, of RG Premier & Mortgage Banks by Scotia and Eurobank by Oriental have contributed to the expectation of more consolidation due to capital requirements. The FDIC had demanded a $500 million later reduced to $350 million capital increase by First Bank. First Bank has begun a public offering through O’Neill Leung Sandler (NY). Doral Bank made a hostile offer to acquire First Bank for 30 cents per share (only slightly above current share prices), but totaling $550 million in new capital. The unsolicited offer
was rejected by First Bank’s board of directors. Aurelio Alemán, Chief Executive Officer of First Bank, indicated they will continue working to comply with the order from the bank regulators to increase their capital by $350 million. Though originally set for deadline the end of 2010, it is expected that the FDIC will allow First Bank time to complete their offering if successful. If unsuccessful Doral could seek a fusion assisted by the FDIC.
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The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
“ThereAre Only 4 Status Options” Senate Leaders Disregard the “Enhanced Commonwealth” as a Status Option for the Island
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ashington, DC- The leadership of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee sent a letter to President Barack Obama, affirming that only four status options exist for Puerto Rico: those contained in H.R. 2499, introduced by Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi and approved in May by the House. The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources , Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Ranking Member Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), stated in their letter to President Obama that in the past “efforts to address Puerto Rico’s political status have been hampered by a failure of the federal government to clearly define these status options and that failure has undermined Puerto Rico’s efforts to accurately assess the views of the voters,” and stressed that the next plebiscite in Puerto Rico must offer realistic alternatives. “In recent years, however, a consistent Administration and Congressional view has emerged that only four status options are available for Puerto Rico’s future relations with the U.S.,” continued the letter to the President. According to the Senate Energy
and Natural Resources Committee leadership, the four options are the continuation of the current Commonwealth status, subject to the territorial clause (under Article IV of the Constitution), statehood, independence, and free association. “General agreement on these four options is demonstrated by recent House passage of H.R. 2499,
status referendum legislation that presents only these options,” said the letter to the President. Bingaman and Murkowski wrote that “This analysis of the status options favored by the principal political parties in Puerto Rico concludes that a fifth option, ‘New Commonwealth,’ is incompatible with the Constitution
and basic laws of the United States in several respects,” according to the analysis and conclusion of the U.S. Department of Justice under the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “The Government of Puerto Rico is planning to conduct a referendum on future political status this summer and the
The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
leadership of the Puerto Rican government has asked us: What are the status options available for future relations with the United States and that should be included in the planned referendum? To properly conduct the planned referendum and provide useful results, it is important for the Administration to provide its views on this question. The upcoming Task Force Report provides an excellent opportunity to do so,” reads the letter. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee has jurisdiction over the political status of Puerto Rico, and Chairman Bingaman will continue leading the Committee in the 112th Congress. “The two leaders in the U.S. Senate with direct jurisdiction over Puerto Rico’s status have
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sent a clear message to the White House. The moment has come to solve the status issue on the Island, and the best way to do it is with a plebiscite in which the people of Puerto Rico can choose among the only four recognized options. To do anything else would be to waste time and play with the future of Puerto Ricans,” said Pierluisi. “I want to thank Senators Bingaman and Murkowski for validating the four status options recognized in H.R. 2499. The people of Puerto Rico are expecting action on this issue. Once they are officially established, it will be up to our political leaders to uphold the virtues of each of the options and up to the people to decide which one they support,” concluded the Resident Commissioner.
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December 9 - 15, 2010
The San Juan Weekly
Patheon Pharmaceutical to Close Caguas Plant
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atheon Pharmaceuticals will close its Caguas plant in one year. The pharmaceutical conglomerate will invest $12 million to expand its Manati operations during the same period. Peter Bigelow, president of Patheon, said this is part of the consolidation the company announced last year that would include closing the Caguas plant, transferring production operations tablets 3.500 to the north of the island. About 100 of the 300 employees of the plant would be transferred to Manati from Caguas gradually, causing the layoff of 200 employees by the end of 2011 in Caguas. Patheon is a leading pharmaceutical products and biotechnology company. “If the growth of this plan is successful in Puerto Rico in the future we may evaluate an increase in the availability of places of employment,� said Bigelow.
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December 9 - 15, 2010
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Four Municipalities Added to PR Disaster Declaration for Tropical Storm Otto Damages
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ederal officials announced today that the municipalities of Cayey, Ciales, Corozal and San Lorenzo in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico have been added to the list of designated municipalities under the presidential disaster declaration of October 26, 2010. The federal disaster declaration was granted due to the rains, flooding, mudslides, and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Otto in Puerto Rico on October 4-8, 2010. Accordingly, these newly designated municipalities are eligible to apply for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Public Assistance (Infrastructure) and Hazard
Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) funds. The grants are for eligible state and municipal governments and certain private non-profit organizations on a federal cost-sharing basis covering 75 percent of eligible costs; state government contributes the remaining 25 percent. On December 7, 2010, the Governor’s Authorized Representative, along with FEMA, will hold an Applicants’ Briefing meeting for eligible applicants to provide them with detailed information of the Public (Infrastructure) Assistance grants program procedures. The meeting will take place at the Puerto Rico Office of Management and
Budget. FEMA’s Public Assistance grants reimburse eligible cost of emergency protective measures, debris removal, repair, restoration, reconstruction or replacement of disaster damaged public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, water control facilities, public buildings and contents, public utilities and parks, and other recreational facilities. There are now twenty-five (25) disaster designated municipalities, including Adjuntas, Aibonito, Añas-
co, Cayey, Ciales, Corozal, Guánica, Guayama, Jayuya, Lares, Las Marías, Maricao, Mayagüez, Morovis, Orocovis, Patillas, Ponce, Sabana Grande, Salinas, San Germán, San Lorenzo, Utuado, Villalba, Yabucoa, and Yauco. FEMA’s mission is to support our citizens and first responders to ensure that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.
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The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
Senate Passes Sweeping Law on Food Safety By GARDINER HARRIS and WILLIAM NEUMAN
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he Senate passed a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s food safety system on Tuesday, after tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people in the last few years and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight. The legislation, which passed by a vote of 73 to 25, would greatly strengthen the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that in recent decades focused more on policing medical products than ensuring the safety of food. The bill is intended to keep
unsafe foods from reaching markets and restaurants, where they can make people sick — a change from the current practice, which mainly involves cracking down after outbreaks occur. Despite unusual bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and a strong push from the Obama administration, the bill could still die because there might not be enough time for the usual haggling between the Senate and the House, which passed its own version last year. Top House Democrats said Tuesday that they were considering simply passing the Senate version to speed approval but that no decision had been made. “With the Senate’s passage of the Food
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Safety Modernization Act, we are one step closer to having critically important new tools to protect our nation’s food supply and keep consumers safe,” said President Obama, who made improving the safety of the nation’s food supply an early priority of his administration. He urged the House to act quickly. Both versions of the bill would grant the F.D.A. new powers to recall tainted foods, increase inspections, demand accountability from food companies and oversee farming. But neither would consolidate overlapping functions at the Department of Agriculture and nearly a dozen other federal agencies that oversee various aspects of food safety, leaving coordination among the agencies a continuing challenge. While food safety advocates and many industry groups prefer the House version because it includes more money for inspections and fewer exceptions from the rules it sets out, most said the Senate bill was far better than nothing. “This is a historic moment,” said Erik Olson, deputy director of the Pew Health Group, an advocacy organization. “For the first time in over 70 years, the Senate has approved an overhaul of F.D.A.’s food safety law that will help ensure that the food we put on our kitchen tables will be safer.” Among the Senate bill’s last major sticking points was how it would affect small farmers and food producers. Some advocates for small farms and organic food producers said the legislation would destroy their industry under a mountain of paperwork. Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, pushed for a recent addition to the bill that exempts producers with less than $500,000 in annual sales who sell most of their food locally. That provision led the United Fresh Produce Association, a trade group, to announce recently that it would oppose the legislation since small food operations have been the source of some food recalls in recent years. But Randy Napier of Medina, Ohio, said the Senate bill was much needed. Mr. Napier’s 80-year-old mother, Nellie Napier, died in January 2009 after the nursing home where she lived continued to give her contaminated peanut butter even after she got sick. “I am appalled at what I have found out since my mother’s death about how poorly food is regulated and how these companies cut corners to save money,” Mr. Napier said. The legislation greatly increases the number of inspections of food processing plants that the F.D.A. must conduct, with an emphasis on foods that are considered most high risk — although figuring out which those are is an uncertain science. Until recently, peanut butter would not have made the list. Staunch opposition to the bill by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, forced months of delay and eventually required the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, to call a series of time-consuming procedural votes to end debate. Mr. Coburn
offered his own version of the legislation. It eliminated many of the bill’s requirements because he said that more government rules would be deleterious and that the free market was working. That version was rejected. Despite Mr. Coburn’s opposition, the bill is one of the few major pieces of bipartisan legislation to emerge from this Congress. Some Republican and Democratic Senate staff members — who in previous terms would have seen one another routinely — met for the first time during the food bill negotiations. The group bonded over snacks: Starburst candies from a staff member of Senator Michael B. Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, and jelly beans from a staff member of Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. “This legislation means that parents who tell their kids to eat their spinach can be assured that it won’t make them sick,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, who, as chairman of the Senate health committee, shepherded the legislation through months of negotiations. Health advocates are hoping the legislation will rekindle the progress — now stalled — that the nation once enjoyed in reducing the tens of millions of food-contamination illnesses and thousands of deaths estimated to occur each year. In the case of toxic salmonella, infections may be creeping up, according to government figures. Part of the problem is the growing industrialization and globalization of the nation’s food supply. Nearly one-fifth of it, including as much as three-quarters of its seafood, is imported, but the Food and Drug Administration inspects less than one pound in a million of imported foods. The bill gives the agency more control over food imports, including increased inspection of foreign processing plants and the ability to set standards for how fruits and vegetables are grown abroad. As food suppliers grow in size, problems at one facility can sicken thousands of people all over the country: The Peanut Corporation of America’s contaminated paste, which was recalled in 2009, was in scores of brands of cookies and snacks made by big and small companies. The new legislation would raise standards at such plants by demanding that food companies write plans to manufacture foods safely and conduct routine tests to ensure that those plans are adequate. The bill would give the F.D.A. the power to demand immediate food recalls. For years, the George W. Bush administration opposed such powers, saying that food manufacturers invariably complied when asked by the government to undertake a recall. But last year, the agency asked a distributor of pistachios to recall its entire 2008 crop after tests showed salmonella contamination at its processing plant. Days passed before the company complied. Consumer advocates were jubilant over the Senate’s action. “Everyone who eats will benefit,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group.
The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
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The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
End Ethanol Subsidies, Senators Say By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
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ubsidies and tariffs to promote domestic ethanol production are “fiscally irresponsible and environmentally unwise” and should be ended, a bipartisan group of United States senators declared in a letter to the chamber’s leaders on Tuesday. “Eliminating or reducing ethanol subsidies and trade barriers are important steps we can take to reduce the budget deficit, improve the environment, and lessen our reliance on imported oil,” the senators wrote to the Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, and the Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell. The letter was circulated by Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and John Kyl, Republican of Arizona. The 15 co-signers included John McCain of Arizona and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, both Republicans; and Barbara Boxer of California and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, both Democrats. Supporters of domestic ethanol call it a cleaner-burning fuel than gasoline
that offsets oil imports from autocratic regimes abroad and creates American jobs. But the growing appetite of ethanol refiners for the American corn crop has steadily driven up the price of food worldwide, while increased demand for corn has caused an rise in fertilizer use and pesticide-intensive agriculture in the United States. High tariffs on imported ethanol, meanwhile, artificially drive up the price of domestic ethanol, angering fiscal conservatives. Earlier this week a coalition of advocacy groups from across the political spectrum issued their own call to end the ethanol subsidy for refiners. Their letter, to Congressional leaders in the House and Senate, was signed by Freedomworks, the Heartland Institute and other conservative groups as well as environmental organizations like the Sierra Club and the liberal activist group MoveOn.org. Food and livestock industry groups have made their own calls to end ethanol subsidies, arguing that the policies have led to a rise in the price of feed and basic
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food commodities. Federal policies currently provide for a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol imports and a subsidy of45 cents a gallon for blending ethanol into gasoline. Federal law mandates that oil companies use 12 billion gallons of renewable fuels such as ethanol in this year, rising to 15 billion gallons by 2015. As a result, Treasury will pay out at least $31 billion to refiners over the next five years if the blending subsidy is renewed. The ethanol mandate will rise to 36 billion gallons per year by 2022. “We cannot afford to pay industry for following the law,” the senators wrote. The senators also argued that the tariff on imported ethanol, which is 9 cents a gallon higher than the subsidy it was intended to offset, made the country more dependent on foreign oil and was a waste of federal funds. Ethanol from Brazil and other sugar-producing countries is cheaper than domestic corn-based ethanol, but the high tariff discourages low-cost imports. “This lack of parity puts imported ethanol at a competitive disadvantage against imported oil,” the letter states. ”Eliminating or reducing the ethanol
tariff would diversify our fuel supply, replace oil imports from OPEC countries with ethanol from our allies, and expand our trade relationships with democratic states.” Supporters of expanded domestic ethanol production sharply disputed the senators’ claims, warning that cutting off the subsidies and ending the tariff would put thousands of Americans out of work and devastate the domestic ethanol industry. “Calling for the elimination of investment in domestic ethanol production may seem pennywise, but is extraordinarily pound foolish,” the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade association, said in a statement. Both the ethanol blending subsidy and the tariff on imported ethanol will expire at the end of the year without Congressional action. If they are allowed to lapse, re-enacting the policies may be difficult, given the more fiscally conservative nature of the incoming Congress. “I think once it’s dead, it’s much harder to shock it back into life,” said Nathanael Greene, director of renewable energy policy at the National Resources Defense Council.
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he Obama administration is rescinding its decision to allow offshore oil drilling in the eas-
tern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast, an administration official says. A moratorium will apply to those areas for at least the next five years
The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
Blackwater Aimed to Hunt Pirates By MARK MAZZETTI
B
esieged by criminal inquiries and Congressional investigators, how could the world’s most controversial private security company drum up new business? By battling pirates on the high seas, of course. In late 2008, Blackwater Worldwide, already under fire because of accusations of abuses by its security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan, reconfigured a 183-foot oceanographic research vessel into a pirate-hunting ship for hire and then began looking for business from shipping companies seeking protection from Somali pirates. The company’s chief executive officer, Erik Prince, was planning a trip to Djibouti for a promotional event in March 2009, and Blackwater was hoping that the American Embassy there would help out, according to a secret State Department cable. But with the Obama administration just weeks old, American diplomats in Djibouti faced a problem. They are supposed to be advocates for American businesses, but this was Blackwater, a company that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had proposed banning from war zones when she was a presidential candidate. The embassy “would appreciate Department’s guidance on the appropriate level of engagement with Blackwater,” wrote James C. Swan, the American ambassador in Djibouti, in a cable sent on Feb. 12, 2009. Blackwater’s plans to enter the anti-piracy business have been previously reported, but not the American government’s concern about the endeavor. According to that cable, Blackwater had outfitted its United Statesflagged ship with .50-caliber machine guns and a small, unarmed drone air-
craft. The ship, named the McArthur, would carry a crew of 33 to patrol the Gulf of Aden for 30 days before returning to Djibouti to resupply. And the company had already determined its rules of engagement. “Blackwater does not intend to take any pirates into custody, but will use lethal force against pirates if necessary,” the cable said. At the time, the company was still awaiting approvals from Blackwater lawyers for its planned operations, since Blackwater had informed the embassy there was “no precedent for a paramilitary operation in a purely commercial environment.” Lawsuits filed later by crew members on the McArthur made life on the ship sound little improved from the days of Blackbeard. One former crew member said, according to legal documents, that the ship’s captain, who had been drinking during a port call in Jordan, ordered him “placed in irons” (handcuffed to a towel rack) after he was accused of giving an unauthorized interview to his hometown newspaper in Minnesota. The captain, according to the lawsuit, also threatened to place the sailor in a straitjacket. Another crew member, who is black, claimed in court documents that he was repeatedly subjected to racial epithets. In the end, Blackwater Maritime Security Services found no treasure in the pirate-chasing business, never attracting any clients. And the Obama administration chose not to sever the American government’s relationship with the North Carolina-based firm, which has collected more than $1 billion in security contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Blackwater renamed itself Xe Services, and earlier this year the company won a $100 million contract from the Central Intelligence Agency to protect the spy agency’s bases in Afghanistan.
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The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
Port Is a Welcome Guest at Cocktail Parties
By ERIC ASIMOV
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SK me about port and I’ll tell you I love it. I have fond memories of the sumptuous flavors of a well-aged vintage port, and, even more so, the delicate, subtle pleasures of a 20-year-old tawny. Alas, these delights reside mostly in the past. I almost never drink port anymore. The urge for a nice after-dinner glass of port or Cognac has largely faded, overcome by the diminished stamina of middle age and the desire to be not only awake and productive the following morning, but eager as well. Port is a fortified wine, after all. You may not taste the 20 percent alcohol in a well-balanced version, but it can quickly catch up with you. Still, when I put my mind to it, the cinnamon-sweet, nutmeg-spice notes of a 20-year tawny come right back to life. It makes me think that I do need to reacquaint myself with the pleasures of port. Yet, how? I wish port weren’t consigned to the end of the meal. Other fortified wines are more versatile. Even the sweetest Madeira, with its jolt of acidity, seems much less sweet than port, and therefore more flexible with savory foods. Fino sherry is dry, with far less alcohol, and makes a glorious aperitif. It also works well supporting many dishes in the traditional Spanish canon. But port? It’s hard to see beyond cheese, especially blue cheeses and aged Cheddar, or chocolate, of course. As for savory dishes, Roy
Hersh, who runs the Web site For the Love of Port, rhapsodizes about port with steak au poivre, ahi tuna and leg of lamb. And Fiona Beckett, a British writer who has a Web site called Matching Food and Wine, suggests that tawny makes a fine substitution for Sauternes in the classic pairing with foie gras. She told me she also suspected that it would pair well with caramelized pork, although she hadn’t tried it herself. Now that’s an invitation I can’t resist. So I tried it — actually sautéed medallions of Berkshire pork with a caramelized onion jam — and a bottle of Taylor’s 20-year-old tawny. The pork-and-onions brought out enjoyable mineral flavors in the port, but the wine was simply too imposing to coexist comfortably throughout the meal. Cheese afterward, alas, was the better bet. Maybe the impulse to drink port with dinner was wrong. I decided to call Jim Leff, the founder of the Chowhound Web site, who, back in the 1990s, I recalled, was a dedicated port lover. “I’m still holding the torch for port, but everybody else has forgotten it,” he said. Mr. Leff, who since selling Chowhound in 2006 has reverted to life as a professional trombonist, has a treasured cache of vintage ports, primarily 1983 and 1985, which he bought in the late 1990s. “They’re my go-to celebration wines,” he said. “Everything since then is too young, and everything older is too expensive. Every time I have a sip, I say, ‘That’s just great,’
and everyone I ever serve it to never fails to be impressed.” Mr. Leff is interested only in the vintage variety, but port is produced in many different styles. The grapes come from daunting terraces built into impossibly steep, rocky hillsides in the Douro region of Portugal, where they bake in dry, often unrelenting heat. Once picked, the best grapes are still trod by feet in stone lagars, or tanks, while the rest are crushed mechanically. The juice is then fermented about half way until the process is halted by the addition of brandy. Vintage port, which is bottled after two years or so in barrels, and tawny, which is typically aged longer, are the two best-known styles, for good reason. They are by far the most magnificent expressions of port. Vintage ports are made only in very good years — maybe three every 10 years — and can require decades to soften their fiery, extravagantly fruity character. Tawnies mellow in the barrel, where they acquire their reddish brown color, and are generally a blend of vintages. Good tawnies generally come with an age statement, indicating the average age in the blend. For me, 20-year tawny is ideal, showing the complexity of age at a still-affordable price. I find a 10-year tawny often to be too sharp and simple, while 30- or 40-year tawnies are too expensive and can lack the vivacity that still enlivens the 20-year-olds. While I have fond memories of vintage ports, I would pretty much be buying them for my children to drink, so long do they need to age. But Mr. Leff makes a good case for enjoying vintage port — vicariously, at least — and he rejects the notion that they need to be paired with food. “I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t use soy and wasabi with sushi,” he said. “So I serve it after dinner, on its own. And it needs a relaxed setting — it doesn’t go well with anxiety.” What, me worry? What could be more calming than a glass of vintage port in the paneled confines of the cocktail lounge at the “21” Club, complete with club chairs and fireplace? “Port by the glass is one of our more popular items,” said Phil Pratt, the wine director at the restaurant.
Still, he said, by-the-bottle sales are not what they once were. “There was a precipitous dropoff when they changed the smoking laws,” he said. “There’s all this mystique around port, or baggage, if you want to look at it that way.” While Mr. Pratt says young women do order port, it still has the image of being an old man’s drink. Mr. Hersh, of For the Love of Port, acknowledges this image problem and suggests a simple but direct method of appealing to younger generations: cocktails! For some cocktail perspective, I checked in with David Wondrich, the mixed-drinks authority. “It’s one of my favorite cocktail ingredients, along with sherry,” he said. “One of the easiest ways to come up with new cocktails is simple substitution, port for vermouth, for example. Equivalent proof, but new textures and flavors.” By port, Mr. Wondrich means ruby port, a simpler, fruity, more accessible cousin of vintage port, and a blend of several vintages. Years ago Mr. Wondrich invented the St. Valentine, a blend of ruby port, white rum, Grand Marnier and lime juice that has a wonderfully ripe, round, punchlike refreshing quality. He reserves tawny ports for things like variations on the manhattan. “I’ll stir it together with a good rye or Cognac, and a dash of bitters, but I wouldn’t use it as much with the sours, because it’s delicate,” he said. You rarely see port in cocktails, but in the past it was an important ingredient. In his book “Imbibe” (Perigee, 2007), Mr. Wondrich describes the St. Charles Punch, named for the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans: a blend of port, Cognac, lemon and sugar. Audrey Saunders has made another historic punch, the hot port sangaree, a popular cold weather offering at the Pegu Club, her New York cocktail lounge. These excursions into cocktail history, though, don’t do much for port’s musty image. “The old view of port needs to be modernized,” Mr. Hersh said. “I’ve even seen sushi paired with port wine.” As eager as I am to drink port more frequently, maybe I’m not that eager.
The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
Poinsettia The Christmas Flower
T
he poinsettia that is also known as also known as Mexican flame leaf or Noche Buena is a sub-tropical plant famous for its striking red displays during Christmas time. It is very often used as a floral decoration for Christmas because of its festive colors. Because of its bright, flaming red color and star shape, its popularly known as a “Christmas Star” or “Flame of Holy Night” in the United States. Poinsettias typically reach a height of 0.6 to 3 m (2 to 10 ft). The plant bears dark green leaves that measure 7 to 16 cm (3 to 6 in) in length. The top leaves are flaming red, pink, or white and are often mistaken as flowers.Poinsettias are local to southern Mexico and Central America, where they may even reach the height of sixteen feet. Dr. Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first United States ambassador to Mexico, brought the plant in the U.S. in the year 1825 and thus named after him. In the U.S. poinsettias can be found in the wild in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. This flower represents the profound love for Christ and deep devotion of a pure innocent human being to child Jesus. There is a Mexican legend that explains the association of poinsettias with Christmas. The devotees in the story were two lovely,
naïve children who were not so lucky as their friends to have enough riches to do what their heart desired for. These poor children who lived in Mexico were Maria and Pablo, her dear little brother. Since Christmas has special association with kids, just like, they were looking forward to the Christmas celebrations and watch the annual Nativity play in which an elaborate, huge manger scene was set up in the church of the village. Besides that, the Christmas season in the village meant processions and parties centered around the church and the village people, especially children, gave lavish presents to the baby child on the Christmas Eve. Now, these two children truly loved Christ and the season of His birth a lot. They desperately wished to get something special for the baby Christ but dint
have enough money to buy even simplest of gifts. They were unhappy and were quite disappointed by their poverty and misery when they set out to attend the church service. They embarked on a longer route in a dreamlike hope to find some blossoms to give the child but couldn’t find any. They faced a lot of difficulties during their journey. But the hope and faith in the Christmas spirit kept them moving ahead. Finally, they pulled out up some wild weeds along the roadside as a gift for the Baby and move towards the Church door. The children who were already there started
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Garden
teasing them, how cruel can children be sometimes! Yet, they braved their way to the manger and carefully placed the greenery around the manger. What followed then was the biggest surprise for all that were present! The weeds burst forth into bright red starshaped flowers and looked most dazzling of all gifts that the baby Christ had received that day.A miracle had happened! The story demonstrates the warmth and the true nature of Christmas celebrations. So add lots of poinsettias to your Christmas decorations and flower arrangements and rejoice in the wonderful miracle of life-Christmas!
Garden
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The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
Avoiding the Dangers Down in the Garden By JANE E. BRODY “
L
eaves of three, let them be.” No doubt you’ve heard this warning about poison ivy, a weedy plant that each year causes more than 350,000 reported cases of human contact dermatitis, and probably many thousands more unreported cases. Anecdotes from doctor’s offices indicate that this year is shaping up as a particularly nasty one for poison ivy, or Toxicodendron radicans, and evidence suggests that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air have contributed to bumper crops with a more potent toxin. But the rising risk of developing an extremely itchy, blistering rash from poison ivy is only one of the recent changes in human exposures to toxic or harmful plants. Many homes and gardens play host to an increasing number of hazardous plants, and children are most often at risk. In 2003, according to an authoritative new book, poison control centers nationwide received more than 57,000 calls relating to exposure to potentially harmful plants, and 85 percent of them involved children under age 6. Most, however, were considered simply exposures; either no toxin was ingested or the amount consumed was too small to be harmful. The book, “Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants” by Dr. Lewis S. Nelson, Dr. Richard D. Shih and Michael J. Balick, was produced under the auspices of the Botanical Garden, where Dr. Balick is director of the Institute of Economic Botany. While its primary mission is to help health care professionals identify and treat plantcaused injuries, this lavishly illustrated book can be a helpful guide to ordinary people. It highlights hundreds of troublesome plants, providing photographs and written descriptions, common names, geographic distributions, toxic parts and toxins, effects on the body and information on medical management. I was stunned to realize just how many of these potentially dangerous plants were in my own home and garden, including aloe, elephant’s ear, jade, peace lily (Spathiphyllum), philodendron and dumbcane (Dieffenbacchia), as well as foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), hellebore, vinca, rhododendron and chrysanthemum. I count my blessings that none of my children or grandchildren tried to chomp on one of them. Of course, plant-based poisons have an important role to play, especially in discouraging predators. And through the ages and into modern times, many have served important medicinal roles. Vinca, for example, was the original source of the anticancer drug vincristine, and foxglove gave us the valuable heart stimulant digitalis. Deer, which have become a horrific horticultural nuisance in the Northeast, somehow know to avoid dining on several of the toxic plants, like vinca and foxglove,
enabling gardeners to plant them in unfenced areas. If only our children were equally knowledgeable. Common Risks Dr. Nelson said the problem often began with the fact that many Caribbean toxic plants are beautiful and colorful, prompting people to pick them to adorn their homes and gardens. But their very attractiveness is what creates a hazard for small children, who may be tempted to put toxic berries, flowers or foliage in their mouths. A second risk involves adults, who pick what they think are edible or medicinal plants but mistakenly choose a toxic look-alike. In a recent incident cited by Dr. Nelson, a group of people picked what they thought were wild leeks, or ramps, cooked and ate them. What they really consumed was the cardiac toxin from young false hellebore. Fortunately, they survived the resulting heart rhythm disturbance.
Other cases have involved people who picked foxglove before it flowered, thinking it was a helpful herb that could be made into a medicinal tea. And sometimes herbal teas that should be safe are not because they were accidentally contaminated by a toxic plant. Thus, it is best to stick to well-known commercial brands packaged. While ingested plant poisons are the most common hazard for small children, for adults and older children the usual sources of misery are plants that create problems on physical contact, like poison ivy. I asked Dr. Nelson what people do wrong after coming into contact with poison ivy, and the answer was simple: “They don’t wash their hands quickly and thoroughly enough. If you wash off the toxin with soap and water within 10 or 15 minutes, it’s unlikely to cause a reaction.” This can be a particular problem for outdoor sports enthusiasts, landscapers and other outdoor workers who may not notice their contact with the plant or may not have a means of quickly washing away the toxin, called urushiol. Even those who do wash may fail to scrub off the urushiol that gets under fingernails and then spread it to other parts of the body, Dr. Nelson said. Over the course of hours or days, urushiol causes a slowly developing rash characterized by pain, itchiness, redness, swelling and blisters. Contrary to what many people think, the rash itself does not spread. Rather, people spread the toxin around their bodies through scratching and contact with contaminated clothing. Other Problem Plants Poison ivy is hardly the only source of urushiol, a class of toxins with varying potencies. It is also found in the skin of mangoes, as I sadly learned after eating a mango off the rind. It was still winter when I called my dermatologist and said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say I had poison ivy of the mouth.” His immediate response: “You’ve been eating mangoes.” Why, I wondered, had this not happe-
ned years ago? The answer was that after repeated exposures to urushiol that caused no reaction, I had become sensitized to the allergen and thereafter any contact with it could cause the same miserable reaction. Dr. Nelson said 85 percent of the population has the potential to develop sensitivity to urushiol. So if you think you can safely traipse through poison ivy, think again. Sooner or later you are likely to suffer as I did. Treatment of a poison ivy rash typically involves relieving the itch with calamine lotion and taking an oral antihistamine or, in more serious cases, a corticosteroid. Another common source of contact dermatitis involves the stinging nettle, a weedy plant that also seems to be thriving in our carbon dioxide-enriched environment, Dr. Balick said. These plants are a source of mechanical irritants. They have fragile hypodermic-like tubules containing a mixture of irritant chemicals that are injected when bare skin brushes against the plant and stinging hairs from the stems and leaves break the skin. Unlike poison ivy, the burning, itchy rash caused by stinging nettles is short-lived. Still other problem plants contain chemical irritants, like capsaicin from chili peppers. This chemical is a mucous membrane irritant that causes the release of a substance that stimulates pain fibers and inflammation. This is especially painful when contaminated fingers transfer the chemical to the eyes or genitalia. To relieve the discomfort, it takes thorough and repeated washing, an analgesic to relieve the pain and, in some cases, anti-inflammatory medication. Some plants, including agave, snowon-the-mountain, crown-of-thorns, marsh marigold and buttercup, contain an irritant sap or latex, which can cause a chemical burn on the skin. Finally, there are plants that contain phototoxins — substances that increase the sensitivity of the skin to ultraviolet light and can result in a blistering sunburn. Among these are yarrow, rue and Queen Anne’s lace.
The San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
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New York Times Editorial From WikiChina By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
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hile secrets from WikiLeaks were splashed all over the American newspapers, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? I suspect the cable would read like this: Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today. Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things. There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them. They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer
U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests. Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent. The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time! Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again,
we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: “When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!” Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s. But the Americans are oblivious. They travel abroad so rarely that they don’t see how far they are falling behind. Which is why we at the embassy find it funny that Americans are now fighting over how “exceptional” they are. Once again, we are not making this up. On the front page of The Washington Post there was an article noting that Republicans Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee are denouncing Obama for denying “American exceptionalism.” The Americans have replaced working to be exceptional with talking about how exceptional they still are. They don’t seem to understand that you can’t declare yourself “exceptional,” only others can bestow that upon you. In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there. Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, par-
ticularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things down. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them so much that China’s mining companies already operating there should be able to buy up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals. Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America. Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America. Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables. Embassy Washington.
The Pentagon, Pursuing Justice
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fter nine months of study and regular leaks, the Pentagon’s report on repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law was hardly a surprise. Most soldiers long ago came to terms with the thorough and frank report’s conclusion that allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly poses little risk. Only 30 percent of the serving military believes that open service would be harmful, and even most naysayers agree that they have long served with gay and lesbian colleagues to no ill effect. Nonetheless, it was bracing to hear
Defense Secretary Robert Gates call directly on the Senate to vote immediately to repeal the ban. Mr. Gates doesn’t want the courts to impose repeal because that could eliminate the transitional period he believes is necessary to implement the change. That period would mostly involve rewriting military regulations and educating the troops and the leadership about how the new system of open service will be implemented. It is hard to imagine why the tran-
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sition would take more than a few weeks or months at the most — or that a specific date cannot be set. The regulations can be rewritten in advance; soldiers have long known this was coming and simply need to be told what to expect and how to act. It is clear from the report there will be no need for separate quarters or bathrooms for gay and straight soldiers. The concern suddenly open gay men and lesbians will become sexual predators is ludicrous. Some of the resistance to repeal is based on religious or moral objections to homosexuality, and the report made it clear that the Pentagon is not trying to change anyone’s deep-seated beliefs. It is simply making it plain that regardless of those beliefs, all members of the military must co-exist and respect each other. That is true for society at large, of course, but Mr. Gates noted that members of the military do not have a vote on such matters and will be expected to follow the orders and rules of their leadership. It is shameful that Republican lawmakers are not as respectful of the values enunciated on Tuesday by Mr. Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who firmly supported
eliminating what Mr. Gates called a “legally and morally fraught process.” Those lawmakers are already gearing up to repudiate the report and stymie repeal. Representative Howard McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, questioned the accuracy of the survey and said he would do everything he could to defeat repeal. Senator John McCain, who built his entire career on military discipline maintained under the direst conditions, said the survey should have asked service members if the ban should be repealed. Mr. Gates swatted that notion away. The Pentagon’s report is full of many passionate comments from soldiers who were interviewed, some expressing fear and others the hope of real equality. But the most persuasive comments were from those soldiers who know how readily life will go on in the trenches once equality is achieved. There was hand-wringing and fear when the military began racial integration in the late 1940s and 1950s, and sexual integration in the 1970s. But in both cases, as the report notes, critics overestimated the negative consequences and underestimated the military’s ability to adapt and incorporate diversity.
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The San Juan Weeekly
LETTERS Only a mule of a judge would do such a thing. Handing someone a lengthier jail sentence for hurting a horse than he can get for murdering a human being is clearly Cruel & Unusual Punishment, a transgression of the Bill of Rights, undefendable Constitutionally. An outrage against both the defendant and the taxpayer. Enough to give you pause at what a hellish tyranny a Puerto Rico in Puerto Rican hands might turn out.
herring demagoguery, legislators here never get into anything that might make them think or work. Remember Hernández Colón’s amendment proposal whereby the Constitition of Puerto Rico would guarrantee U.S. citizenship, as if someone other that the United States can mandate who’s a citizen of the United States. The people of Puerto Rico had the sense to vote against that one, even while our public schools make sure we’re not very educated. Our politicians don’t respect our institutions, they don’t care for democracy, it’s only petty opportunism their careers are about.
Jackson Winters, Isla Verde
Anita Roig, Santurce
Unmanaging Magistrate
Obviating the Patdown
O.K., You Fix The Budget, Nov 25 Article By David Leonhardt,
You want to show-up the Homeland Security robots? Get to the airport stark naked. Then gently grope the personnel. Might they have the audacity to arrest you? Nina Fotze, San Juan
Ever Corrupt The cutely-monikered (as usual) Viaverde struck me as odd. That the penepeístas would do something for us the people. After all, oil makes more money for big business. Only now those two Puerto Rican girls are demonstrating against it in Spain, as we all saw. They must know something we don’t. The media ought to look into it. Those of you who haven’t been bought off. Danilo Alvarez , Hato Rey
Chickened Out? To The Colegio de Abogados: You said Figueroa Sancha had to go. He’s still there. You said the Riot Squad had to go. They’re still there. And where are you? You’ve gone. Anita Roig, Santurce
Pettiness & Opportunism The evolving or not of social institutions is effected by simple laws. I mean, is a constitution amended to accommodate or block changes in divorce law, inheriitance law, paternity rights, legal age/ emancipation rulings and so forth? The proposed straight-marriage-only Constitutional amendment is an aberration. And so much of our legislation is plain silly because it’s always either copycatting whatever’s in vogue on the mainland or local red-
Comment On David Lionhardt’s recent article “O.K., You Fix the Budget” is best summarized by President Clinton’s former Chief of Staff, “The reason we find ourselves in this situation....is that we’ve made promises we can’t keep” and by the last paragraph of the article: “Whatever the eventual solution is....it will probably be something that is not politically feasible now.” His analysis omits some significant aspects of the “deficit puzzle” that I would like to fill in. It is generally agreed that the seeds for recovery are in greater growth of the private sector of our economy. Neither corporate bail outs nor credit easing nor tax breaks and subsidies nor cuts in Medicare and Social Security benefits can be expected to provide sufficient fertilizer to carry these seeds to fruition. Capitalist systems rest on trust and if the U.S. Government wants to start off on the right foot it must regain the confidence of investors who will be risking their capital to create new businesses. How can anyone fix the budget if the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) first says the deficit is 1.3 trillion, then changes it to 13 because of Social Security and Medicare?. Along comes a very credible and respected economics professor from Boston U., Dr. Lawrence Koltieff who claims that using the CBO’s own numbers his calculations come up with a two hundred trillion plus deficit. Government statistics are so unreliable that there is now an alternate site, www.shadowstats.com set up for those who care. For example, Consumer Price Index (which the Treasury uses to determine the interest on its debt) is really 8.48, not 1.2 as the official numbers indicate. The difference: food and fuel are not included in the latter. Apparently accounting shennanigans are not the exclusive purview of the Enrons of the world. Ever since in 1997 the Fed stopped publishing the M3 fraction of the Money Supply, Congressman Ron Paul has been suspecting a lot of statistical hanky-panky going on (www.ronpaul.com) . If there is one rule for investors, specially insitutional investors, the first is to stay away from companies with accounting tricks up their sleeves. As for political feasability, that is precisely what got us the Obama Model O healthcare hybrid, a twenty thousand page thick Swiss cheese so full of
loopholes that filling them will make Reform unrecognizable. A former CBO director Douglas HoltzEakin wrote on March 10 in the New York Times: “The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits by $562 billion”. According to estimates by Hubbard (Dean of Columbia’s Graduate Business School) and Navarro (authors of “Seeds of Destruction”, Financial Times Press, 2010) “once ObamaCare fully kicks in to 2014, the real cost of expanding coverage in the ten year period from 2014 to 2023 will be more like $1.6 trillion, not $940 billion..... The results will be enlarged budget deficits in the hundreds of billions.” Neither Right nor Left is willing to admit, for as long as hang ups from the Cold War survive, that Socialized Medicine should be as much a right of citizens as is a public education. When will politicians realize that it may also be the less painful of all measures needed to balance our budget? Don’t expect President Obama to lead; he is more interested in using obsolete Keynesian tools to create jobs before the next election and on being as good a Commander in Chief as Candidate McCain proclaimed he would be. As a result of the ideological divide, the American public has yet to see a feasability study that compares the costs of Socialized Medicine with our present system’s. Even worse, few financial analysts care to tread on these waters. Ed Martinez, San Juan
It’s Only Money Air conditioning is left on overnight at the UPR. And over weekends. And all through Christmas recess, the whole month of it. Bureaucrats mumble it because otherwise some fungus might grow on the carpets. Now why is all the inside lighting left on as well? Miguel Estrada, Caparra Heights
The Unthinking of Zealotry There’s reasonable Creationism and there’s idiotic Creationism. The real laws of God are not the Ten Commandments, that are merely injunctive, you can break them. You find God’s will rather, written in the fabric of nature, and transliterated into science textbooks. And God doesn’t break His own laws---it would be an un-Godly contradiction. Genesis explains the Beginning as best minds at the time could grasp. Bible literalists in our day read Scripture like parrots and argue in the same manner. Would it have been wise to start the Hebrew Bible out with the exposition of Newtonian principles, general relativity and quantum mechanics that would’ve been indispensable to lead to an accurate account of the Creation? And realize that in our age we’re surely but scratching the skin of God’s handiwork. Agustín Manzano, Santurce
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December 9 - 15, 2010
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LETTERS Kill People Who’s life is more important? The fat Montehiedra lady with the funny-looking headgear or her poodle with the gigantic ears and bulging eyes that just won’t shut up. Don’t even think of hurting the animal, even giving it a dirty look would be hazardous to its psychosocial well-being, a court may hold. But you kill the lady and it’s just probation if it’s your first, nine years if it’s not, provided you were angry when you did it, no kidding, that’s the way the law’s written. And even nine is less than twelve. Then Delma Fleming herself shows up to remove the little monster. Also the minds of cops are such that they relate more to animals than to humans, aggressive canines in particular. And cops are important here, remember they shoot you if they don’t like you. Juan Pérez, Altamira
Istambul Nov 18-24, Sirs: On your last edition you published an article on Istanbul in which you showed two pictures looking North to the Sultanahamet section of the city. The picture of Hagia Sophia, and a larger one including Sultanhamet Mosque, Hagia Sophia and a farther away Topkapi Palace, seem to have been inverted. What should have been on the right side was on the left. The row of smaller domes in Haghia Sophia should appear on the right side. On the other picture, the Egyptian Obelisk on the Hippodrome that appears in the lower right side should appear on the lower left side. To correct this you may have to invert the negatives, or by mirroring the pictures in your computer, as we hope you do, so that you may be able to show them again in a future edition, for a better appreciation and a more realistic view of these Sultanahmet area photos. Ramon Rosado Vila, Guaynabo
It Was Assassination After All To FBI Director Luis Fraticelli: Perhaps, American citizen that I am, I don’t make up my mind till I’ve heard the other side of the story, you’ve got to be heard before the rope wraps around your neck. Tarig Assiz on Larry King Live made clear Saddam Hussein was every bit the thug the Bushes insisted. Before that I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Everybody here believes the FBI murdered Filiberto Ojeda---and hard-core penepeístas add that that was the right thing to do. Nevertheless I couldn’t stomach such a prospect. I was, after all, reared on American TV, where FBI hagiography is pervasive. When I heard you’d be on WOSO Speak Out, I figured I’d finally learn what really happened at Hormigueros. The FBI Director in Puerto Rico, at the itsy-bitsy
least had to be a man endowed with intelligence that commands respect. Perhaps even better than the savvy agents in Criminal Intent. It was a precipitous letdown. You were reminded by a caller that bringing in Ojeda to face Due Process of law was a right that more than his belongs to the public, it was our right to hear what he had to say, and to whatever victims there were, particulary if it was the national community at large harmed. That he, being an aging political, you’d expect him to want to go down in fiery glory. What reason did you have to not stake and ambush and jump and handcuff him and bring him in in one peace to answer for whatever crimes? Are you totally indifferent to whether you kill somebody? Is this what “In God we trust” means to you? I then expected the full lowdown from you. Instead you blurted that Ojeda was no political, just a criminal and a terrorist. That and nothing more. I’d deem a cabbie or a barman a moron for such a response. And you’re wrong on both counts. Political goes to motive. Like Dillinger didn’t rob banks to further anything beyond running around in a black 1934 convertible Studebaker with his latest Charleston blonde at his side and a bottle of the Glenlivet across the rumble seat. And if the macheteros had been terrorists they would’ve machine-gunned hundreds of tourists at the hotels here, where security is to keep out the colaos and lives of guests matter little. Or mow down perhaps thousands at Time Square on New Year’s, easily enough before 9/11. When you label the macheteros terrorists, you’re offending the dictionary, worse, you’re hurting the United States by making the real terrorists---al Qaeda et al.---begin to not look so b ad. Mateo Peralta, Guaynabo
Birds Shoot at the Hunters Gov. Fortuño gave a long talk over the radio on how to rear children. I hate it when politicians do that. The implication is that if we only brought up our children right, everything here would be peaches and cream. Ana Badillo, Hato Rey
Governance Through Lying “Restructuring” is a beloved code word of local pols and bureaucrats. It’s invoked every time one party takes over from the other. It’s to feign something is getting done while nothing is, beyond changing the colors of logos and stationery from red to blue and changing “Commonwealth of Puerto Rico” in headings and signs to “Government of Puerto Rico.” Or vice-versa. And they split an agency or join it to another or centralize or decentralize it. In short, nothing that means anything in performance, just partisan smoke and mirrors.
Now, in the wake of the public outcry over longstanding police corruption and bullying, the topcop brass are, yes, going to “restructure” the police department. Wouldn’t it be simpler to tell police they must behave and fire those that don’t? The Superintendent first. Not quite. Remember that “restructuring” really means to do nothing. Ana Badillo, Hato Rey
Teresa Livoti Is Right This Once The rectum is the endpoint of digestion, the depository of feces. Making it the venue of lust/love has to be an unhealthful prerogative, not to forget filthy in the graphic sense. And anatomy isn’t available for even a simulation of sex between women. Homosexuality can’t possibly be inherited. Being, by definition, non-reproductive, albeit incompletely so, such a trait would be depleted out of the gene pool virtually instantly. Paula Benedict, Atlantic View
Parroting Giuliani To Police Superintendent Figueroa Sancha: You go after the misdemeanors and the felonies abate on their own. This is what Mayor Giuliani ranted about the Big Bad Apple to procure himself votes. But New Yorkers know such a notion is voodoo law enforcement. Going after old parking tickets won’t cut into drugs. Nor will mobsters be intimidated when you round up city panhandlers. Once in office Giuliani did move on the bad guys though. Now you’re invoking the nevertheless-discredited abrakadabra here. Uneducated, media dumbeddown Puerto Ricans will believe anything, you assume. Like if your cops shove commuters who chew gum at the train station or slap teens who text each other naughty images or lock up potheads till kingdom come, your colleagues the narcotraffickers will simply cease to exist. You have two years before people find out that’s hogwash. By which time your replacement will conjure some new fairy tale. Nathan Arbuncle, Santurce
Unrespectable Governance In Puerto Rico you can get more jail for hurting an animal than for murdering a person. All because the frivolous wealthy have pets. Usually dogs that just won’t shut up. How can any citizen respect such a government? Agustin Manzano, Santurce
Kitchen
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December 9 - 15, 2010
The San Juan Weekly
Turkey: Not Just for Thanksgiving By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN
T
oo often, cooks think about what to make with turkey only when faced with a deluge of Thanksgiving leftovers. Your refrigerator may still be stuffed with them even now, well after the holiday. But there are plenty of reasons for cooks to get better acquainted with turkey. Above all else, turkey is versatile. Combining turkey with grains is one way to make meals high in protein and low in fat. Toss shredded turkey with grain pi-
laf, celery, fresh herbs, a vinaigrette and a few vegetables, and you’ve got a terrific main-dish salad. You can use turkey in a risotto. Or how about a casserole? The turkey casserole I’ve chosen this week is Middle Eastern, spiced with allspice and cinnamon and topped with thick yogurt. Turkey also can substitute for chicken in your favorite tacos and enchiladas, salads, chilaquiles and soups. A while back, I devoted a week of columns to dishes you can make with shredded poached chicken breasts; turkey will work in any of those dishes just as well.
Turkey Tacos With Green Salsa
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hese tacos are reason enough to keep a bottle of green salsa on hand in your pantry. They are easily thrown together, even if you choose to make your own salsa. 2 cups shredded turkey 1 cup green salsa, bottled or homemade 4 radishes, thinly sliced or cut in julienne 1/4 cup chopped cilantro 1 small ripe avocado, diced Salt 8 corn tortillas 1 cup shredded lettuce Juice of 1 lime 1/3 cup queso fresco 1. Combine the turkey, salsa, radishes, cilantro and avocado in a bowl. Season with salt to taste. 2. Heat the tortillas individually
in a dry pan or microwave. Alternately, wrap them in a kitchen towel and place in a steamer above 1 inch of boiling water for one minute. Turn off the heat, and let sit, covered, for 10 minutes. 3. Place two tortillas on each plate, and top with the turkey mixture. Top the turkey mixture with shredded lettuce, squeeze on some lime juice, sprinkle with queso fresco and serve. Yield: Four servings. Advance preparation: This is thrown together just before serving. Homemade salsa will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. Nutritional information per serving: 303 calories; 12 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 60 milligrams cholesterol; 23 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams dietary fiber; 129 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 26 grams protein
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Kitchen
Turkey and Mizuna Salad By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN
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his dish has bright, mildly spicy Asian flavors and lots of crunch. Mizuna is a Japanese mustard green that’s high in folic acid, vitamin A, carotenoids and vitamin C. If you can’t find it, substitute arugula. For the salad: 2 cups mizuna or arugula 3 cups shredded or diced cooked turkey Salt and freshly ground pepper 1 serrano chili, seeded if desired and chopped (optional) 1 bunch scallions, white part and green, thinly sliced 1 small cucumber, seeded, diced and peeled if waxy; or 1/2 long European cucumber, diced 1/4 cup chopped cilantro 1 small red bell pepper, cut in thin strips
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped walnuts 2 broccoli crowns, cut or broken into small florets, steamed four to five minutes, refreshed with cold water and drained on paper towels (optional) For the dressing: 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice 1 tablespoon seasoned rice wine vinegar 1 garlic clove, minced or put through a press 2 teaspoons finely minced fresh ginger 1 tablespoon soy sauce 2 tablespoons dark Chinese sesame oil or walnut oil 2 tablespoons canola or peanut oil 1/3 cup low-fat buttermilk or plain nonfat yogurt 1 tablespoon turkey stock or water, for thinning out if using yogurt
with the mizuna or arugula. 2. Season the turkey with salt and pepper, and combine in a large bowl with the chili, scallions, cucumber, cilantro, red pepper and walnuts 3. Combine the ingredients for the dressing, and mix well. Toss with the turkey mixture. Arrange on top of the mizuna or arugula and serve. Yield: Serves six. Advance preparation: You can 1. Line a platter or large bowl
prepare and combine the salad ingredients several hours before tossing with the dressing. Keep in the refrigerator. Nutritional information per serving: 293 calories; 17 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 54 milligrams cholesterol; 10 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 242 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 24 grams protein
Risotto With Turkey, Mushrooms and Peas By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN
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urkey makes an unexpected but welcome addition to this traditional risotto.
1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms (about 1 cup) 5 cups well-seasoned chicken or vegetable stock 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1/2 cup minced onion 1 1/2 cups arborio rice 1 to 2 garlic cloves (to taste), minced Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste 1/2 cup dry white wine, such as pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc 1 1/2 cups diced turkey 1 cup thawed frozen peas or cooked
fresh peas 2 tablespoons minced chives 1/4 to 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (1 to 2 ounces) 1. Place the mushrooms in a large Pyrex measuring cup, and pour in 2 cups boiling water. Allow to sit for 30 minutes. Line a strainer with cheesecloth, place it over a bowl and strain the mushrooms. Squeeze the mushrooms over the strainer then rinse several times to rid them of sand. Set aside. Combine the mushroom soaking liquid with the stock in a saucepan. 2. Bring the stock to a simmer over low heat, with a ladle nearby or in the pot. Make sure that the stock is well seasoned. 3. Heat the olive oil over medium
heat in a wide, heavy nonstick skillet or a wide, heavy saucepan. Add the onion and a generous pinch of salt, and cook gently until the onion is just tender, about three minutes. Do not brown. 4. Stir in the rice, porcinis and garlic. Stir until the grains separate and begin to crackle. Add the wine, and stir until it is no longer visible in the pan. Begin adding the simmering stock a couple of ladlefuls (about 1/2 cup) at a time. The stock should just cover the rice and should be bubbling neither too slowly nor too quickly. Cook, stirring often, until it is just about absorbed. Add another ladleful or two of the stock, and continue to cook in this fashion, adding more stock and stirring when the rice is almost dry. You do not have to stir constantly, but stir often. After 15 minutes, stir in the turkey and the peas, and continue to add stock as instructed above. The risotto is done in 20 to 25 minutes, when the rice is just tender all the way through but still chewy. Taste now and adjust seasoning. 5. Add another ladleful or two of stock to the rice. Stir in the chives and Parmesan, and remove from the heat. The mixture should be creamy (add more stock if it isn’t). Serve right away in wide soup bowls or on plates, spreading the risotto in a thin la-
yer rather than a mound. Yield: Serves four to six. Advance preparation: You can begin up to several hours before serving. Proceed with the recipe and cook halfway through Step 3 — that is, for about 15 minutes. The rice should still be hard when you remove it from the heat, and there should not be any liquid in the pan. Spread it in an even layer in the pan and keep it away from the heat until you resume cooking. If the pan is not wide enough for you to spread the rice in a thin layer, transfer it to a sheet pan. Fifteen minutes before serving, bring the remaining stock back to a simmer, and reheat the rice. Resume cooking as instructed. Nutritional information per serving (four servings): 527 calories; 12 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 44 milligrams cholesterol; 69 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams dietary fiber; 639 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 31 grams protein Nutritional information per serving (six servings): 352 calories; 8 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 30 milligrams cholesterol; 46 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams dietary fiber; 426 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 20 grams protein
Kitchen
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The San Juan Weekly
Baked Cod Fish Fillets Florentine-Style add the milk and cream, stirring. When thickened and smooth remove from the heat and add the cheese, cayenne pepper, salt and pepper, and blend well. Add the egg, stirring rapidly. Set aside and keep warm. 3. Cut away and discard any tough blemishes on the spinach leaves. Rinsewell and drain. 4. Place spinach in a skillet and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spatula. When spinach is wilted, in about 3 minutes, transfer it to a colander and drain, pressing with the back of the spatula to extract liquid. Set aside. 5. With 1 tablespoon butter, grease a baking dish large enough to hold the fish in one layer. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the shallots over the bottom. Add the fish and sprinkle with PREPARATION 1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. salt and pepper. Add the wine. Bring 2. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in to a boil on top of the stove, then a saucepan. Add the flour, stirring place in the oven. Bake 10 minutes. 6. Meanwhile, heat the remaiwith a wire whisk. Blend well and INGREDIENTS • 4 tablespoons butter • 2 tablespoons flour • 1 1/2 cups milk • 1/4 cup heavy cream • 1/4 cup grated Gruyere or Cheddar cheese • pinch cayenne pepper • Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste • 1 egg, lightly beaten • 1 pound fresh spinach • 2 tablespoons finely chopped shallots • 4 6-ounce skinless and boneless codfish fillets • 1/4 cup dry white wine • 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
ning butter in a skillet and add the remaining 1 tablespoon shallots, and the spinach, salt and pepper. Cook and stir for one minute, no longer. Smooth the spinach over the bottom of an oval baking dish. Carefully place the baked codfish pieces over the spinach. Cover and keep warm. 7. Pour the wine liquid from the
baking dish into a saucepan. Reduce it quickly by half. Add this to the cheese sauce and stir. Bring to a boil. 8. Spoon the hot sauce evenly over the fish. Sprinkle with cheese and bake, uncovered, until bubbling and the fish is nicely browned on top. YIELD 4 servings
Spaghetti With Octopus Braised In Red Wine Adapted from Alessandro Giuntoli TOTAL TIME 1 hour 30 minutes INGREDIENTS • 6 tablespoons olive oil • 1 carrot, peeled and chopped • 1 medium onion, peeled and cho-
pped • 1 celery stalk, chopped • Salt to taste • 2 medium octopuses, about 12 ounces each, cut in half the long way • Freshly ground black pepper to taste • 2 cups dry red wine
• 1 bay leaf • 1 clove garlic, minced • 1 pound spaghetti or linguine • 2 tablespoons butter • 16 cherry tomatoes, cut in half • 1/2 cup roughly chopped basil PREPARATION
1. Place 2 tablespoons olive oil in large skillet or saute pan, and turn heat to medium-high. Add carrot, onion and celery. Sprinkle with pinch of salt, and cook, stirring occasionally, until onion becomes translucent, about 5 minutes. 2. Add octopus, along with some pepper and a little more salt. Cook, stirring, for 1 minute, and then add wine, bay leaf and garlic. Cook until octopus is tender, for about 1 hour (check with point of sharp knife). Remove octopus, and cut into bite-size pieces. Return octopus to skillet, and turn heat to a minimum. 3. Meanwhile, bring large pot of water to boil, and salt it. Fifteen minutes before eating, begin cooking pasta. When it is barely tender but not nearly tender enough to eat, drain it, reserving about 1 cup cooking liquid. Add pasta to octopus mixture, with half the reserved liquid. Cook until pasta is tender but not mushy; add remaining liquid if needed to keep mixture from drying out. 4. Add remaining olive oil, along with butter, cherry tomatoes and basil. Stir until butter melts, and then serve. YIELD 4 to 6 servings
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December 9 - 15, 2010
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The Mystery of Tiwanaku Ruins T
he ruins of Tiwanaku (also called Tiahuanaco and Tiahuanacu) is an important Pre-Columbian archaeological site in Bolivia, South America. The ruins are located in western Bolivia near Lake Titicaca, about 75 Kilometers (45 miles) west of La Paz. The archelogical site of Tiwanaku is near a small village town also called Tiwanku. Tiwanaku was once the cradel of Andean civilization, its cultural had an enormous impact throughout the region and though the society that built it disappeared many centuries before the first Europeans arrived, the civilization provided the fundamental inspiration for the better-known Inca empire. The ruins are open daily from 9:30am - 4pm and is about 90 minute bus ride from La Paz along paved roads. A ticket costs 80 bolivianos ($10) to enter. The museum, which is next to the site is also included in the ticket price. (see below) Since much of the site has still not been excavated and the the ruins are over 1,000 years old, it may not look very impressive to some. But, if you have an open mind about this site you will enjoy yourself here. You can easily get lost in thought from the energy and mystery that this place holds.
History Little is actually known about the ancient ruined city of Tiahuanaco and much of the site has still not been excavated. Archaeologists believe that the civilization first rose around 1000 BC as a small agriculturally-based village. However, it wasn’t until around 600 BC that the Tiwanaku developed
into a bustling city. And many centuries later it continued to grow significantly in power. Where the city was constructed with many terraced platform pyramids, courts and urban centers dispersed over 2 square miles. Some archeologist believe that the Tiwanaku empire, during its peak, controlled the whole Titicaca basin and extended into parts of Peru, Chile and northeast Argentina. It is also believed that as many as 50,000 people lived in the city itself and another 150,000 people resided in the surrounding countryside, farming grains and herded llamas. The decline of the Tiahuanaco
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Comes from page 35 empire was believed to have been caused by drought around 900 AD and became another ‘lost’ civilization. Evidence of its influence has been found throughout the vast area that later became the Inca empire.
Interesting Facts • It is believed that Tihuanaco once sat on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but due to drought, the lake receded, leaving the city almost 10 miles (16 KM) from the water. It was because of this drought that the entire civilization had to move. • The people of Tiwanako built one of the longest paved roads in preColumbian history. • From findings from the site, many archaeologists have concluded that the Tihuanaco people were more advanced in pottery, astronomy and math than the Inca ever were. • Tiahuauaco’s huge stone monoliths were built around 600 BC and left to crumble after the mysterious co-
llapse of the society around 1200AD. One notable structure that still stands is the huge sun gate, which is thought to be similar to a solar calendar and part of a larger observatory complex that complemented the Andean worship of gods and spirits. • The treasures of Tiahuanaco have literally been scattered around the world. Its gold was looted by the Spanish, and many of the stone and pottery finds were destroyed by people who considered them pagan idols. Fortunately, a portion of the treasure has been preserved some of its remains in Bolivia.
The San Juan Weekly
San Juan Weekly
December 9 - 15, 2010
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FASHION & BEAUTY
The Making of Fashion’s Latest ‘It’ Girl Ms. Chung’s run at “It” Girl-dom in America (a title she dismisses) has not been without strain. Though she is a huge star in England, her American television debut, MTV’s “It’s On With Alexa Chung,” was canceled last year after two seasons. But that career hiccup has hardly damaged her A-list status in the fashion world. In the last year, thousands of people placed themselves on a waiting list for the Alexa, a $1,150 buffalo-leather handbag named for Ms. Chung by Mulberry, the British luxury goods company. Inspired by Ms. Chung’s carrying of a vintage Mulberry men’s briefcase, the new bag was “an immediate best seller,”
probably never heard of Ms. Chung.) Indeed, while Ms. Chung has been on the covers of the British editions of Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar and was identified last month by The Sunday Telegraph as one of the 100 most powerful women in Britain, the American mass audience thus far appears to be more interested in the antics of the Kardashian sisters and Kate Gosselin than Ms. Chung’s brand of offhanded chic. Scheduled to be broadcast on PBS next summer, “Thrift America” might introduce Ms. Chung to a larger segment of the nation. On the show, she and Maya Singer, the series creator and the editor of special projects for Style.com, will comb the country’s consignment shops, garage sales and flea markets for old clothing, furniture, music equipment and other potential treasures to use in various creative endeavors. A few of the places they plan to visit include Orlando, Detroit, Nashville, Alabama and Brooklyn (and, on a less populist note, fashion capitals like Paris and London as well). In the first episode, Ms. Chung helps Pamela Love, a gothic jewelry designer, create a pop-up shop in London during Fashion Week.
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By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
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N a recent afternoon at the Bowery Hotel, over a burrata caprese salad, green beans and a Coke, the British television host, model and popculture phenomenon Alexa Chung was explaining her hair color, which often calls to mind a grown-out dye job. “I said ‘I want to look like Kurt Cobain,’ ” said Ms. Chung, 26. “I said, ‘I’m going to America and they’re going to try and make my hair shiny and I don’t want it. I want to look like Kurt Cobain.’ ” In town filming “Thrift America,” a new television series about shopping for vintage clothes and other paraphernalia, Ms. Chung was wearing a dark skirt from J. W. Anderson, an Isabel Marant cardigan and Russell & Bromley flats — her penchant for flats being but one characteristic, along with her oft-copied ombre hair, that has captivated fashion’s capri-
cious higher ranks. “All of my beauty icons are men,” she said in her throaty alto. “It’s all about effortlessness. It’s all about looking underdone.” Ms. Chung’s sartorial flair (when a dress didn’t arrive in the mail recently, she wore black shorts and a white buttondown shirt to the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards) has earned her a coterie of high-powered admirers. She’s a hipster muse for Karl Lagerfeld; a regular on the pages of fashion and music magazines; and an inspiration for young bloggers, who track her every look as if she were a deer in the crosshairs. “She’s become the Kate Moss for this new generation,” said Jane Keltner de Valle, the fashion news director for Teen Vogue. There was a time when all the pretty young things wanted was, as Ms. Keltner de Valle put it, “Kate, Kate, Kate. And now they say ‘Alexa!’ ”
the company’s chairman and chief executive, Godfrey Davis, told investors. And it spawned an array of other satchels like the Alexa Hobo and the Oversized Alexa. Many pieces in a collection Ms. Chung helped design for Madewell, the chain owned by J. Crew, sold out quickly after its debut in September. (Among the offerings: a fisherman-knit sweater and a blue silk dress with mini polka dots.) Millard Drexler, chairman and chief executive of J. Crew, told investors on an earnings call that women were curious about Ms. Chung: “Especially the 20-something crowd — they are Googling her all the time.” (He also said he suspected that outside of New York, most people had
FASHION & BEAUTY Comes from page 55 Think of it as “Antiques Roadshow” meets the foodie romp “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.” Ms. Singer said viewers hoping to replicate Ms. Chung’s high-low style will see firsthand, “What does Alexa Chung pull out of the crap bin at the yard sale?” Ms. Chung, known in England as a model, a presenter of various fashion and music shows, and the girlfriend of Alex Turner, the frontman of the band Arctic Monkeys, does not employ a stylist, which has earned her a kind of a street cred. Corin Nelson, who was an executive producer and show runner for “It’s On With Alexa Chung,” said that while television hosts typically wear what is picked for them, Ms. Chung said the clothes that were bought for her weren’t really her style. So she dressed herself each morning instead, mixing her own vintage items, like high-waist Levi’s denim shorts, with Chanel booties, new T-shirts and sweaters. “She very much marches to the beat of her own fashion drum,” Ms. Nelson said. MS. CHUNG’S style might be described as tomboy-meets-Lolita (delicate mini-dresses and brogues). To achieve the look, she relies on an ingrained English skill for layering. “The weather plays a big part over there,” she said at the Bowery. “It’s always cold and unpredictable. And also I quite like the slightly dorky aspect of English dressing.” In person and in photographs, certainly, Ms. Chung exudes none of the polished standoffishness of another current British style maven, Victoria Beckham. Having grown up with two brothers, she is quick with a comeback and wary of being precious. “She has this persona of your cool best friend or of your cool big sister,” said Izzy Grinspan, the editor of the shopping blog Racked NY. “It’s not aggressively sexual at all. It’s not aggressive.” It’s the antithesis of the warrior goddess look of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, Ms. Grinspan said. “You can very easily dress like Alexa Chung and it feels really fresh and new right now because it’s such a change.” And unlike many other trendsetters her age, Ms. Chung is more likely to flash paparazzi a peace sign than her underwear. “No kind of parenting can prepare you for how odd it is to be in front of a baying mob of flashbulbs and having to act natural or pose,” she said. “And I’m really bad at being elegant and graceful and doing this sort of thing.” With that, Ms. Chung elongated her neck and narrowed her eyes, achie-
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ving a smolder befitting a Calvin Klein billboard. “I mean I can do it,” she said returning to herself, “but that poise, that A-list Hollywood glamour thing is ugh. It makes me sick.” That attitude, along with challenging summer afternoon time slots, may be part of why “It’s On With Alexa Chung,” a live daytime television series for MTV with celebrity interviews and musical performances, failed to click. In 2009 she took an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her boyfriend and went on to interview the likes of Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg in her signature subtle, cheeky manner. “My style of presenting is, I suppose, a lot different to a lot of female presenters who are usually a prop for the man,” Ms. Chung said. Asked whether it’s necessary to make adjustments for an American audience, she said, “I think you do have to. But I didn’t. And that speaks volumes.” Yet while “It’s On” went off, Ms. Chung did not. She had already begun conquering the New York fashion world, one outfit at a time. Last year she turned up at the Emmy Awards gala at the New York Hilton and Towers; at Teen Vogue’s party at the Louis Vuitton store; at the MTV Video Music Awards; at the New York premiere of the documentary “The September Issue”; at the Saks Fifth Avenue party for Calvin Klein’s new secondfloor boutique; and at Men.Style.com’s annual “25 Women of Fashion” celebration at the Palace Hotel. Ms. Chung said this was not a personal P.R. strategy. “In a practical sense I was just trying to make friends,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone when I moved here.” Apparently she made the right friends: By the end of last year, Vogue named her one its best-dressed women of the year. And fan blogs like Daily Alexa Chung, alexachungworld.com and iwanttobealexachung.tumblr.com, as well as fashion blogs like Refinery 29 and Fashionista, were chronicling her every move. At New York Fashion Week in September she was seemingly omnipresent: in the front row at Phillip Lim’s show; at the Madewell store in SoHo during Fashion’s Night Out. This year Ms. Chung has also appeared in the advertising campaign for Pepe Jeans, and is the face of Joy of Pink, a new fragrance by Lacoste. Despite the attention, Ms. Chung shrugged off the idea that she is original. “A lot of my friends dress like this, and so I feel somewhat bad about how I’ve made a career out of it,” she said. She said she inherited from her father, a graphic designer, an eye for good proportion. “I just apply that to clothes,”
she said. “And I’m dressing for my body. So it’s very flattering that other people might want to borrow my style, but really it’s just making the most of what personally suits me, which is that I’ve got a long skinny leg and no boobs. So I dress to accommodate that.”
Ms. Chung is the youngest of four children who hail from a small village called Privett in Hampshire, England, about 70 miles west of London. Her mother is a housewife, and fashion was not a priority. “It was just kind of more about horse riding or going to dog shows,” Ms. Chung said. Her fashion obsession was sparked in the 1980s by a British television series, “The Clothes Show.” At 16, she was scouted by a modeling agency at the Reading music festival. But the profession disappointed. “I can’t express how bored I was and how my self-esteem just diminished,” Ms. Chung said. “I felt worthless because I was doing a job that had nothing to do with my own merit. It was to do with something that was given to me by my parents.” “The most beautiful girls in the world that I met while I was modeling were also the most depressed, ” she said
The San Juan Weekly But in 2006, Ms. Chung got a job as a host of her favorite television music show, “Popworld.” “It just really pulled me out of a quite depressing moment in my life,” she said. “Because I’d had my opinions suppressed it was really freeing to be able to express myself in that way because the tone of the show generally is quite sarcastic. I became known for being quite cutting.” She went on to host other popular English television programs like “Frock Me,” “Gok’s Fashion Fix,” and now, “Gonzo With Alexa Chung.” She plans to continue modeling (for pet projects), writing (she is a contributing editor for British Vogue), taking photographs (there is talk of an exhibition) and designing, perhaps a second Madewell collection. “I hope so,” she said. “They sent me nice flowers for my birthday.” Someday, she’d like to live in New York again, Ms. Chung said, eying the last of the fiery leaves clinging to the trees beyond the hotel’s heated patio. Eventually, she’d like children. And a house. The other day, she said, her boyfriend asked, “What do you want in life?” “Everything,” Ms. Chung told him.
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FASHION & BEAUTY
Year of the Couturière By CATHY HORYN
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ith the Chinese buying cars by the tens of thousands every week — big cars, too — and throwing up new buildings, driving in Beijing is no lark. It was an hour before Guo Pei and her husband, Cao Bao Jie, reached the headquarters of Rose Studio, their fashion company, on the city’s north side. The October sun was blazing pale when their Mercedes pulled up to a low-rise office complex, its white brick rendered shabby by newer developments. Cao, a stocky, goodlooking Taiwanese man who goes by the name Jack, had been kneeling the whole time next to the driver; facing his wife, who sat in the back; and translating from Chinese into English. Now he sort of backed out of the car. Guo Pei, whose career as a fashion designer began when there was no fashion in her country, remained a study in Asian poise and etiquette. In addition to large eyes and delicate features, enhanced by careful makeup, she has a gentleness unmarred by circumstance. These circumstances include wealth and a list of clients in Beijing’s highest political, media and social circles. But as Jack said proudly, ‘‘Guo Pei is a very traditional lady — a wonderful wife and daughter and mother who always cares more about her family than the attention she receives.’’ Be that as it may, nobody, upon learning that Beijing has its own couturière, would ever imagine such a salon. Rose Studio’s décor goes well beyond Chinese standards — in fact, its excessiveness suggests that in her ideas
Guo Pei is anything but modest. Along one wall are display cases of dresses in gold and Easter shades of blue and yellow, behind which are lighted panels of doily-white filigree rising to the mirrored ceiling. A glittering staircase, as wide as those in a musical, is ornamented with bronze vines. Coiled around its base, like a fat, drowsy serpent, is a tufted green damask banquette. Several assistants, half-hidden by vases of red silk flowers, work at a large white table. In the center of the room is a molded silver chair in the shape of three plump breasts. This is what you see upon entering Rose Studio from the parking lot. Nothing prepares you for the manyhued jolt any more than the desert prepares you for Las Vegas. On the second floor are three private rooms where luminaries of CCTV, the state-run television station; businesswomen; and the wives and daughters of Communist Party leaders come for
fittings. According to Jack, many of the Politburo wives are customers, though few Chinese people would know since the wives do not play much of a public role. So there is no P.R. value as there would be for dressing Michelle Obama, but there are certainly guanxi, or connections, which anyone with a problem appreciates. On the third and fourth floors 140 people cut, sew and finish clothes, with a separate workroom for shoes and jewelry. Guo Pei, 43, started her business 13 years ago, and it’s safe to say that just about everything in China has changed since then. Many more people are able to afford luxury products, and Beijing’s malls are packed. Still, this small woman with a bob and a tendency to finish her sentences with a giggle is an anomaly — and not because she dresses V.I.P.’s or designs one-off pieces in a country geared for mass production. What makes Guo Pei different is what she puts on a runway. Four years ago, she began making collections that were on a scale that equaled, and in some cases surpassed, the technical feats of Paris couture — skirts of fantastic dimension, molded into bell shapes, or cones that rippled like the surface of a shell. Some dresses are inspired by children’s clothes, and on adults the proportions look extreme, an effect she heightens with ridiculously high platform sandals. The clothes are also lavishly embellished. Next to her dresses, the most elaborate Paris stuff is a dim bulb — and growing weaker as European houses subtly cut back on handwork to meet rising labor
costs. In China, it’s the reverse. Guo Pei says that when she went looking for people to do embroidery, in 1999, the only product in demand were the kind of slippers you’d find on Canal Street. Today she employs 300 people in a workroom two hours from Beijing. She had to train them, but it’s also true that her creative freedom is tethered to relatively cheap labor. One dress alone, made entirely of golden panels, took 50,000 hours to embroider. Guo Pei announced her ambitions at China Fashion Week in Beijing. The city was in a building frenzy because of the Olympics, and European luxury brands were finally seeing the fruits of their marketing. Young people with decent jobs were the driving force, a McKinsey study found, and unlike people who had lived through the Cultural Revolution, they had no problem spending three times their monthly salary on a bag if it showed they were well off. Still, their reasoning was pragmatic, McKinsey said, and not emotional. For Guo Pei, however, the decisions were all emotional. One can see in videos of her shows, which typically last 35 minutes and invoke Chinese fairy tales, the artistic yearnings of a woman — yearnings that until then had a limited outlet. Last November, for her third collection — held in the National Stadium at the Olympic Village before an audience of 2,600 people — Guo Pei flew the legendary model Carmen Dell’Orefice in from New York. Dell’Orefice was 78 when she agreed to wear a bejeweled sheath and an embroidered, fur-trimmed cape fit for a Ming empress, and heavy enough to require an escort by two men ‘‘and two boys in back pushing the tra
Continues on page 54
FASHION & BEAUTY Comes from page 53 in.’’ When asked about the experience, Dell’Orefice answered, ‘‘That’s like asking me how I would feel about Zeffirelli.’’ She went on to compare Guo Pei to Charles James and added: ‘‘I was awe-struck by the pure beauty. She brings some part of the Chinese history forward and jumps over Mao Zedong.’’ Not long after that show, Nicola Formichetti, an editor who helps style Lady Gaga, contacted Guo Pei to borrow some clothes. This was a provident match. Whatever one thinks of the entertainer or the designer, they share an outsize vision of a warrior woman. There is nothing dainty about a 40-pound crystal beaded dress, as Lady Gaga discovered when four or five dresses (and the platform shoes) arrived in Los Angeles, ‘‘all beautifully packaged in silver boxes,’’ Formichetti recalled. She tried them on, he said, ‘‘but basically couldn’t move in them, so they couldn’t work onstage.’’ ‘‘They were very nice, polite people,’’ Jack said of his dealings with Formichetti’s office, but one senses that Guo Pei isn’t dying to dress the world’s most famous performer. The daughter of an army platoon leader who later held a high-ranking position in the state housing authority, Guo Pei was born in Beijing in 1967, at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Her family remained in the capital, and in 1982 she enrolled in fashion studies at Beijing Second Light Industry School. Guo Pei says her teachers had no knowledge of what was going on in Europe in the mid-’80s, which was the heyday of Azzedine Alaïa and the beginning of John Galliano. But the lack of worldly information wasn’t the obstacle it might seem. After secretly watching a movie that featured a wedding scene, she asked a teacher how to make a huge skirt. ‘‘He said, ‘I don’t know, but maybe you can find a solution in costumes for opera,’ ’’ Guo Pei recalled. ‘‘At that moment, I fell in love with big things.’’ After graduating in 1986, she took a job designing children’s clothing. There was no question that she would find work. ‘‘The government assigned you a job,’’ said Guo Pei, who made 65 renminbi a month, the equivalent today of about $10. A year or so later she moved to a women’s clothing company, Tianma, where she tentatively asserted her ideas. Tianma was among the first generation of privately owned companies, and as the Communist government was loosening controls and the dark Mao uniform was gradually vanishing in a
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The San Juan Weekly
sea of pastels and prints, Guo Pei decided to ask the owner for 3 percent of every garment sold. She was that sure, she says, that women would buy her designs. Eventually sales reached 100 million renminbi (about $15 million), but long before that, she says with a look of satisfaction, the owner pressed her to renegotiate their deal. In 1997, with money that she had saved, Guo Pei opened Rose Studio. Now married to Jack, whose family owns a textile company in Taiwan, she decided to pursue her dream of custom dresses. Even as her runway pieces serve a single-minded purpose — ‘‘I wanted a space of my own,’’ as she put it — Guo Pei’s evening dresses are hardly pedestrian affairs. Made in European fabrics, they are charming and pretty, like the pink taffeta column embroidered with a soup bowl of red Chinese characters (signifying luck) that the actress Li Bingbing wore at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Guo Pei dresses a lot of stars, including the singers Tang Can and Sun Yue. In the beginning, though, she nearly went broke dressing Beijing’s rising elite. She would make a sketch of a dress for a client, but at the first fitting the woman would complain it wasn’t what she wanted and demand her 30 percent deposit back. So she and Jack came up with a membership system, in which clients buy in at three levels — roughly, $15,000, $33,000 and $83,000. A dress like one that Li Bingbing wore in Venice would cost about $5,000, a traditional qipao with minimal embroidery $2,000. One woman spent $80,000 on a wedding dress. As for her runway pieces, Guo Pei, who says she has 400 clients, just shook her head: ‘‘I don’t even want to say what they would
cost.’’ Anyone who spends time in China’s cities, which in 20 years are expected to have a billion inhabitants, quickly realizes that shopping is like a new territory to be explored. As Linda Lin, who supervises Max Mara’s China operations, with 250 stores, said of the typical young professional: ‘‘You don’t have a place to go on the weekends. So you go to the shopping center.’’ Lin has never heard of Guo Pei, but that’s not surprising. Local designers, no matter how good their guanxi, don’t have much of a chance in China’s frenetic retail scene, where Western brands have their pick of locations and managers. ‘‘The good people were all taken by Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci Group,’’ said Angelica Cheung, the editor of Vogue China. ‘‘So local designers end up doing everything themselves and they can’t move on.’’ It may just be that the farther you get from the ‘‘new’’ China, with its paved-over traditions and green spaces, the easier it is to appreciate Guo Pei’s
achievement — her feeling for nature, beauty and China’s dead yet salient past. Wallace Chan, a Hong Kong jeweler whose masterly designs have a similar spirit, thinks China actually needs more designers like his friend Guo Pei. He said, ‘‘Only when there are more will Chinese people understand fashion.’’ And Nicola Formichetti, seeing little in Japan that strikes him as new, thinks it’s worth paying attention to a woman whose artistry and ambition are fed by her sky’s-the-limit workroom. ‘‘I always have a desire to create something that is fashion and is not fashion,’’ Guo Pei admitted and then laughed. ‘‘So a dress ends up weighing 50 kilos! Every piece is not fashion anymore. It’s sculpture; it’s painting. I want to put all that into a dress.’’ Such a fortress may not meet Charles James’s ideal — ‘‘what is rare, correctly proportioned and, though utterly discreet, libidinous.’’ But give her time. She has been making these clothes only a few years, amid tremendous change. And she has not even begun to refine her ideas.
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PAINTER
John Singer Sargent, a Realist Who Tried Another Style By KAREN ROSENBERG “
S
argent and Impressionism,” at Adelson Galleries in Manhattan, is a mellow, verdant treat for the short, sleety days of December. Does it matter that Sargent’s Impressionist period
was fairly brief, or that the movement itself didn’t play to his strengths? Not really, because he was a quick study and he learned from the best in the business, Monet. Besides, the show has plenty of scholarship to back up its plein-air pleasures. The gallery’s fourth in-depth look
at Sargent, it’s timed to the release of Volume V of his catalogue raisonné. “Sargent and Impressionism” has its own catalog, too, with an essay by the Sargent scholar Elaine Kilmurray that delves into a newly published cache of letters between Sargent and Monet. The 28 paintings and smattering of watercolors on view find Sargent taking lessons from Monet and other successful Impressionists (just as he had looked to old masters like Velázquez and Van Dyck in his portraits). Sargent made his name as a portraitist, and his best works all fall into that category: the roguish Dr. Pozzi in his bathrobe, the lonely daughters of Edward Darley Boit and the awkward arriviste we know as “Madame X.” But in paintings including the Brooklyn Museum’s “Paul Helleu Sketching With His Wife,” the Metropolitan Museum’s “Reapers Resting in a Wheat Field,” and the Tate’s “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” nature isn’t relegated to the background. The Brooklyn’s painting was at Adelson for only a couple of weeks; the Tate’s is there only in reproduction, and in related studies. But the Met’s is on the gallery walls for the remainder of the
show, as are paintings from the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and numerous other institutions and private collections. All of the works date from 1883 to 1889 — a period during which Sargent, riding out the scandal over his “Madame X,” fled from Paris to the English countryside. His portrait commissions had dried up, and he was eager to try something different. Impressionism was a safe choice; it was no longer a movement of upstarts and Salon rejects. Monet’s exhibitions at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris were both popular and profitable. Besides, Sargent had already tried plein-air painting during a summer at Cancale, a Breton fishing village, in 1877; his scenes of oyster gatherers had been received favorably at the Salons. Although it isn’t clear exactly when Sargent and Monet first met (probably in Paris around 1876, the catalog says), they had developed a supportive friendship by the mid-1880s. Sargent visited Monet at Giverny; Monet returned the favor at Calcot Mill, in the English county of Berkshire, where Sargent was painting his own riverside landscapes. The Calcot paintings in the show (“Landscape With Trees, Calcot,” “At Calcot” and “A Backwater at Calcot Near Reading”) come closest to Monet’s mature Impressionism, with their short, stabbing brush strokes and use of violet and russet tones to add depth to the foliage. Monet said of these works, “I see that Sargent is engaged in this project and proceeds by imitating me.” Elsewhere, though, Sargent seems to have painted Impressionist subjects — lazy afternoons of boating, strolls by the water’s edge, naps in the shade — without fully embracing the movement.
Continues on page 62
PAINTER
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in a flowering garden at dusk. Sargent’s studies for this work, and some related paintings, are on view in a second-floor gallery. Here he’s under the sway of Whistler, more than of Monet, scattering the flowers across a flat ground to create the feeling of a Japanese print or textile. In her catalog essay “Sargent, Monet
Comes from page 61 His brushwork, influenced by his teacher Carolus-Duran, remains defiantly virtuosic; it turns every ripple of water and blade of grass into a flourish. It’s best exemplified by the Brooklyn Museum painting of Paul Helleu, sometimes called “An Out-of-Doors Study.” The work depicts Helleu, another artist and mutual friend of Sargent and Monet’s, seated outdoors with his wife and his sketchbook. It would be hard to find a more energetically painted riverbank anywhere in art history. Sargent’s palette, too, seems out of step with Impressionism (Monet’s Impressionism, at least). He favors bright greens with a straight-from-the-tube look, rather than generating optical mixes of color. (Sargent also insisted on using black pigment, anathema to Monet.) A result is that the English countryside looks strangely tropical, as in “Under the Willows” and “A Backwater at Henley.” The best works of Sargent’s Impressionist period, not surprisingly, involve the figure. Gesture and drapery were to
Sargent as light and air were to Monet. The show includes several delightful paintings of Violet Sargent, the painter’s youngest sister, engaged in boating and other leisurely activities. In “Violet Fishing” she holds the rod daintily, at a distance from her fluttery white gown. And in “Autumn on the River” she’s comfortably adrift, cocooned in furs and a cozy brown blanket, letting her brother and the tide do all the work. (Sargent painted “en bateau,” we intuit from the drastically foreshortened composition.) There’s something somnolent, even funereal, about this work — and about Sargent’s Impressionist pictures in general, for all their vivid colors and vigorous brushwork. The authors of the catalogue raisonné, Ms. Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, go so far as to suggest that “Sargent was conflating Impressionist technique with themes of dream and sleep, which are very potent in late-19th-century art.” Also dreamlike is the show’s masterpiece in absentia, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose,” with its singsong title and central image of two children lighting lanterns
... and Manet” Ms. Kilmurray explores one of the more interesting links between Sargent and Monet: their concerted and successful effort to keep Manet’s “Olympia” in France and available to the public, following a proposed sale to an American collector. The idea of “Olympia” as a bridge between Sargent and Monet feels right. Sargent, in the wake of “Madame X,” may have admired Manet’s frank approach to the figure. Monet, you imagine, valued the painting’s unstinting depiction of modern life (the subtext of his own scenes of bridges and railway stations). Ultimately, Sargent was a Realist who dabbled in Impressionism. As Monet (quoted in the catalogue raisonné) said to the Sargent biographer Evan Charteris: “Sargent didn’t like flowers. He used to say that what he didn’t like about flowers was that they weren’t in harmony with the leaves — he wasn’t an Impressionist, in the sense that we use the word.”
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Gilberto Santa Rosa ilberto Santa Rosa’s most recent album is titled “ Irrepetible”(non repeatable) and he says he made the record because it gave him a unique opportunity to do duets with an ample range of Latin American singers. The album includes recording artist from Kanny García, Rubén Blades, Johnny Ventura, Guaco y Felipe “Pipe” Peláez, in addition to the success of the first single “Vivir sin ti” (to live without you).
G
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34 December 9 - 15, 2010 “ It is unique because…. the occasion is unique, the collaborations are unique, and the proposal and the atmosphere it represents” as said by the gentleman of salsa with his new production, the 25th of his career. In the middle of the promotion of his latest record “Irrepitible” the veteran singer Gilberto Santa Rosa feels that to maintain him self as one of the favorites in the music industry after obtaining a solid trajectory in 34 years, it has been luck that the public has always accepted and embraced him. “The Gentleman of Salsa” Indicates that his music formula has
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ilberto Santa Rosa was born on 21 August 1962, in Puerto Rico and today is known as “El Caballero de la Salsa” (the gentleman of salsa). In 1976 he started with a group of amateurs in Puerto Rico, and his first
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been based on an honest and original product and very hard work. His commitment with the public is serious, because “some people think that I just simply sing (in an activity), finish and then he leave and that is all to it, but there is more behind the production of an activity. One has to count on the crew, with the people who I have meet and those who I have not, and have in some way or another have put their pinch of sand In the production, which I truly appreciate, and this Is the key to my validity. With Sony Music I have been working for 20 years. All of this combined helps me have a long career”.
recording was with the Mario Ortiz Orchestra. He then moved on to Orquesta La Grande, and during the two years Gilberto was with them, he met Mr. Elias Lopés who later helped mold and polish the promising young singer, relea-
sing three recordings. In 1980, he got an important opportunity recording “Homenaje a Eddie Palmieri” with the Puerto Rico All Stars. He then went on to record with Tommy Olivencia. From 1981 through 1986 he was with the Willie Rosario Orchestra where he recorded six albums. Santa Rosa then signed with Ralph Cartagena’s Combo Records. In 1986, he debuted on Good Vibrations fronting his own salsa orquesta. After releasing three more albums on Combo, including “De Amor y Salsa”, he switched to CBS Records and issued the he chart-topping salsa romantica set Punto to De Vista in 1990, which went platinum m and spawned the smash hits “Vivir Sin n Ella” and “Perdoname”. Santa Rosa’s ’s 1991 CBS/Sony follow-up, Perspectiva, a, was another monster hit. Since the mid-80s, the mainssn tream salsa recording industry in n Puerto Rico and the USA has been largely preoccupied with developing and marketing the images of “good looking” young male vocalists, rather than producing solid, stimulating music performed by swinging soneros (improvising salsa sin-
gers). Santa Rosa, however, who was one of the first of this new crop of solo singers, is regarded as being amongst the small number who deserve to be called a sonero. In 1990, Santa Rosa was in the illustrious company of Andy Montañez and Pedro Brull (from Mulenze ), as one of the contemporary soneros assembled by bandleader Don Perignon for his all-star La Puertorriqueña project. In 1990, he won the Billboard Lo Nuestro award for Best Male Singer. He has also performed at New York’s prestigious annual salsa festival. But 1990 was an important year in other respects. Santa Rosa made acting debut in the play “La pareja dispareja”, where he was joined by Rafo Muñiz and Luis Vigoreaux. He visited Japan in 1995 as Puerto Rico’s musical ambassador and sang one of his songs, “De cara al viento” in Japanese in his effort to bridge the cultural barriers. Since then Santa Rosa’s fame reached across borders and continents; commanding recognition as salsa artist in most demand. In 1976 he released yet another smash album Esencia which included hit songs such as No Quiero Nada Regala’o.
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December 9 - 15, 2010
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A Fate That Narcissists Will Hate: Being Ignored By CHARLES ZANOR
N
arcissists, much to the surprise of many experts, are in the process of becoming an endangered species. Not that they face imminent extinction — it’s a fate much worse than that. They will still be around, but they will be ignored. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (due out in 2013, and known as DSM-5) has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition. Narcissistic personality disorder is the most well-known of the five, and its absence has caused the most stir in professional circles. Most nonprofessionals have a pretty good sense of what narcissism means, but the formal definition is more precise than the dictionary meaning of the term. Our everyday picture of a narcissist is that of someone who is very self-involved — the conversation is always about them. While this characterization does apply to people with narcissistic personality disorder, it is too broad. There are many people who are completely self-absorbed who would not qualify for a diagnosis of N.P.D. The central requirement for N.P.D. is a special kind of self-absorption: a gran-
diose sense of self, a serious miscalculation of one’s abilities and potential that is often accompanied by fantasies of greatness. It is the difference between two high school baseball players of moderate ability: one is absolutely convinced he’ll be a major-league player, the other is hoping for a college scholarship. Of course, it would be premature to call the major-league hopeful a narcissist at such an early age, but imagine that same kind of unstoppable, unrealistic attitude 10 or 20 years later. The second requirement for N.P.D.: since the narcissist is so convinced of his high station (most are men), he automatically expects that others will recognize his superior qualities and will tell him so. This is often referred to as “mirroring.” It’s not enough that he knows he’s great. Others must confirm it as well, and they must do so in the spirit of “vote early, and vote often.” Finally, the narcissist, who longs for the approval and admiration of others, is often clueless about how things look from someone else’s perspective. Narcissists are very sensitive to being overlooked or slighted in the smallest fashion, but they often fail to recognize when they are doing it to others. Most of us would agree that this is an easily recognizable profile, and it is a puzzle
why the manual’s committee on personality disorders has decided to throw N.P.D. off the bus. Many experts in the field are not happy about it. Actually, they aren’t happy about the elimination of the other four disorders either, and they’re not shy about saying so. One of the sharpest critics of the DSM committee on personality disorders is a Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Gunderson, an old lion in the field of personality disorders and the person who led the personality disorders committee for the current manual. Asked what he thought about the elimination of narcissistic personality disorder, he said it showed how “unenlightened” the personality disorders committee is. “They have little appreciation for the damage they could be doing.” He said the diagnosis is important in terms of organizing and planning treatment. “It’s draconian,” he said of the decision, “and the first of its kind, I think, that half of a group of disorders are eliminated by committee.” He also blamed a so-called dimensional approach, which is a method of diagnosing personality disorders that is new to the DSM. It consists of making an overall, general diagnosis of personality disorder for a given patient, and then selecting particular traits from a long list in order to best descri-
be that specific patient. This is in contrast to the prototype approach that has been used for the past 30 years: the narcissistic syndrome is defined by a cluster of related traits, and the clinician matches patients to that profile. The dimensional approach has the appeal of ordering à la carte — you get what you want, no more and no less. But it is precisely because of this narrow focus that it has never gained much traction with clinicians. It is one thing to call someone a neat and careful dresser. It is another to call that person a dandy, or a clotheshorse, or a boulevardier. Each of these terms has slightly different meanings and conjures up a type. And clinicians like types. The idea of replacing the prototypic diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with a dimensional diagnosis like “personality disorder with narcissistic and manipulative traits” just doesn’t cut it. “Clinicians are accustomed to thinking in terms of syndromes, not deconstructed trait ratings. Researchers think in terms of variables, and there’s just a huge schism.” He said the committee was stacked “with a lot of academic researchers who really don’t do a lot of clinical work. We’re seeing yet another manifestation of what’s called in psychology the science-practice schism.”
When the Nurse Disagrees With the Doctor By THERESA BROWN, R.N.
A
recent conversation with a physician at my hospital was laced with tension about the different roles of doctors and nurses. “When you get down to it,” he told me, “Patients come to me for care, Theresa, not you.” I couldn’t believe that this doctor, who had always worked well with the nurses on my floor, had just suggested, at least in my mind, that a nurse’s opinion on patient care matters less because patients don’t directly make appointments with us. It all began after the doctor read a story I had written about a leukemia patient in his 70s. The doctor had not been involved in the case, but he was troubled by my role in it. Due to the patient’s existing health problems, I was concerned that giving him chemotherapy would cause more harm than good. During the course of the treatment, the patient complained in agony, telling me “I can’t take it,” and I relayed his misgivings to the patient’s care team. A more aggressive lament from the patient — “What the hell are you doing to me?” — also got communicated to the team. I was the patient’s nurse and his advocate, and I worried that it was not ethical to subject him to more chemotherapy when he was clearly having a hard
time with the treatment. The chemo we had given him before this latest round had already sent him into permanent renal failure and caused congestive heart failure. I recounted that story with great sadness, as it had been agonizing to watch my patient suffer through treatments that I believed he would not have chosen had he known the harm they could cause and the unlikeliness of being cured. He eventually was admitted to hospice and died, but only after the chemo had left him with unstoppable and painful bleeding in his bladder, robbing him of a more peaceful and more comfortable end to his life. The doctor colleague who cornered me at the nursing station was particularly unhappy with my aggressive objection to the patient’s care plan. This doctor felt strongly that for cancer patients, end-of-life decisions should ultimately be the responsibility of the physician in charge of his or her care. That physician, he argued, is in the best position to offer advice about care decisions because he knows the patient’s full history. Floor nurses, he said, usually only see a snapshot of the patient near the end of a long journey. Obviously, doctors and nurses have different roles in the hospital. Our training is different, and so are our responsibilities. It’s also true that patients choose their doc-
tor and only end up with a particular nurse through the luck of the draw. But when a doctor and a nurse disagree over patient care, should the doctor always prevail? Many of the nurses I know could share their own, dramatic stories of rescuing patients or catching frightening errors by other health care workers, including doctors. In fact, the same day the doctor cornered me at the nursing station, I had caught a potentially risky medication prescribing error by a doctor in training. I took my care question to a clinical pharmacist and the attending physician to insure that my patient was given the right treatment. Nurses don’t have the power to make certain types of care decisions, but they do have the responsibility to be satisfied good decisions are being made. Nursing care is also an important factor in a patient’s recovery. Several studies now show a strong association between nurse staffing levels and rates of patient complications like pneumonia or internal bleeding during a hospital stay. Patients in hospitals with high nurse staffing ratios get better sooner and have shorter hospital stays. Many doctors will tell you that it’s nursing care, not physician care, that makes the biggest impact on a patient’s recovery. So is the doctor-patient relationship really more sacrosanct than the nurse-patient relationship? I don’t think so. Physi-
cians have the ultimate responsibility for treatment decisions, but because nurses spend so much more time with hospital patients than doctors do, we have a unique view of how the patient is really doing. Patients present different faces to nurses and to doctors — complaining to a nurse in a way they never would to a doctor. And while my physician colleague said that nurses only see a snapshot, that picture is often one the doctor does not see. He shared difficulties he’d had with nurses criticizing decisions when they had only known the patient for a few hours. I nodded. Then I said that physicians can have blinders on, too, and he nodded as well. In the end he said, “The point is, it needs to be a conversation.” And we both agreed on that. But when in doubt, I will err on the side of aggressive advocacy for my patients. Nurses have a professional obligation to make sure that patients receive the best care possible and to insure that all care given in hospitals is safe. For better or for worse, patients who come into our hospital are the responsibility of the nurses, even if the patient has been admitted by a doctor of her own choosing. A good nurse will share his or her opinions with the medical staff — sometimes loudly — because that’s part of our job, even if we ruffle a few feathers in the process.
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Fell Off My Bike, and Vowed Never to Get Back On By GINA KOLATA
I
crashed on my bike on Oct. 3 and broke my collarbone, an experience so horrific that my first impulse was to say I would never ride on the road again. Turns out I am not alone. “Well, you’ve joined the proud majority of serious cyclists who’ve busted a collarbone,” said Rob Coppolillo, a competitive cyclist in Boulder, Colo., who also leads rock- and iceclimbing expeditions and is a part-time ski guide. I’ve since heard from other cyclists who broke bones or were badly bruised and shaken up in crashes. Many say they, too, vowed, at least initially, never to ride outside again. It’s not a universal response, but it is so common that cyclists nod their heads when they hear my reaction to my injury. Yet almost no one swears off running after an injury, even though — and I speak from experience — a running injury can keep you away from your sport at least as long. And that made me wonder: is a cycling injury qualitatively different from a running injury? Is it the drama of a crash, or is it that a crash makes you realize you could actually be killed on a bike? Is it the type of injury? Or the fact that you can feel, as I did, that the accident was unfair and out of your control? Risk-assessment experts say that it is all of the above, and that the way we respond to various sports injuries reveals a lot about how we assess risks. My crash came 8.9 miles into a 100-mile ride (of course I knew the distance, because of course I was watching my bicycle computer). My friend Jen Davis was taking a turn leading; my husband, Bill, was drafting — riding close behind her. I was drafting Bill when a slower rider meandered into his path. Bill swerved and I hit his wheel. Down I went. The first thing I did when I hit the ground was turn off my stopwatch — I did not want accident time to count toward our riding time. Then I sat on a curb, dazed. My head had hit the road, but my helmet saved me. My left thigh was so bruised it was hard to walk. Worst of all was a searing pain in my left shoulder. I could hardly move my arm. But since it hurt whether I rode or not, I decided, like an idiot, to finish the ride. The next day I went to a doctor and learned, to my shock, that my collarbone was broken. Running is my sport, I thought, and no ride is worth this. I remembered what Michael Berry, an exercise physiologist at Wake Forest University, once told me. With cycling, he said, it’s not if you crash, it’s when. He should know. He’s a competitive cyclist whose first serious injury — a broken hip — happened when he crashed
taking a sharp turn riding down a mountain road. Then, last June, he was warming up for a race when he hit a squirrel, crashed into a telephone pole and broke his arm so badly he needed surgery. His reaction to each crash was a variant of mine. He’d taken up cycling about five years ago because he’d injured his hamstring running. “With each wreck I thought, ‘Maybe I should try running again,’ ” he said. My running friend Claire Brown, a triathlete, crashed a few years ago when she was riding fast on wet roads, getting in one last training ride before a race. Her bike slid on a metal plate in a bridge and she went down, hitting her head and her left hip. She was badly bruised, and even though she broke no bones, she did not feel comfortable riding for the next two years. Even now, she told me, “there are bridges around here I won’t ride on, and I definitely won’t go downhill fast.” And yet, and yet. Despite how much it hurt, my collarbone fracture was nowhere near as bad as some running injuries. When I got a stress fracture — a hairline break — in a small bone in my foot, I was on crutches for eight weeks. When I finally could run again, my foot hurt because the muscles had atrophied. Running was slow and difficult. I’d lost the rhythm and the stride that make running fun. With the collarbone fracture, I wore a sling for three weeks but could take it off and ride my bike on my trainer — a device that turns a road bike into a stationary one — and use an elliptical cross-trainer. After four weeks I could run, and running felt good. George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, says there are several factors that separate running injuries from cycling ones. Running injuries are often hidden — like a torn hamstring — and tend to heal gradually on their own. Bicycling injuries, he told me, “tend to be more acute and dramatic — often there is blood or even bones sticking out,” and “if it’s a gory image, it tends to deter us.” Then there’s the issue of control. “Control makes a big difference in whether we take risks,” Dr. Loewenstein said. “With biking, you feel in control until you have an accident. Then all of a sudden you realize you are not in control. That can have a dramatic effect — you can shift abruptly from excessive daring to exaggerated caution.” With running, even though I realize that I and others who got injured could not have prevented our injuries, somehow I blamed myself. It was “overuse,” even though overuse is apparent only in retrospect, as you cast about for a reason why you got injured. But running is considered to carry less risk than cycling. And, notes Barry Glassner, pre-
sident of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., and an expert on fear and risk perception, “anything that is widely perceived as lower risk, we blame ourselves when something goes wrong.” “It’s known as the just world hypothesis,” he said, “this notion that the world should be fair.” Dr. Glassner said “we get especially outraged” when the world is not fair, as with a cycling crash. Or, he noted, “we blame ourselves” for the injustice of it all, as with a running injury. The hypothesis does let some people continue a risky sport — by deciding that a serious accident was not really random. “You see it with rock climbers,” says Rob Coppolillo. “There will be a fatality or someone will really get hurt. There are those psychological backflips you can make yourself do. ‘It won’t happen to me.’ ” And if you have an accident and you can blame yourself for it, then you can also convince yourself that it won’t happen again. That’s how Dr. Loewenstein reasoned when he crashed his bike last winter after riding over a patch of ice. He ended up with a shoulder injury. He decided the whole thing was his fault and could have been avoided. “I did not experience a loss of control,” he said. “I just thought I had been stupid. Whereas if a car had hit me, it would have been different.” If that had happened, he said, he might have vowed never to ride again.
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December 9 - 15, 2010
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Inefficiency Hurts U.S. in Longevity Rankings By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
B
y any measure, the United States spends more on health care than any other nation. Yet according to the World Fact Book (published by the Central Intelligence Agency), it ranks 49th in life expectancy. Why? Researchers writing in the November issue of the journal Health Affairs say they know the answer. After citing statistical evidence showing that American patterns of obesity, smoking, traffic accidents and homicide are not the cause of lower life expectancy, they conclude that the problem is the health care system. Peter A. Muennig and Sherry A. Glied, researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, compared the performance of the United States and 12 other industrialized nations: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. In addition to health care expenditures in each country, they focused on two other important statistics: 15-year survival for people at 45 years and for those at 65
years. The researchers say those numbers present an accurate picture of public health because they measure a country’s success in preventing and treating the most common causes of death — cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes — which are more likely to occur at these ages. Their data come from the World Health Organization and cover 1975 to 2005. Life expectancy increased over those years in all 13 countries, and so did health care costs. But the United States had the lowest increase in life expectancy and the highest increase in costs. In 1975 the United States was close to the average in health care costs, and last in 15-year survival for 45-year-old men. By 2005 its costs had more than tripled, far surpassing increases elsewhere, but the survival number was still last — a little over 90 percent, compared with more than 94 percent for Swedes, Swiss and Australians. For women, it was 94 percent in the United States, versus 97 percent in Switzerland, Australia and Japan. The numbers for 65-year-olds in
2005 were similar: about 58 percent of American men could be expected to survive 15 years, compared with more than 65 percent of Australians, Japanese and Swiss. While more than 80 percent of 65-year-old women in France, Switzerland, and Japan would survive 15 years, only about 70 percent of American women could be expected to live that long. In narrowing the blame to the American health care system, the researchers first eliminated several other factors. Obesity and smoking are the most important behavior-related causes of death, but obesity increased more slowly in the United States than in the other countries and smoking declined more rapidly, so neither can explain the differences in survival rates. Homicide and traffic fatality rates have remained steady over time, and social, economic and educational factors do not vary greatly among these countries. But not all experts agree with this analysis. Samuel Preston, a demographer and a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, says the analysis is faulty. “The basic message is correct —
that measures of U.S. health, including mortality and morbidity, are very poor in comparison with other countries,” he said. But the Columbia researchers “have no direct evidence about the health care system in this article,” he continued. “Their conclusion is extremely speculative.” That they did not find smoking at fault, Dr. Preston said, “is mysterious to me, particularly since they show high lung cancer mortality for the U.S.” Dr. Preston has published widely on mortality trends and the effects of smoking. Dr. Muennig conceded that the study examined only life expectancy and health care spending in the 13 countries, and not the structure or economics of health care. “We did a pretty good job of showing that smoking isn’t the culprit,” he said. “Smoking and obesity are still major risk factors for an individual’s health,” he said. “But they are sapping life expectancy in all countries. Whereas in the U.S. we have a highly inefficient health system that’s taking away financial resources from other lifesaving programs.”
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Fuel Lines of Tumors Are New Target By ANDREW POLLACK
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or the last decade cancer drug developers have tried to jam the accelerators that cause tumors to grow. Now they want to block the fuel line. Cancer cells, because of their rapid growth, have a voracious appetite for glucose, the main nutrient used to generate energy. And tumors often use glucose differently from healthy cells, an observation first made by a German biochemist in the 1920s. That observation is already used to detect tumors in the body using PET scans. A radioactive form of glucose is injected into the bloodstream and accumulates in tumors, lighting up the scans. Now, efforts are turning from diagnosis to treating the disease by disrupting the special metabolism of cancer cells to deprive them of energy. The main research strategy of the last decade has involved so-called targeted therapies, which interfere with genetic signals that act like accelerators, causing tumors to grow. But there tend to be redundant accelerators, so blocking only one with a drug is usually not enough. In theory, however, depriving tumors of energy should render all the accelerators ineffective. “The accelerators still need the fuel source,” said Dr. Chi Dang, a professor of medicine and oncology at Johns Hopkins University. Indeed, he said, recent discoveries show that the genetic growth signals often work by influencing cancer cells’ metabolism. The efforts to exploit cancer’s sweet tooth are in their infancy, with few drugs in clinical trials. But interest is growing among pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers. “Nutrient supply and deprivation is becoming potentially the next big wave,” said Dr. David Schenkein, chief executive of Agios Pharmaceuticals, a company formed two years ago to develop drugs that interfere with tumor metabolism. Among its founders was Dr. Craig B. Thompson, the new president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Other small companies, like Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals and Myrexis, are pursuing the approach, and big drug companies are also jumping in. Earlier this year, AstraZeneca agreed to work with Cancer Research UK, a British charity, on drugs that interfere with cancer metabolism. One factor spurring interest in cancer metabolism is the intriguing interplay between cancer and diabetes, a metabolic disease marked by high levels of blood glucose. The possible link between the two great scourges has garnered so much attention that the American Cancer Society and the American Diabetes Association jointly published a consensus statement this sum-
mer summarizing the evidence. People with Type 2 diabetes tend to have a higher risk of getting certain cancers. And preliminary evidence suggests that metformin, the most widely used diabetes pill, might be effective in treating or preventing cancer. It is still not clear if high blood glucose is the reason diabetics have a higher cancer risk. A more likely explanation is that people with Type 2 diabetes have high levels of insulin, a hormone that is known to promote growth of certain tumors, according to the consensus statement. Similarly, metformin might fight cancer by lowering insulin levels, not blood sugar levels. But there is some evidence that the drug works in part by inhibiting glucose metabolism in cancer cells. Even if blood sugar levels fuel tumor growth, however, experts say that trying to lower the body’s overall level of blood sugar — like by starving oneself — would probably not be effective. That is because, at least for people without diabetes, the body is very good at maintaining a certain blood glucose level despite fluctuations in diet. “When a patient with cancer is calorically restricted, the amount of glucose in the blood until they are almost dead is close to normal,” said Dr. Michael Pollak, professor of medicine and oncology at McGill University in Montreal. Also, Dr. Pollak said, tumors are adept at extracting glucose from the blood. So even if glucose is scarce, he said, “the last surviving cell in the body would be the tumor cell.” So efforts are focusing not on reducing the body’s overall glucose level but on interfering specifically with how tumors use glucose. This gets to the Warburg effect, named after Otto Warburg, the German biochemist and Nobel Prize winner who first noticed the particular metabolism of tumors in the 1920s.
Most healthy cells primarily burn glucose in the presence of oxygen to generate ATP, a chemical that serves as a cell’s energy source. But when oxygen is low, glucose can be turned into energy by another process, called glycolysis, which produces lactic acid as a byproduct. Muscles undergoing strenuous exercise use glycolysis, with the resultant buildup of lactic acid. What Dr. Warburg noticed was that tumors tended to use glycolysis even when oxygen was present. This is puzzling because glycolysis is far less efficient at creating ATP. One theory is that cancer cells need raw materials to build new cells as much as they need ATP. And glycolysis can help provide those building blocks. “You can have energy that turns on the lights in your house, but that energy can’t build anything,” said Matthew G. Vander Heiden, assistant professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Still, as with everything else about cancer, metabolism is complex. Not all tumor cells use glycolysis, and some normal cells do. So it could be challenging to develop drugs that can hurt tumors but not normal cells. Two early efforts by a company called Threshold Pharmaceuticals to interfere with glucose metabolism did not work well in clinical trials. One of Threshold’s drugs, called 2DG, is the same form of glucose used in PET imaging, but without the radioactivity. Because of a slight chemical modification, this form of glucose cannot be metabolized by cells, so it accumulates. But much less 2DG buildup is needed to spot a tumor on a scan than to destroy it by gumming up its works. Large amounts of the drug were needed because 2DG lasted only a short time in the body and because it had to compete with the natural glucose that is abundant in the bloodstream. Efforts have not ended, however. Waldemar Priebe, a professor of medicinal chemistry at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, said he had developed a way to deliver up to 10 times as much 2DG to a tumor. It has been licensed to a startup called Intertech Bio. The other Threshold drug, glufosfamide, consisted of glucose linked to a standard chemotherapy agent. The idea was that, as with the Trojan horse, the tumors would eagerly ingest the glucose only to then be poisoned. In a late-stage clinical trial involving more than 300 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer, glufosfamide prolonged lives compared with no treatment, but not by a statistically significant amount. A new company, Eleison Pharmaceuticals, plans to repeat the trial. Dr. Forrest Anthony, Eleison’s chief medical officer, said the original trial would have
succeeded had it excluded 43 diabetics who were taking insulin, which is known to impede PET scanning for tumors. Insulin “sends glucose into skeletal muscle and fat tissue and away from the cancer,” he said. Many other companies and scientists are trying to develop drugs that inhibit enzymes — for example, pyruvate kinase M2, involved in tumor metabolism. Yet another approach is not to starve a tumor of energy but to give it more energy, and that is the idea behind a substance called dichloroacetate, or DCA. Dr. Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta, who came up with the idea, says there is a mechanism by which cells that become defective can commit suicide for the greater good of the body. But cancer cells usually do not kill themselves. Dr. Michelakis says this could be because they lack sufficient energy. DCA, a simple chemical that is formed in small quantities when drinking water is chlorinated, has long been used to treat certain rare diseases in which lactic acid builds up in the body. DCA inhibits an enzyme called pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase. The effect of that inhibition is to move metabolism away from lactic acidproducing glycolysis and toward more normal oxidation of glucose in the mitochondria, the energy factories of the cell. In 2007, Dr. Michelakis and colleagues published a paper showing that DCA, when put in drinking water, could slow the growth of human lung tumors implanted into rats. It seemed the DCA did not affect normal cells. Some patients began clamoring for it. Within days, an amateur chemist had synthesized DCA and began offering it for sale. Some clinics still offer it. Dr. Michelakis cautioned that in high doses DCA can cause nerve damage and that it takes months for enough to build up in the body to have any effect. This spring, in the journal Science Translational Medicine, Dr. Michelakis reported results of the first human testing of DCA, in five patients with glioblastoma multiforme, a deadly brain cancer. There was no control group, making it hard to judge the drug’s effectiveness, though some patients lived longer than might have been expected. There was evidence that the drug bolstered the activity of mitochondria and promoted cell suicide. Since DCA is not a novel compound, it cannot be patented, making it unlikely a pharmaceutical company would pay for clinical trials. So Dr. Michelakis has been raising money from foundations and governments to conduct larger clinical trials. “We have only assumptions and theoretical excitement,” Dr. Michelakis said. Still, he added, “there’s no question that this is a new direction that is logical and very appealing.”
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39 SCIENCE & TECH
An Odyssey Through the Brain, Illuminated by a Rainbow By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.
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ho has seen the mind? Neither you nor I — nor any of the legions of neuroscientists bent on opening the secrets of that invisible force, as powerful and erratic as the wind. The experts are definitely getting closer: the last few decades have produced an explosion of new techniques for probing the blobby, unprepossessing brain in search of the thinking, feeling, suffering, scheming mind. But the field remains technologically complicated, out of reach for the average nonscientist, and still defined by research so basic that the human connection, the usual “hook” by which abstruse science captures general interest, is often missing. Carl Schoonover took this all as a challenge. Mr. Schoonover, 27, is midway through a Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Columbia, and thought he would try to find a different hook. He decided to draw the general reader into his subject with the sheer beauty of its images. So he has compiled them into a glossy new art book. “Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain From Antiquity to the 21st Century,” newly published by Abrams, includes short essays by prominent neuroscientists and long captions by Mr. Schoonover — but its words take second plaCerebellum, 2007. The brain’s neurons are small, convoluted and very densely packed. This makes it exceedingly difficult to tell neighbors apart from one another, and then understand how they are connected to each other. In this micrograph, individual colors are bestowed to adjacent cells. Here we see the endings of axons in the cerebellum, called rosettes because of their flowerlike appearance.
ce to the gorgeous imagery, from the first delicate depictions of neurons sketched in prim Victorian black and white to the giant Technicolor splashes the same structures make across 21st-century LED screens. Scientists are routinely seduced by beauty. Mr. Schoonover knows this firsthand, as he acknowledged in an interview: for a while his wallet held snapshots not of friends or family, but of particularly attractive neurons. Sometimes the aesthetics of the image itself captivate. Sometimes the thrill is the magic of a dead-on fabulous technique for getting at elusive data. Consider, for instance, a blurry little black-and-white photograph of a smiley-face icon, so fuzzy and illdefined it looks like a parody of the Shroud of Turin. The picture is actually a miracle in its own right: the high-speed video camera that shot it was trained on the exposed brain of a monkey staring at a yellow smiley face. As the monkey looked at the face, blood vessels supplying nerve cells in the visual part of the monkey’s brain transiently swelled in exactly the same pattern. We can tell what was on the monkey’s mind by inspecting its brain. The picture forms a link, primitive but palpable, between corporeal and evanescent, between the body and the spirit. And behind the photo stretches a long history of inspired neuroscientific deductions and equally inspired mistakes, all aiming
to illuminate just that link. It’s only fitting that the story should be a visual one, for the visuals had the ancients fooled for millenniums. The brain was so irredeemably ugly that they assumed the mind was elsewhere. Aristotle, for example, concluded that the brain’s moist coils served only to cool the heart, the obvious home of the rational soul. The anatomist Galen pointed out that all nerves led to the brain, but medieval philosophers figured that most of the important things happened within the elegantly curved fluid-filled ventricles deep inside.
Spiny neuron, 2009. Electron microscopy grants researchers and clinicians access to a universe that is too small to be detected using light-based microscopes. This photomicrograph was obtained by scanning a beam of electrons across the sample while a detector kept track of electrons bouncing off its surface, betraying the specimen’s outer shape. It shows a soma with dendrites radiating from it.
Only when the long ban on dissection petered out in the Renaissance did the ventricles prove to be so much empty space — poke the brain around a little, and they collapse and disappear. The gelatinous brain moved into the spotlight, as resistant to study as a giant mass of tightly packed cold spaghetti.
Continues on page 38 Rabies, 2005. Francis Crick, who turned his attention to neuroscience after his seminal work on the structure of DNA, once wrote that a critical tool the field was still lacking was “a technique for injecting a single neuron in such a way that all the neurons connected to it (and only those) are labeled.” Recently, a group of scientists have transformed the rabies virus into a tool to accomplish just this — by harnessing the virus’s lethally efficient natural mechanisms and turning it around to address Crick’s challenge. Here, his single neuron is in red and the ones connected to it are in yellow.
SCIENCE & TECH 40 Comes from page 37 The challenge was twofold: what did that neural pasta really look like, and how did it do what it did? In 1873 the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi developed a black stain to highlight the micron-thin neural strands. Fifteen years later the Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, deploying the stain with virtuoso dexterity, presented the world for the first time with visible populations of individual neurons, looking for all the world like burnt scrub brush in a postapocalyptic Dalí landscape. The roots, or dendrites, of these elongated nerve cells gather information. The trunks, or axons, transmit it. Now those same skeletal silhouettes glow plump and brightly colored, courtesy of a variety of inserted genes encoding fluorescent molecules. The most dramatic variation on these methods for highlighting neurons in living color, dubbed the Brainbow by its inventors, turns the brains of living mice into wild neon forests of branching trees. The electrochemical circuitry that propels information around that forest, from nerve to nerve, has generated its own fabulous images. One team of researchers harnessed the rabies virus, which has the unusual ability to travel upstream against the neural current. The virus moves from a leg bitten by a rabid dog up the long axons leading to
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the spinal cord, then jumps to dendrites of other nerves and travels up to the brain, where it causes horrific damage. Modifying the virus by a few genes and inserting it in mice, the researchers captured its path in a photograph, highlighting the long axon of the first nerve in brilliant magenta and then the tangle of dendrites of communicating nerves in yellow. Meanwhile, the traffic in long groups of neurons all coursing together around the brain becomes visible with a variation on the standard scanning technique called diffusion M.R.I. Here the neurons do look just Neocortex, 2007. This photomicrograph zooms in on a small portion of the neocortex, the outer layer of the brain, to reveal horizontal layers. Behind the colorful somata in the foreground, a pattern of light and dark in the background suggests anatomical distinctions.
This photomicrograph shows a portion of the cerebellum in which only one type of neuron — its Purkinje cells — has been illuminated by a genetically encoded fluorescent protein; meanwhile, other classes of neighboring neurons that would have clouded the view have been left invisible. like pasta — angel hair, perhaps — slightly beaded, draped and purposeful. But if the structure is destroyed (by a stroke, for instance) the strands shatter into fragments, the information highway broken, upended as if by an earthquake. In the book’s final essay, Joy Hirsch, a neuroimaging specialist at Columbia, sympathizes with readers who hate the idea that they — their essential selves, their likes and dislikes, their premonitions, biases and life decisions — are nothing but neural circuits. “These cells and molecules, awash in various neurochemical cocktails in my basal ganglia, are presumably the basis for my love and attachment to my husband,” she writes.
“Earlier in my academic journey I would have resisted this unavoidable fact of biology on the misguided rounds that a physical basis would diminish the grandeur and centrality of my choice of a life partner.” Now, however, Dr. Hirsch says she joyfully embraces “the astonishing unity of the physical brain and the mind” for the potential it clearly holds for improving the lot of humankind. And furthermore, she doesn’t see that anyone has much choice about accepting it. “People assumed for thousands of years that there must be something else,” the science writer Jonah Lehrer writes in the introduction. “And yet, there is nothing else: this is all we are.”
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41 SCIENCE & TECH
Mammal Growth Spurt After Dinosaurs Died About 34 million years ago, during the early Oligocene epoch, the largest known land mammal ever, a rhinoceroslike creature known as Indricotherium transouralicum, lived in Eurasia. The species grew to be about 40,000 pounds. “Basically what happened was the biggest dinosaurs were the herbivores, and when you remove the biggest herbivores there’s nobody eating those plant resources,” said Jessica Theodor, a paleontologist and one of the authors of the study. “It basically left open space for mammals.” Dr. Theodor and her colleagues
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
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ammals exploded in size after dinosaurs went extinct and continued to grow for about 25 million years, according to a new study that appears in the journal Science. In the first 140 million years of their existence, most mammals stayed small, most the size of today’s rodents. Then, after the end of the Cretaceous epoch, when dinosaurs disappeared, mammals began to grow, and grow and grow, for about 25 million years.
studied fossil records to determine how mammal size grew over time. In most cases, they used teeth to predict body mass. “Mammals have higher metabolic rates, and we think they are kind of capped at a lower size,” Dr. Theodor said. “It takes more plant material to sustain a higher metabolic rate, so there isn’t enough food to grow bigger.” Today’s largest land-based mammals, elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses, are all mainly herbivorous, just as the largest dinosaurs were.
It’s a Bird. It’s a Plane. No, It’s a Flying Snake. By SINDYA N. BHANOO
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hen paradise tree snakes, found in South and Southeast Asia, leap from trees, they don’t tumble to the ground in disarray. They gracefully glide long distances through the air. And a study in which scientists threw the snakes from a 50-foot tower and recorded their descent on video suggests that the snakes are active fliers, manipulating their bodies to aerodynamic effect. “It essentially looks like they are slithering in the air, like a whip moving left and right,” said Jake Socha, the study’s lead author and a biomechanist. “The body itself moves up and down as well.” Dr. Socha and his colleagues found that the paradise tree snake tilts its body about 25 to 30 degrees relative to the airflow to stay as aerodynamic as possible. The farthest a snake was able to travel from the tower was about 79 feet. The research, financed by the Pentagon, may be useful to engineers trying to
design more effective search-and-rescue vehicles, like a slithering, snakelike robot that can fly as well. “There’s a lot of interest in creating a small little flier; something that might go up to the top of a building and see what’s there,” Dr. Socha said. The study was published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics in a special issue that highlights nine research projects that use nature as a guide to improving the design of air vehicles. The other studies include research on falling geckos, cruising sea gulls and hovering hummingbirds. Ardian Jusufi, an integrative biologist, led a study on how geckos flick their tails as they are falling, helping them reorient so they always land on their feet. “We already have robots that can climb quite well, but anything that goes up will at some time come down,” Mr. Jusufi said. “If we could stick a tail to the end of the robot it would be advantageous to reorient if it ever fell down.”
Flexible Scales Add to Speed of Shortfin Mako Shark By SINDYA N. BHANOO
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he shortfin mako shark is one of the fastest sharks around, perhaps because of the variation in size and flexibility of the teethlike scales embedded in its skin. Amy Lang, an aerospace engineer from the University of Alabama, and colleagues found that flexible scales around the side of the shark allow it to swiftly change direction while maintaining a high speed. She recently presented her work at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in Long Beach, Calif. Working with biologists and with funds from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Lang studied dead shark specimens. Although the shark’s entire body is covered with the scales, made of
the same hard enamel as its teeth, the scales on the top and underside of the body are larger and not as flexible. “The scales are about 0.2 millimeters in size on the mako’s sides,” Dr. Lang said. “And on the other species they can get much larger.” The tiny scales are flexible to an angle of 60 degrees or more, and allow the shark to control water flow separation across its body. Dr. Lang is now trying to create models of the shark scales in her laboratory, with hopes of finding real-life applications. “Flow separation is an issue in a lot of different engineering applications,” she said. “Some other person would take it from that point, but it could be used in the rotors of the helicopter blade, parts of a submarine or a torpedo.”
SCIENCE & TECH 42
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Lakes Around the World Are Warming By FELICITY BARRINGER
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om Smart for The New York Times The Great Salt Lake in Utah was one of 104 inland water bodies worldwide whose temperature was tracked in a new study. It is warming at a rate of 1.21 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. The world’s largest lakes are warming along with the air — and sometimes at faster rates — but the intensity of the warming trend differs strikingly around the globe, a new study by two scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says. The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the warming trend is most intense in northeastern Europe, where Lake Vanern in Sweden and two lakes in Russia, Ladoga and Onega, are. There, temperature data drawn from satellite measurements taken from 1985 to 2009 show a rate of warming as high as 1.72 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. On the North American continent, warming that met the test of statistical significance was found in three Western lakes, Lake Tahoe in California, Pyramid Lake in Nevada and the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which were warming at a rate of more than one degree Fahrenheit per decade. The Great Lakes also showed a statistically significant warming trend, although the rates of warming were slightly lower than those of the Southwestern lakes. There were interesting anomalies among and within various regions.
In the tropics and in the Southern Hemisphere, for instance, the warming trend was less pronounced. And in data from lakes tested along an arc stretching from the Great Lakes up through Canada’s Lake Athabasca, the rates of warming were noticeably different. As Simon J. Hook, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview, “You will get some lakes that, for reasons we really don’t know, will not be showing as much warming as other lakes, even in the same region.” Dr. Hook, who wrote the paper with Philipp
Schneider, said in an interview that of the 104 lakes where sufficient data was available over the 25-year period, 100 showed a warming trend and four did not. For 40 of the 100, the trend was statistically significant. Dr. Hook said the research had been of great interest to climate scientists, who said it provides an independent data set that nonetheless tended to parallel data obtained from measurement of air temperatures. “The two data sets complement each other,” he said. “Obviously that is important because it provides an additional line of evidence for warming.” The study has also been of interest to people within and outside the scientific community who are concerned about the fate of their regional lakes. While warming water does not cause harmful algal blooms — which are most often related to the presence of nutrients, like those in fertilizers — the warmer the water, the quicker the growth of the bloom, he said. The two researchers used only nighttime temperatures measured in the summer and focused on inland water bodies with a surface area of 193 square miles or more, in part so there would be a large region clear of direct influences from shoreline temperatures. “One of the things we want to do in the future is compare these results with what the climate models predict in the region,” Dr. Hook said. Measuring a model’s performance in replicating changes of the recent past gives scientists a way to test the accuracy of the models being used to project future conditions, he said.
Outbreak of Mysterious Blisters Is Case Study in Spread of Panic By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
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n outbreak of mysterious blisters illustrates how panic can be stirred by a combination of overwrought journalism, listless government and traditional witchcraft. The Inquirer, a Sierra Leone news site cited on ProMed, an epidemic-alert service, reported that “the wild spread of the contagious skin disease” was taking over a rural county, with 75 people affected. It quoted local residents blaming polluted water, “poisonous bacteria” or “contamination of the underground,” and said a government minister had “warned people with the disease to cease all movement.”
In fact, a careful reading of the article suggested that local doctors had identified a plausible cause and suggested a sensible solution. But that point was obscured by the purple “Fear Grips City” prose. The blisters, the doctors said, were from “Nairobi flies,” and their advice was to just blow them off, not slap them. The “Nairobi fly” is actually a red-and-black beetle of the genus Paederus that is found from India to West Africa but hatches only rarely. It does not bite, but contains pederin, a stinging acid, to drive off predators. Smacking it on the skin releases the acid, which can leave a nasty welt; touching an eye with the acid can blind it for days. The condition is, of course, not con-
tagious. While this brouhaha may seem minor, others have had serious consequences. Nigeria’s polio vaccination drive, for example, was derailed
by journalists spreading rumors that the vaccine was a plot to sterilize Muslim girls; polio then spread from Nigeria to more than a dozen other countries.
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Hamas Leader in Gaza Softens on Possible Vote By FARES AKRAM
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he leader of the Hamas government in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, said Wednesday for the first time that any resolution of the Palestinian dispute with Israel should be put to a referendum of all Palestinians around the world, and that if one were held, Hamas would accept the results no matter what they were. In the past, when President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority discussed a holding such a referendum, Hamas had been critical, saying that principles like the return of refugees and the borders of the state could not be subject to a vote. But on Wednesday, Mr. Haniya, speaking in a relatively rare meeting with reporters from foreign news organizations at his office in Gaza City, .said, “We will accept the outcome of any referendum even if it contradicts
our policies and convictions.” The Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel and says that all Palestinian land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River is a sacred Islamic endowment that nobody has the right to give up. The Palestinian Authority retains control in the West Bank, but it was ousted from Gaza by Hamas in a brief civil war in 2007, after Hamas won parliamentary elections there in 2006. The Hamas leadership is divided between Gaza and those in the Syrian capital Damascus with those here generally considered more pragmatic. Mr. Haniya also said his government intended to keep Gaza’s state of cease-fire with Israel active for 2011. He said one of the “government’s priorities for the next year is to maintain the national understanding inside Gaza that the Palestinian resistance factions work on.” That un-
derstanding is that rockets would not be fired on Israel unless Gaza was attacked. Hamas and Israel have been observing a shaky, undeclared truce since Israel ended its threeweek invasion nearly two years ago. The stated goal of that operation was to stop the rocket fire. Mr. Haniya denied the presence of any Al Qaeda cells in Gaza and condemned Israeli raids that killed three militants affiliated with a Qaeda-inspired group, Army of Islam, here last month. “This is a dangerous assassination,” he said. He added that all militant groups in Gaza worked only inside their national borders, thereby denying Israeli reports that the slain were planning attacks against Israeli tourists in the nearby Sinai Peninsula. Mr. Haniya criticized European diplomats who visit Gaza and do not meet with members of his government or the Hamas movement. “We
don’t understand why they don’t meet the legal government,” he said. He said his government had started contacting United Nations organizations in Gaza, which arrange the diplomats’ schedules and tours in the coastal strip, to emphasize that the visitors “must coordinate” with Hamas even if they do not want to meet it. “They should knock on the door and hear the permission before they enter the house,” he said. Israel did not relax its blockade, Haniya said, adding that it had only “applied marginal changes” to its policy towards Gaza since June. Israel is now letting most of civilians’ goods into Gaza. The decision was taken after global criticism of its May raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, during which Eight Turks and an American-Turkish youth were killed. “There is no essential change on the nature of the siege,” said Mr. Haniya.
Date Set for Nuclear Talks With Iran By WILLIAM YONG and J. DAVID GOODMAN
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ran and the European Union agreed Tuesday on a date for nuclear talks in Geneva next week, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted in a speech that Iran would not give “one iota” in the discussions. The meeting between Saeed Jalili, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, and Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, would be the first high-level negotiations in more than a year and would follow revelations, in leaked diplomatic communications, of widespread concern among Iran’s Arab neighbors about the nation’s nuclear program. The agreement on when to hold the meeting came a day after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran. Speaking to a crowd of supporters in northern Iran on Tuesday, Mr. Ahmadinejad took a hard stance ahead of the talks. Iran had always been willing to talk “under the conditions of justice and respect,” he said, but added that “the people of Iran will
not back down one iota” on demands to curb the nation’s nuclear program, which Iran claims is directed only at nonmilitary purposes. Mr. Ahmadinejad appeared to frame the Geneva meeting, scheduled for Dec. 6 and 7, in terms of the economic sanctions imposed by the Western powers. “I advise that if they want to get results from these talks, they must put aside their outdated behavior” in order to talk “about international cooperation, solving the problems of humanity and about economic and nuclear issues,” he said in a speech that was broadcast on state television. In the view of American and European officials, the new willingness by Iran to engage in talks may indicate that new and tougher sanctions, approved this year, are having an effect on its troubled economy. Officials from the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain are expected to attend the meeting, although Ms. Ashton said she would negotiate with Iran “on behalf” of those six nations, her office said in a statement confirming the meeting. On Monday, attackers riding motorcycles killed one prominent Ira-
nian nuclear scientist and wounded another in separate bombings in Tehran. The scientist who survived, Fereydoon Abbasi, is on the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions list for ties to the nuclear effort, and the highly targeted nature of the attacks led to accusations of a renewed effort by the United States and Israel to dis-
rupt Iran’s program. In diplomatic cables revealed by the Web site WikiLeaks on Sunday, Arab allies of the United States, including King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, candidly voiced concerns over the leadership of Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran’s path on nuclear weapons.
Brazil: Extended Troop Presence Sought for Rio Slums By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
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he governor of Rio said he asked Brazil’s Defense Ministry to maintain about 2,000 troops until next October in two slum areas that were cleared of drug traffickers by the police and the military over the last week. The governor, Sérgio Cabral, had asked for troops to continue patrolling Complexo do Alemão and Vila Cruzeiro for the next seven months, but he said on Brazilian radio that he revised his request to give more time for the military police to form a new community policing unit. Cmdr. Carlos Chagas, a spokesman for the Brazilian Marines, said Tuesday that the marines had still not received a request for an extended troop presence.
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U.S. and South Korea Balk at Talks With North By HELENE COOPER AND SHARON LaFRANIERE
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he United States, South Korea and Japan are all balking at China’s request for emergency talks with North Korea over the crisis on the Korean Peninsula, as high-profile military exercises between South Korea and the United States in the Yellow Sea continued on Monday in a show of force. Obama administration officials said that a return to the table with North Korea, as China sought this weekend, would be rewarding the North for provocative behavior over the past week, including its deadly artillery attack on a South Korean island and its disclosure of a uranium enrichment plant. Beijing called for emergency talks with North Korea, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Russia, participants in the six-party nuclear talks, which have been suspended indefinitely. “The United States and a host of others, I don’t think, are not interested in stabilizing the region through a series of P.R. activities,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman. He said that the talks “without an understanding and agreement from the North Koreans to both end their behavior as they exhibited last week, but also to come to the table with a seriousness of purpose on the denuclearization issue — without that seriousness of purpose, they’re just a P.R. activity.” Rejecting the emergency talks amounts to a pointed rebuke to China. The United States wanted China to signal clearly that North Korea’s aggressive behavior would not be tolerated. Instead, Beijing remained neutral about who was responsible for the recent flare-up, and offered only to provide a venue for all sides to air their differences. Yet turning down China’s offer may also reveal the limited options available to the Obama administration and the South Korean leadership. Aside from a show of military solidarity, the two countries have based their response largely on hopes that
China, as the North’s main economic and diplomatic supporter, might punish the reclusive government for its series of provocations. Mr. Gibbs and other administration officials said that the United States also wanted to see North Korea take steps to denuclearize, which most Asia analysts said might be a tall order for the North at a time when its government is undergoing a leadership crisis. South Korea and Japan are also clearly skeptical of whether the consultations, as suggested by the Chinese, are worth a try. President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea and Prime Minister Naoto Kan of Japan on Monday both denounced what they called North Korea’s brutality. President Lee pointedly said nothing about the Chinese proposal; analysts in Seoul described it as disappointingly familiar. A spokesman for the Japanese prime minister said that while Japan is cautiously reviewing China’s offer, talks hinge on whether North Korea changes it behavior. It remains unclear just what the United States would actually accept from North Korea to return to talks. One Obama administration official said that the United States wanted a clear sign that the North “will stop provocative behavior.” “We’re trying to get out of this cycle where they act up and we talk,” the official said. He spoke on grounds of anonymity under diplomatic rules. Emotions continued to run high on Tuesday in both Seoul and Pyongyang. In an editorial in the government-run newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, North Korea threatened to step its uranium enrichment program. North Korean officials last week unveiled a surprisingly sophisticated enrichment plant north of the capital to an American scientist. The editorial said the uranium development “will be pushed harder” to meet North Korea’s energy needs, according to a report by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. But scientists say the plant with 2,000 centrifuges could be quic-
kly converted to produce highly enriched uranium for bomb fuel and South Korean analysts interpreted the editorial as a notso-veiled threat. In Seoul, police officials said up to 10,000 protesters gathered in two plazas to demand that their government take a stronger stand against the North. Military veterans, retired police officers and activists carried pickets and banners calling for retaliation against the North during the threehour protests. “We came to show our commitment to overthrow Kim Jong-il. We have to show it in action,” said Lee Jae-myung. 63, a retired police officer who traveled with about 100 former officers two hours by train to participate in the rally. On the diplomatic front, two North Korean envoys arrived in Beijing for four days of talks. Choe Thae-bok, secretary of the Workers’ Party of North Korea’s Central Committee, and Kim Yong-il, director of the party’s international department. Separately, South Korea’s military appeared to step back from one confrontational stance on Monday , canceling live-fire artillery drills on the island in the Yellow Sea attacked by the North a week ago. While the military exercises continued, the prospect of the South Korean live-fire drills — scheduled for Tuesday but canceled within four hours of the announcement — had been sharpening tensions on a peninsula on tenterhooks after the North’s artillery attack last week on a garrison island that is also home to about 1,350 civilians, mainly fishermen. The attack killed two South Korean marines and two civilians, and wounded 18 people. North Korea blamed the South for provoking the attack by firing at it from the island, Yeonpyeong, which lies in waters disputed by the two sides. The South, which returned fire, insisted it had been firing only test shots and that none were in territory it recognized as the North’s. The United States announced the date of the joint exercises as an immediate response. China — which the United States, South Korea and other countries hoped would act to calm the North — responded by warning the United States not to operate
in waters it claims as a sovereign zone. In Washington, the Pentagon cited security concerns and declined to say precisely where in the Yellow Sea the exercises were taking place. But a military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity acknowledged that some of the exercises might be within 200 nautical miles of the Chinese coast. China defines that zone as within its exclusive sovereignty, but the United States and many other nations do not recognize its claim. “We have a large operating area and some of it may be, and some of it may not be” within 200 miles of China’s eastern border, the official said. South Korea naval authorities on Yeonpyeong warned residents by loudspeaker on Monday afternoon that they should move to bomb shelters by 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning because live-fire drills would take place at 10 a.m. But Monday night, they announced that no firing would take place. A South Korean military official declined to explain the shift, saying only that the exercise “will be conducted at an appropriate time.” At the United Nations, the Obama administration called for tighter enforcement of sanctions against North Korea. The Security Council met on Monday to discuss the crisis, but did not emerge with any new plans for what to do next, further reflecting the mounting frustration in the international community over how to rein in North Korea. Diplomats said that at the moment, the most they could do was to try to make sure countries enforce existing sanctions against North Korea, including an arms embargo and a travel ban against people linked to the country’s nuclear weapons program. Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters that the United States looked “to China to play a responsible leadership role in working to maintain peace and security in that region.” White House officials said last week that Mr. Obama planned to call President Hu Jintao of China to discuss the crisis in the Korean Peninsula. Mr. Gibbs said Monday afternoon that the call had not happened yet.
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December 9 - 15, 2010
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Dueling Beauty Pageants Put Income Gap on View By SIMON ROMERO
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he Champagne flowed. Cigar smoke floated in the thick air of the tropical night. Women in miniskirts and men in pressed guayaberas danced at Jet-Set magazine’s fete in this city’s Naval Museum, as the candidates for Miss Colombia sashayed about, flashing perfect smiles and impossibly high cheekbones. Another party unfolded the same night last month outside Cartagena’s stone ramparts. In a slum called Boston, Ivonne Palencia, an elegant 19-year-old, tiptoed in the mud outside her family’s hovel. Amid the din of firecrackers and reggaetón music, neighbors toasted her victory as Miss Independence, the queen of this city’s slums, with beer. “We have our queen,” said a glowing Patricia Álvarez, 44, a social worker in Boston who led a collection drive to support Ms. Palencia’s candidacy. “They have theirs.” Despite making strides in stabilizing the economy in the last decade, Colombia has South America’s most unequal distribution of wealth, except for small Paraguay, according to the Center for Economic Development Studies in Bogotá. And each November this port city puts that inequality on open display, when it hosts two beauty pageants at the same time. The rival contests offer views not only of the country’s yawning income gap but of issues of race and class in a country that has, by some measures, the Spanish-speaking world’s largest black population. Miss Colombia, the better-known event, features two dozen strutting candidates, many of them light-skinned daughters of prominent families. The pageant positions Cartagena as its boosters often market it: a playground for the global elite with $475-a-night boutique hotels and Audis prowling the narrow streets of a colonial gem once coveted by corsairs.
In the shadows of that opulence, Cartagena’s slums hold their own pageant celebrating the city’s declaration of independence from Spain in 1811. Largely featuring Afro-Colombian candidates, the contest, which unfolds during a tumultuous street festival, reveals rival concepts of beauty in a city that was also imperial Spain’s major port of entry for slaves being shipped to its South American colonies. “One pageant portrays Cartagena as its elite wants it to be seen: rich, white and glamorous,” said Elisabeth Cunin, a French sociologist who studies Cartagena. “The other reflects the reality of the city as the majority of its inhabitants know it: poor and neglected, a complex mix between racial domination and an emerging current of black consciousness.” The national pageant, founded here in 1934 as a tourism linchpin, employs a multilingual staff at an air-conditioned building in Parque de Bolívar in the old center, attracting sponsors like Edox, a Swiss watch manufacturer. The municipal contest, crea-
ted in 1937, operates on a shoestring budget from a crumbling structure a few blocks away. Few nations, with the exception of neighboring Venezuela, attach as much importance to such pageants. In addition to Miss Colombia and Miss Independence, Colombian juries award many lesser titles, like Miss Plantain and Miss Coal. Cellblocks in a Bogotá women’s prison have their own pageants. One town in northern Colombia takes it even further, putting makeup and wigs on its donkeys then parading them for its annual Miss Burro celebration. No pageant attracts as much obsessive attention as Miss Colombia. Paparazzi swarm the city each November. Gossip columnists speculate about plastic surgery, while investigative journalists try to uncover whether drug kingpins paid the surgeons’ bill. In a further stamp of legitimacy, Colombia’s intellectuals deride the event. The writer Laura Restrepo skewered the whole scene with the words of a cynical reporter in her novel “The Angel of Galilea.” “Of all my assignments for Somos, covering the pageant was by far the worst, having to rhapsodize on Miss Boyacá’s Pepsodent smile, Miss Tolima’s dubious virginity, Miss Arauca’s preoccupation with poor children.” One of this year’s candidates boasted that she was studying at DePaul University in Chicago. Yet another emphasized that she was born in Paris. In contrast, the bios from the municipal pageant described one candidate who came from a family of 10 children. Another said she simply dreamed of visiting the capital, Bogotá. Sometimes the candidates from both pageants have to greet one another, as they did at a military parade one morning in November. Organizers seated them side by side under a canopy shielding them from the sun.
Awkwardness reigned. The mostly fair-skinned Miss Colombia candidates fidgeted. There were attempts at small talk, and smiles for the cameras. In an interview, Raimundo Angulo, a former mayor of Cartagena who now directs the national pageant, chafed at criticism that his event was somehow racist or excluding. He said the pageant could improve life for residents by helping to make Cartagena into “the Monte Carlo of the Caribbean,” replete with chic casinos and a Formula One race. “It is democratically elitist,” he contended of his pageant. “I simply want what is beautiful, wherever it comes from, according to certain principles, certain values.” As Mr. Angulo points out, an AfroColombian candidate has even been named Miss Colombia. That happened precisely once in the pageant’s 76-year history, in 2001, when Vanessa Mendoza won the crown. Winners of the local contest sometimes go on to compete in the national pageant the following year. As with the national pageant, the views here of the local contest are far from unanimous. Some Afro-Colombian leaders see it as a poor imitation of the rival pageant, while reinforcing standards in which women are judged almost solely on their appearance. Still, it is clear which pageant elicits the most excitement on Cartagena’s streets. The candidates from the slums strut through different districts as the city’s carnivalesque celebration of its independence from Spain unfolds. Shop owners shut early, fearful of assaults. A bawdy parade is led by a troupe dressed as whip-wielding priests pursuing sinners, re-enacting the Spanish Inquisition’s tribunal, once based here. This year, bystanders greeted them with cries of “Long live our queens!” as they marched through the Getsemaní district. Bands of youths roamed the streets carrying buckets of black paint, threatening to paint the faces of visitors. For a few small bills they would relent. Within this anarchic scene, a panel chooses a winner. The title of Miss Independence this year went to Ms. Palencia, who took time off from her job as a preschool teacher to compete. Her slum, Boston, said to be named for a red-light district once frequented by foreign sailors, erupted in celebration. Ms. Palencia’s mother, Yadira Querubín, 50, a maid who earns $6 a day cleaning houses in a rich area of Cartagena, proudly welcomed a visitor into their home, which has a dirt floor that turns into mud when rain leaks through the ceiling. “I’m a maid, and I have a daughter who is a queen,” said Ms. Querubín. “Maybe my lovely girl, from this difficult place, will have a more dignified life than my own.”
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New Arrivals Strain India’s Cities to Breaking Point de of slums, like the tiny room Mr. Sarkar and his family shared, is almost impossible to find because it is very difficult to create such housing legally. “If I want to build for the poor, the current building codes wouldn’t allow me to do it profitably,” said Sanjeev Sanyal, and economist and expert on urbanization. “There is a demand that is not being met, and the only way to meet it is by breaking the law.” The building’s owner, Amrit Singh, appears to have flourished by bending the law. He had more than 25 criminal cases pending against him, according to the Delhi police.
By LYDIA POLGREEN
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ahitosh Sarkar came here from his distant village in West Bengal 12 years ago looking for a better life, and he found it. He abandoned the penniless existence of a subsistence fisherman to become a big-city vegetable seller. His wife found work as a maid. Their four children went to school. Their tiny household, a grim but weather-tight room in a dilapidated tenement, had a color TV and a satellite dish. But these days Mr. Sarkar is counting losses, not blessings. His 10-year-old son died along with more than 70 others when their tenement collapsed on Nov. 15. His wife is in the hospital with a broken leg. All of their possessions, including that color TV, are gone. The crumbled remains of the illegal building in which the Sarkar family lived in a riverside neighborhood of East Delhi have become an emblem of India’s failure to come to grips with its urban explosion. After decades of being primarily a nation of farmers, India’s countryside is emptying out, as millions leave their stagnant villages and flock to the cities. But India’s urban infrastructure has not kept pace, and that failing now threatens to undermine the nation’s ability to vault its multitudes out of poverty and share the fruits of its nearly double-digit growth more widely. A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030, 70 percent of India’s jobs would be created in cities, and about 590 million Indians would live in them. To provide enough housing and commercial space, it said, India must build the equivalent of the city of Chicago every year. But it has no such plans, and the cities already here are buckling under the strain of their new arrivals. From Mumbai to Bangalore, Delhi to Chennai, roads are perpetually choked. Sewers, water lines
and electricity are lacking. Perhaps most important, housing is desperately short, especially for impoverished new arrivals, leaving India with more slum dwellers than anywhere on earth. “We require a radical rethinking about urban development,” said K. T. Ravindran, a professor of urban design who frequently works with the government on urban issues. “It is not that there are no ideas. It is that there is no implementation of those ideas.” Like those of many Indian cities, Delhi’s building codes and zoning laws were written for a much smaller city in a different time, with policies that actively discourage growth. The number of floors in most neighborhoods is capped at five stories, and in many areas fewer. The government largely controls land, and government approval for new development is difficult to obtain, even to house the wealthy and middle class, never mind the poor. The dilapidated state of Indian cities is in some ways by design. For decades, Indian governments tried to discourage migration to cities by making city life unaffordable and unbearable for new arrivals. These policies were driven at least in part by a Gandhian belief that India should be a rural nation, and more broadly by a centrally planned, socialist approach to development. But rural Indians have voted against these notions with their feet. A recent report on urban slums published by the Center for Policy Research and the Centre des Sciences Humaines concluded that these measures “have made formal housing expensive and unattainable to a large share of the population, reinforced both chronic urban infrastructure shortages citywide and squalid, precarious living conditions in urban slums.” Indeed, cheap rental housing outsi-
His misdeeds included selling adulterated cement, the police said, and dealing in stolen goods. According to local news reports, he also bragged of having bribed building inspectors to avoid penalties for adding floors to his rental buildings. Local residents said the building was notorious for its shoddy construction, and Mr. Singh well known for flouting building rules. “The government didn’t do anything,” said Ratan Haldar, a social worker who helps migrants in the neighborhood. “They make rules but never implement them. Officials take bribes and ignore the rules. People died as a result.”
No one who lived in the building dared complain, however, because housing is so scarce in Delhi that they knew they would just end up back in a slum or on the street. That is precisely what happened to the residents of another building Mr. Singh owned, which was evacuated after the collapse. Narayan Sharma, a 35-year-old carpenter from Bihar, stood shivering and barefoot in a downpour beneath a flimsy tarp surrounded by bundles of his family’s belongings. He had rented a room from Mr. Singh for about $50 a month and was grateful to have it. Life in Delhi beat the one he left behind, he said. His children could have much bigger dreams than he ever did. “I am illiterate because I could not study, I had to work,” he said. “I am giving so much importance to education for my children so they don’t have to live the kind of life I am living.” As miserable as living conditions in city slums and tenements might be, they are much better than the ones villagers leave behind. Abysmal as urban infrastructure is, a recent government report said 65 percent of villagers lacked toilets, while only 11 percent of city dwellers did. Cities also have much better access to piped water and proper sewage. At a city morgue, workers prepared the flimsy wooden caskets of those who died in the building for the journey back to the villages from which they hailed. The bodies of 27-year-old Shahen Shah, from rural West Bengal, and 13-year-old Iftikhar, from Bihar, would be loaded on trains heading east. But few of those who survived the collapse plan to follow. Even the most precarious perch in the new India is too precious to be abandoned for the old. “Our life is here now,” said Manoj Sarkar, Mr. Sarkar’s 20-year-old son. “We cannot live anywhere else.”
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Guavate Home of the Lechón W
eekends in Puerto Rico are a family affair, especially Sundays. Locals love to get together for meals and family activities. Places that offer cooler temperatures, great food and live music are always popular with locals looking for some fun. If you, as a tourist, want to experience some of that fun and flavor, you can join them and head to the famous lechoneras in Guavate. Lechoneras are outdoor restaurants that specialize in seasoned whole-pig, slow roasted over an open fire. This makes the pork flavorful and delicious. Even Anthony Bourdain, of No Reservations on the TravelChannel, came to Guavate on his trip here to taste this specialty. Families make the trip in droves, not just for the lechon, but also for the various side dishes like rice and pigeon peas, cassava, breadfruit, sweet potato, blood sausage, and yellow or green plantains. Of course, besides the delicious pork, there are turkeys and chickens cooked and seasoned in a similar way. Those are really good, too! And not only is the food a draw, but also the live music and the cool mountain air. It is a daytime activity – most people leave before sundown. We have been to Guavate a few ti-
mes. It is a tasty and interesting place. The live music gets people dancing and singing, and everyone is eating and drinking. The area is really like a multi-mile long block party. Children play in the streams and forests behind the restaurants. Older people hang out and talk, eat
and dance. Young adults just drive up and down this congested area, just scoping out, looking for people they know. It’s a place to be seen. The road up is just lined with lechoneras. Everyone you ask will have their favorite place. Some people like the first ones you come to on the road – easy in / easy out, and delicious! But you can keep
going up and up. The road eventually tees at Road 763. Turn right and then you will start getting into the serious lechoneras. Here is where the street party is – tons of people, bands and food! My way of finding the best place is to look for the crowded ones – then you know you have found the best!
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Comes from page 71 Once you find a crowded one and find some parking (most likely along the side of the road), walk up and get in line. These are “cafeteria style” places. The food is already prepared in warming trays behind glass. You will need to decide what you want to eat, and then point. When we were “newbies” we would just ask if anyone in line knew English, then ask for explanations and recommendations. People are always willing to help initiate a tourist into the flavors of the island. Or for the more daring, you could always just point to what looks good to you!
I always enjoy just watching as they hack up the pork with a machete. The cutting boards are all concave from years of hacking. It is quite the spectacle! And very reasonably priced. You will have a plateful for about $6. The road up is winding and crowded. The road ends at the Carite Forest Reserve. There are vendors along the roadside selling all sorts of things like plants, honey, seasonings and Puerto Rican souvenirs. You need to go on a Saturday or Sunday to get the most if this event. Get there early – arrive before noon. After that the road up and down becomes bumper to bumper. Of course, that is part of the experience! So many people enjoying life. So come and enjoy and leave your diets, and timetable, at home! If you absolutely can’t make it on a weekend, some of the lechoneras are open during the week. There just isn’t the party atmosphere or the live music. But the food is still delicious! Friday has more places open than other weekdays. El Mojitos and El Nuevo Rancho are open 7 days/ week usually from early am until about 8:00pm. If you can’t make it all the way to Guavate, lechon is generally available all around the island from Friday through Sunday. Just drive down the road and
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look for the pig on a spit, then pull in and enjoy. It is usually sold by the pound. Even right along Route 3, between Rio Grande and Canovanas, you will find a couple places ( Mini & Johnny’s and Armando’s and sometimes a guy roadside with a roast pig trailer almost across from Armando’s) that have a pig on the weekends. Go early (before lunch usually), once the pig is gone, there is no more. On weekends, there is also a place on RT 191 (the road to the rainforest) that has Lechon).
The best time to go to Guavate is from about noon until early evening on Saturdays and Sundays. Driving directions from San Juan to Guavate: Hop on the Luis A. Ferre Expressway (PR-52) southbound for about 30 minutes. When you get near Cayey, take exit #32, which says Guavate, turn left and head up the mountain on PR-184. At km 27 or so, you will see places. If you keep going up, turn right when you get to the tee. Go as far up as you want and choose your lechonera!
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In Argentina, Touring the Tigre Delta nanza Deltaventura company offers horseback riding, kayaking, bird-watching and tramping through forests, where botanists point out plant species. Some new developments attempt to bridge the two worlds. One of them, the Isla el Descanso, is a small island occupied by a retreat that highlights its natural attributes: lagoons, channels and gardens. The owner, Claudio Stomato, created the retreat when he converted his weekend home into a retreat with sculptures by Alberto Bastón Díaz, an Argentine artist. Its most famous visitor was Madonna, who came in 2008 with her children and bodyguards in tow. Other developments are more ambitious. Delta Eco Spa, on an island near Bonanza, is a sprawling resort that ope-
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By MICHAEL T. LUONGO
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HE stunning belle-époque building that houses the Museo de Arte Tigre in the Tigre Delta of Argentina opened as a social club a century ago, when rich bohemians would visit the region to give themselves a respite from Buenos Aires. The building eventually fell into disuse before reopening as a museum in 2006, newly refurbished with marble, bronze and stained glass as part of a municipal improvement project. Its fortunes in many ways mirror those of the delta, 45 minutes by train from Buenos Aires. The area has been rediscovered by the leisure class that abandoned it for beachier getaways, leaving behind their imprint in the paintings they created that hang in the museum. “There are three places in Buenos Aires which are changing, which everyone is talking about,” said Diana Saiegh, the director of the Museo de Arte Tigre. “San Telmo, Palermo Viejo, and now, Tigre. The most rich people of Buenos Aires have come here.” The renaissance comes after a long decline during which down-market tourists began traveling to Tigre, oftentimes without staying overnight, and it slowly developed a honky-tonk, rundown feel. Recently however, the municipality of Tigre has spearheaded renovations like improving the waterfront walkways along the Río Luján and renovating the shopping and information arcades near the main train station. Developers have
also become attracted to Tigre, building homes and spas on its remote islands, aiming once again at the very wealthy. The region is vast. At 5,405 square miles, the Tigre Delta is among the world’s largest, and it is the only major delta not emptying into a sea or ocean. It flows instead into the Río de la Plata, which separates Argentina and Uruguay, after the Río Paraná splits into several smaller rivers and forms a multitude of sedimentary islands covered in forest and grasslands. With its islands and canals, Tigre is what Venice might have looked like before development. Tigre is named for the jaguars — which were called tigers — that once roamed here, before the islands became important agriculturally for wicker and fruit in the mid-1800s; the British built trains bringing these products to market. After an 1877 yellow fever epidemic in Buenos Aires, Tigre was seen as a healthful retreat. British character pervades Tigre, with Victorians and half-timbered mock Tudors. Many of those structures and the museum are on what locals call “continente,” the mainland. This center sits on the Río Luján tributary and is a launching pad from which boats travel from the Estación Fluvial terminal to venture to the islands scattered in the delta. The center has no shortage of draws. In addition to the museum, there is an amusement park and a market where handmade reed furniture, leather, artisanal food and other products are sold.
Tigre still attracts artists, like Sebastián Páez Vilaró, son of the Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró. His atelier, where he makes bronze and copper repoussé art, is a miniature of his father’s amorphous Casa Pueblo in Punta Del Este. Mr. Páez Vilaró, 25, said he finds Tigre inspiring “because I can enjoy nature and the land and still be close to Buenos Aires.” But it is the delta’s remote, carefree islands that provide a greater reprieve from urban life. A number of spa resorts and gated communities — called “countries” after American country clubs — have opened on the islands, once known only for rugged day trips. For example, there is Bonanza, an island where the Bo-
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Comes from pag 73 ned in N-ovember 2009, six years after construction began. Building is continuing, according to the hotel’s commercial director, Marcelo Israel, with much of the material coming laboriously by boat. “Constructing in the water is not the same as constructing on solid ground,” he said. Though its physical structure is not finished, the spa’s vision seems complete. It is meant for romance: Children under 10 are not permitted, and rooms feature showers for two; each room comes with a sprawling patio deck. Private vacation bungalows are being developed on the island to offer guests even more privacy. The precursor to Delta Eco and the wave of other spa resorts that have been built is Rumbo 90, which opened in 2005. It’s intimate, with only seven guest rooms and a rustic-romantic candlelit dining area whose menu emphasizes river fish and other local products. It’s possible to visit for half days or just for lunch, but Paula Gezzi, an owner, said that day-tri-
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ppers are limited to maintain the sense of solitude. The resort fronts Canal del Este, which Ms. Gezzi described as “upscale.” Across the water, a neighboring island has large, expensive homes. Ms. Gezzi, 32, vacationed as a child in Tigre. “Twenty years ago,” she said, “the only thing to do was have some fun in the day and then return to the city, but now people choose to stay on the islands.” She added, “you are only half an hour from land, but you feel very far away.” Her sentiments were echoed by Norma Effrón of Buenos Aires, who was celebrating her 54th birthday at Rumbo 90 and was staying there overnight for the first time. “I love the vegetation,” she said. “I love the water. There was a time when I used to come very often, but it was only to stay for the day.” This time, she said, she found that “Tigre is a way to refresh the head.” Susana Neira, 53, a Buenos Airesbased tour guide, finds the mainland just as restorative. Ms. Neira is a member of the Buenos Aires Rowing Club, located between Tigre’s train station and the Es-
tación Fluvial. She calls the club’s baronial British structure a “Harry Potter place,” but it also looks like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad location, with its ivy-covered crew-boat storage areas. Among Ms. Neira’s favorite pastimes is rowing along the Tigre waterfront. As she paddled there on a recent trip, people waved from the Puerto de Frutos, the tourist market. At water level, the intimacy is astounding: kayakers stop one another for directions, and one can hear the conversations emanating from the docks of island houses built on stilts. The crew boat returned to Tigre as the sun set, casting a golden glow over the lapping water, silhouetting the Parque de la Costa amusement park. Ms. Neira stopped rowing, taking in the view. “I spend all my free time here in Tigre,” she said. IF YOU GO For general information, laisladelta. com.ar is a good source. From Buenos Aires, a 45-minute train goes from Retiro Station in Buenos Aires to Tigre, and it runs about three times an hour. The cost is a mere 1.70 Argentine pesos, or 45 cents at 3.9 Argentine pesos to the dollar. Taxis from Buenos Aires to Tigre run about 120 pesos (about $31). A scenic Sturla ferry boat connects Puerto Madero (54-11-4731-1300; www. sturlaviajes.com.ar) in Buenos Aires to Estacion Fluvial in Tigre. It costs 75 pesos. Private water taxis can run as much as five times that, but many resorts are also on the Interisleñas boat bus routes, which cost 19 pesos. Transit can be confusing and is best coordinated with the resort or travel agent. Boat transfers to the islands from downtown Tigre are often included with the cost of a resort room. WHERE TO STAY Most resorts are all-inclusives, with
excursions and spa treatments extra. Delta Eco Spa (54-11-5236-0553; deltaecospa.com) is on the western delta’s Río Carapachay. Standard rates from 330 pesos per person per night to 570 pesos for bungalows. Rumbo 90 (54-9-11-5843-9454; rumbo90.com.ar) is on Canal del Este, in the eastern delta. Standards from 440 pesos per person per night to 739 pesos for Jacuzzi suites. Bonanza Deltaventura (54-11-4728-1674; deltaventura.com) is in an 1898 villa on a former Río Carapachay fruit plantation, ideal for the eco-conscious. From 172 pesos for day trips, 560 pesos for two--night stays. GUIDES AND TOURS Say Hueque Tours (54-11-5199-2517; sayhueque.com) runs reasonably priced adventure delta excursions. Borello Travel (800-405-3072 or 54-11-5031-1988; borellotravel.com) runs luxury spa and art tours. Susana Neira acts as a guide in Tigre and Buenos Aires (54-9-11-4992-3780; susananeira159@gmail.com) as does Mariana Jimenez (54-9-11-4997-7832; mariana.v.jimenez@gmail.com;). SIGHTS Museo de Arte Tigre, Paseo Victorica 972, Tigre (54-11-4512-4528; www.mat. gov.ar). Atelier Sebastián Páez Vilaró and Casa Pueblo Tigre, General Campos 160, Tigre (sebastianpaezvilaro.com). By appointment only. Isla El Descanso, Rio Sarmiento (54-11-4825-6996; islaeldescanso.com). Puerto de Frutos (puertodefrutosarg.com.ar) is a market that is a 10-minute walk from the Tigre train station. Parque de la Costa (54-11-4002-6000; parquedelacosta.com.ar) is a waterfront amusement park next to Puerto de Frutos and Tren de la Costa station.
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Advertising
Agency Proposes ‘Do Not Track’ Option for Web Users By EDWARD WYATT and TANZINA VEGA
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he Federal Trade Commission advocated a plan on Wednesday that lets consumers on the Internet choose whether they want information about their browsing habits to be collected, an option known as “do not track.” The F.T.C.’s proposal, a framework for commercial use of consumer data, would make consumer privacy the default position and would let Web users decide whether Internet sites and advertisers can build profiles of their browsing and buying habits as well as collect other personal information. The recommendations, in a report released by the commission that solicits public comment over the next two months, are based on the commission’s belief that current practices regarding privacy protec-
tion have not kept pace with the rapid growth of technology and new business models. Industry self-regulation, the preferred model among advertising companies and many online retailers, has “failed to provide adequate and meaningful protection” for consumers, the report said. Now, the trade commission hopes to adopt an approach that it calls “privacy by design,” where companies are required to build privacy protections into their everyday business practices. That approach would include retaining data on consumer preferences and online browsing activity only as long as needed and deleting data on a regular basis. The report also recommends that companies adopt simpler, more transparent and streamlined ways of presenting consumers with their options rather than the “long, incomprehensible privacy policies that con-
sumer typically do not read, let alone understand.” And the report recommends that data brokers give consumers “reasonable access” to whatever data they have collected. While the report is critical of many current industry practices, the commission will probably need the help of Congress to enact some of its recommendations. “I do not think that under the F.T.C.’s existing authority we could mandate unilaterally a system of ‘do not track,’ ” David Vladek, the director of the commission’s bureau of consumer protection, said Wednesday at a conference sponsored by Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit group. “There are ways we could coax, cajole and charm industry in that direction,” Mr. Vladek said. But, he added, “If the decision was made by Congress that ‘do not track’ should be put in place immediately, it would take an act of Congress.”
There is support in Congress for doing so, however, and the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection will take up the matter at a hearing Thursday that will examine the feasibility of creating a simple and universal method of opting-out of being tracked online. Christopher Soghoian, a privacy and security researcher, said at the Consumer Watchdog conference that most consumers do not have privacy software and that the use of privacy options in most Internet browsers “doesn’t do much.” Because many of the companies that make Web browsers are also supported by advertising networks, “the design decisions are motivated by a desire not to hurt their advertising divisions,” Mr. Soghoian said. “The situation right now is laughable,” he added. “There certainly isn’t a single one-stop shop.”
For Start-Ups, the Ultimate Goal: Becoming a Verb By NICK BILTON
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hen starting a new Web site or Internet service, most technologists are aiming to sell to a larger company or gain hundreds of millions of users. But for some there is an even bigger glory than cash: their company name becomes a verb. It didn’t take long for Google to win this honor, as people began saying “let me Google that” instead of using the verb “search.” Microsoft hopes that its search engine, Bing, is on its way to this usage too. And of course this idea goes beyond search sites. Take Twitter, for example, which has been verbified with the advent of the word “tweet.” Then there’s Facebook, Skype, Photoshop and many more technology brands that pop up as verbs in daily conversation. But a company name turning into a verb has not always been seen as a good thing. Before the rise of Google, teams of lawyers were constantly at the ready to fight the use of a trademarked company name, especially when it was used to represent an action or even an en-
tire industry. Fred Shapiro, editor of “The Yale Book of Quotations” and a trademark consultant, said in an interview that although some company names have become standard verbs, including Xerox, Rollerblade and FedEx, the fear in the past was that such company names would be so commonly used that they would become “generified,” potentially losing trademark sta-
tus. Over the past several years this mentality has rapidly shifted as the Web has taken off. Now the power of word-of-mouth marketing can lead to widespread awareness of a start-up. “What is new is that in recent years some technology companies have begun to think of ‘verbing’ as a good thing,” Mr. Shapiro said in an e-mail. “Their thinking is that there
is a strong positive marketing value from verbing, because verbs connote activity and excitement and because widespread use of a mark as a verb extends brand recognition.” For many companies online, where strong competition can quickly squelch a new start-up, this type of free marketing can far outweigh any dangers of the word or term becoming diluted. “The success of brands in technology, like Photoshop and Google, has opened people’s eyes to the fact that becoming a verb is not always a bad thing,” Mr. Shapiro said. It is still unclear whether verbification will have a lasting positive effect on these brands. Names like Band-Aid, Tylenol and Laundromat have become generic terms, even with a team of lawyers trying to defend their usage. Now, just because Johnson & Johnson invented the term “Band-Aid” doesn’t mean you’re going to buy that product specifically from them. Who knows, maybe one day the word Google will become so synonymous with “searching” that you could end up Googling something on Bing.
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Beauty Discrimination During a Job Search By TARA PARKER-POPE
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ow much do looks matter during a job search? A new study suggests that while handsome men do better while looking for work, good looks can end up hurting a woman’s chances of scoring a job interview. The study, conducted by economists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, sent 5,312 résumés to more than 2,600 employers who had advertised job openings. Two applications were sent to employers, each with virtually identical résumés. The only real difference was that one of the résumés included a photograph of the applicant. Sometimes the applicant was an attractive man or woman, and sometimes the photo showed a more plain-looking man or woman. (While sending a photograph with a résumé isn’t typical in the United States, it’s not uncommon in Israel, the researchers noted.) To choose the photographs used in the study, the researchers
collected photos from 300 university students. A panel of four men and four women rated the pictures in terms of attractiveness. To eliminate potential racial bias, the judges selected photos of individuals who appeared to have a more ambiguous ethnic background. Over all, employers sought interviews with 14.5 percent of the job candidates. Notably, 19.9 percent of the male candidates who sent attractive pictures were called in for interviews, compared to 13.7 percent of the men with “plain” photos. Only 9.2 percent of the men who didn’t send a picture were called to interview. Based on the response rate in the study, an attractive man needs to send an average of five résumés with a photo to get one interview. An ordinary-looking man needs to send 11 résumés with a photo to get a single interview. But the apparent bias in favor of job candidates with photos didn’t hold true for women. Women who didn’t send photos
had a 16.6 percent callback rate, the highest response rate from prospective employers. Résumés accompanied by a photo of a “plain” woman received callback responses 13.6 percent of the time, compared with 12.8 for those accompanied by photos of attractive women. The researchers found that the response rate was about the same for all categories of women when the résumé was sent to employment agencies. When résumés were sent directly to a company, however, attractive women were only half as likely to receive a response as plain women and those who didn’t send a picture, a difference that was statistically meaningful. That suggests that when the hiring is done by the company where the job candidate will work, the people doing the hiring appear to strongly discriminate against attractive women. After the study was complete, the researchers contacted the companies to determine who at each of the firms was in charge
of screening job candidates. At nearly every firm, the person in charge of screening résumés was a young woman, from 23 to 34 years old, and typically single. The researchers concluded that callback rates most likely were influenced by the screener’s jealousy “when confronted with a young, attractive competitor in the workplace.” In addition, the survey of employers found different reactions to résumés accompanied by photos, depending on the gender of the job candidate. When a man included a photo with his résumé, employers found that it showed confidence and that the candidate was presentable. But when a woman included a photo, it was viewed as a negative, suggesting the woman was “attempting to market herself via her appearance.” “Our results show that beauty distorts the hiring process,” the researchers concluded. “Suitably qualified attractive women and plain men and women may be eliminated early on from the selection process.”
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Fed Papers Show Breadth of Emergency Measures By SEWELL CHAN and JO CRAVEN McGINTY
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he Federal Reserve released documents Wednesday showing that its efforts to help stabilize the markets at the height of the financial crisis reached far beyond Wall Street and deep into the economy. The disclosures reveal the extent that corporations were forced to rely on the Fed for the money to pay suppliers and make weekly payroll. The crisis in the commercial paper market, the documents show, was more extensive and lasted longer than was previously known. During the worst moments of the financial crisis, in the fall of 2008, even bedrock corporations like Caterpillar, General Electric, Harley Davidson, McDonald’s, Verizon and Toyota had to turn to the Fed after the market for shortterm commercial notes had dried up. While most of the Fed’s commercial paper purchase were made in the first few weeks after the program opened on Oct. 27, 2008, the central bank had to buy nearly as much in January 2009 and only slightly less in March 2009. Indeed, the Fed was still supporting the market for commercial paper well into the summer of 2009 — even as the recession officially came to an end. In total, the documents released Wednesday on the Fed’s Web site offer insight into the more than 21,000 emergency loans and $3 trillion in liquidity that the Fed provided to investment banks, foreign central banks and a number of other institutions. The bulk of the money went out in 2008 during the peak of the crisis. The efforts by the Fed were in addition to the use of monetary policy to expand the supply of credit to the economy and lower interest rates. The Fed lowered its benchmark short-term interest rate, the federal funds rate at which banks borrow from each other overnight, to essentially zero in December 2008. And from that month until March 2009, the Fed purchased some $1.7 trillion in mortgage-related assets and Treasury securities to lower longterm interest rates. On Nov. 3, the Fed announced a resumption of its bondbuying strategy, known as quantitative easing, with plans to purchase $600 billion in Treasury securities through June 2011. The data also revealed the global scope of the crisis that followed the co-
llapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The European Central Bank drew heavily on the Fed’s currency swap lines to support dollar-financed money markets in Europe. But nine other central banks, the data show, also made use of the swap lines: Australia, Britain, Denmark, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Sweden and Switzerland. From March 2008 to May 2009, the central bank extended a cumulative total of nearly $9 trillion in short-term loans to 18 different financial firms — under a program called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility. Previously, the Fed had only revealed that four financial firms had tapped the special lending facility and did not reveal their identities or the loan amounts. The data seems to confirm that Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley were under severe strain in the weeks following the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008. All three firms tapped the facility on more than 100 occasions. A quick analysis by The New York Times indicates that Citigroup was the greatest beneficiary, drawing on a total of $1.8 trillion in loans, followed by Merrill Lynch, which used $1.5 trillion; Morgan Stanley, which drew $1.4 trillion; and Bear Stearns, which used $960 billion. During the crisis, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America and Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase, as storied Wall Street institutions crumbled under the weight of bad loans and excessive leverage. Despite Goldman Sachs’ insistence that it would have been strong enough to survive without a bailout, the bank borrowed a total of $590 billion on at least 52 separate occasions, according to the Fed data. JPMorgan’s investment bank, by contrast, used the special lending facility meagerly. It borrowed a total of $3 billion and turned to the Fed three times. The American subsidiaries of French, German, Swiss and Japanese banks also relied on the program. BNP Paribas of France borrowed $66.4 billion, UBS of Switzerland about $35.4 billion and Mizuhno Securities of Japan about $42.3 billion. The data on commercial paper market, however, illustrated the reach of the problem. In early October 2008, the Fed hastily arranged to become the buyer of last resort for corporate commercial
paper — the short-term notes that companies issue to smooth out cash flow and make sure that payroll checks and vendor payments do not bounce. The market had been under pressure since Sept. 15, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and defaulted on a substantial amount of its own short-term notes. The pressure became panic on Sept. 16, 2008, when the Reserve Fund, one of the nation’s largest money market funds, “broke the buck” by reporting a share price below a dollar. Within days, the Fed set up an emergency insurance program for money market mutual funds, which helped slow the tidal wave of withdrawals. Because money market funds were the principal buyers of commercial paper, the crisis spread quickly to that market as well. The Fed set up a lending facility and started buying commercial paper on Oct. 27, 2008. The program was not aimed at rescuing the least creditworthy borrowers, who remained frozen out of the market, but was intended to buy only the best quality commercial paper. The common wisdom was that its primary beneficiaries would be the top-tier banks, insurers and financial institutions who would normally could have sold their notes without difficulty. In the first week of the program, the Fed bought more than $225 billion in paper. And the new data confirms that companies ranging from Ohio’s First Third Bank to the best-known bank franchises of Europe and Asia, like Commerzbank and Sumitomo were the primary occupants of the new lifeboat, along with the finance arms of the nation’s hard-pressed auto indus-
try. But in line with them that week were McDonalds, Caterpillar, General Electric, Harley-Davidson, Verizon and Baxter International, the health-care industry giant — major companies that were not generally considered vulnerable to the market meltdown. The Fed, which took months to compile the data and release it in electronic form by the Dec. 1 deadline, emphasized that most of the programs closed earlier this year and that taxpayers did not incur losses. “The Federal Reserve followed sound risk-management practices in administering all of these programs, incurred no credit losses on programs that have been wound down, and expects to incur no credit losses on the few remaining programs,” the central bank said in a statement. To an unprecedented degree, the Fed created an alphabet soup of loan programs during the crisis. (Probably the one with the most cumbersome name was the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, the program used to help money market funds that held commercial paper.) The Fed also purchased $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities to prop up the housing market. With the economy still so fragile , some Fed officials have expressed concern that the release of so much data might roil the markets. The Fed emphasized Wednesday that the institutions that used the loan programs did not necessarily have any underlying problems beyond the liquidity crunch that became widespread in 2008.
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A Facebook Founder Begins a Social Network Focused on Charities said.
By JENNA WORTHAM
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hris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook and the chief digital organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, knows a thing or two about building online communities. Now he is applying his expertise to a new venture called Jumo, which aims to connect people with nonprofits and charitable organizations. The site, which is being unveiled on Tuesday, aims to “do what Yelp did for restaurants,” Mr. Hughes said, indexing charities “to help people find and evaluate them.” Individual charities, projects like building a school in rural Africa and broad issues like gay rights will all have dedicated pages on Jumo. Relevant news articles, Twitter posts and YouTube videos will be added to the pages, and users can add their own feedback and comments. Users can also find their Facebook friends and follow their adopted projects and issues on the site. The idea is to take the principles that helped Mr. Hughes organize a network of volunteers into a successful political force and apply them to a much broader universe of causes and issues. Mr. Hughes is not the first entrepreneur to venture into this territory. Causes, a Facebook application, and the Web site Global Giving are among the many existing ways to find and support charities online. But Mr. Hughes said Jumo would not be primarily about soliciting donations. Instead, he said, the site would first try to deepen ties between its users and their favorite causes. “The more connected that individual is to an issue they care about, the higher probability there is they will stay involved over a longer period of time,” Mr. Hughes
To start, the Jumo site was seeded with more than 3,000 issues and groups. But “anyone with a social mission can create a page,” said Mr. Hughes, who thinks Jumo could become a simple way for smaller charities to establish a social media presence. Jumo will allow only organizations that have been certified as tax exempt to solicit donations, as a way to discourage fraud. Jumo is itself a nonprofit, and will rely on payments from users and sponsorships from organizations that want better promotion on the Web site. One challenge for Jumo will be figuring out how willing are Internet users to share details about their donations, which they can choose to display on their Jumo profile pages, said Susan Etlinger, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, a consulting firm. “The same dynamics of other social networks may not transfer to this activity,” she said. But Chris Bishko, director of investments at Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm that contributed to the $3.5 million in grants that Jumo raised before its release, said that it was not such a long shot. “One thing we’ve learned with Internet companies is that if you can lower the barrier and lower friction, then activity follows where it didn’t exist before,” he said. As an example, he pointed to the flood of donations via text message that followed the earthquake in Haiti last January: “We saw what people were willing to do.” Another issue for Jumo is social network burnout. Will people who are spending time on Facebook and elsewhere be willing to add another site to their lineup? Mr. Hughes said Jumo was not intended to compete with Facebook. Instead, he predicts that Facebook will become a
ubiquitous backbone for the social Web, and that people will also use niche sites focused on specific interests and communities. Jumo will send out e-mails and updates tailored to its users to help them stay engaged, he said. It is not yet clear how much the Internet and social media can help push people to move beyond just “following” and “liking” things, but a social network like Jumo could be a crucial first step, said Steve MacLaughlin, director of Internet solutions at BlackBaud, a global provider of technology and services to nonprofits. “It’s still not clear whether or not followers translate to volunteers and donors,” said Mr. MacLaughlin. “But people that are more engaged with nonprofits are most likely to become a donor or support them in another way.” The financial impact could be tremendous, he said. Of the $300 billion that was donated to charities and nonprofits in 2009, only 6 percent was submitted online.
U.S. Won’t End Gulf Drilling Ban By JOHN M. BRODER
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he Obama administration is rescinding its decision to expand offshore oil exploration into the eastern Gulf of Mexico and along the Atlantic coast because of weaknesses in federal regulation revealed by the BP oil spill, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced on Wednesday. Mr. Salazar said that drilling would remain under a moratorium for those areas for at least seven years, until stronger safety and environmental standards were in place. Drilling will continue in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, although under a set of new safeguards put in place after the deadly BP explosion and oil spill in April. Future gulf leases will be subject to further environmental and safety studies, he said. Shell’s pending lease in the Arctic Ocean off the Alaska coast will be hono-
red, but drilling will be allowed only after a new environmental review is completed and additional spill response requirements are met. That probably will push the oil company’s plans back by a year or more, officials said. Other potential drilling sites in the Arctic will be studied before any leasing decisions are made, Mr. Salazar said. “As a result of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill we learned a number of lessons,” the interior secretary said Wednesday afternoon in a briefing for reporters, “most importantly that we need to proceed with caution and focus on creating a more stringent regulatory regime.” The decision essentially reverses the controversial drilling plan announced in March, which would have begun environmental studies and exploration activity in previously untouched swaths of the gulf and along the East Coast from Florida to Delaware. That plan, unveiled just three weeks before the BP accident, was part of a poli-
tical effort to encourage more domestic oil production in exchange for Congressional action to limit the carbon dioxide emissions that are contributing to global warming. The eastern gulf and the Atlantic Seaboard had been off-limits to oil companies for years because of Congressional opposition, although lawmakers in some Atlantic coast states have been pushing for offshore oil activity to reduce foreign imports and to generate tax and royalty revenue The Obama administration’s package fell apart as a result of the oil spill and the Senate’s refusal to take up comprehensive legislation on energy and climate change. The administration imposed a moratorium in May on all deepwater offshore drilling while the new safety procedures were drawn up. Mr. Salazar lifted the ban in October, and oil companies have been seeking new permits to resume exploration in the gulf. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry lobby, called the decision a
mistake. “The oil and natural gas industry is a reliable vehicle for growing the economy and creating good-paying jobs,” the group said in a statement issued minutes after Mr. Salazar’s announcement. “This decision shuts the door on new development off our nation’s coasts and effectively ensures that new American jobs will not be realized,” it said. “It will stifle investment, deny billions in revenue for critical government services and increase our dependence on foreign energy sources.” Environmental advocates welcomed the administration’s reversal of what they called a wrongheaded move earlier in the year. “What it means is they’ve learned a great deal from the Macondo blowout and they’re taking a lot of places off the table that originally were going to be considered,” said WMarilyn Heiman, an oceans expert at the Pew Environment Group. “They still need to learn a lot more.”
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New Vehicles That Should Best Hold Their Value By JENNIFER SARANOW SCHULTZ
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elley Blue Book recently released its annual look at new vehicles expected to retain the
greatest proportion of their original list price after five years. The information can be helpful to new car buyers who envision selling or trading in their car at some
point. According to Kelley Blue Book, depreciation, or a car’s loss of value, is typically a car buyer’s primary expense during ownership, and the average car will only retain about 34 percent of its original value after five years of ownership. So which 2011 models made the cut and won Kelley Blue Book’s best resale value award? The top 10 models cited by Kelley Blue Book were, in alphabetical order: the Audi A5, BMW X5, BMW X6, Honda CR-V, Jeep Wrangler, Lexus GX, Lexus RX, Subaru Outback, Toyota FJ Cruiser and Toyota Tacoma. (The vehicles were analyzed with base packages and no extras.) In addition, Subaru was cited as the brand with the best resale value for 2011 and BMW was cited as the luxury brand with the best resale value. Kelley Blue Book also cited a
2011 model with the best resale value for each vehicle category. (Vehicles with prices higher than $60,000 were considered for only the luxury and high-performance category awards.) The awards were based on projections from the Kelley Blue Book resale value guide. The projections are, in turn, based on various factors, including sales data, competition within vehicle segments and expectations for the broader economy as well as the assumption that a vehicle is in average condition with 75,000 miles at the end of five years. According to Kelley Blue Book, options and packages do not necessarily increase a vehicle’s resale value, though there are some exceptions, including high-performance engines and performance packages.
Skinning a Higher-Mileage Accord By CHRISTOPHER JENSEN
TESTED 2011 Honda Accord SE
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HAT IS IT? An updated Accord with better mileage and heated, leathertrimmed seats in new, less expensive trim. HOW MUCH? $24,480 including $750 delivery charge. WHAT MAKES IT RUN? 2.4-liter 4-cylinder (177 horsepower, 161 pound-feet of torque); 5-speed automatic transmission. IS IT THIRSTY? Not at all, for its size. The federal rating is now 23 m.p.g. city and 34 m.p.g. highway. ALTERNATIVES Chevrolet Malibu, Ford Fusion, Hyundai Sonata, Nissan Altima and Toyota Camry. TO a large extent the updated Honda Accord SE is aimed at those with fiscal limits but higher aspirations about where they want to park their posteriors. In short, they want heated cowhides beneath them. Last year, if you desired a midsize Honda with leather seats you had to buy the fancy Accord EX-L. That car came with a lot of other goodies, like a sunroof. But Honda figured there might be significant demand for leather upholstery in a lower-priced and less
lavishly equipped Accord, according to Jeff Swedlund, a senior product planner. And that explains the creation of the SE (for Special Edition). The Accord family now starts with the LX model, and the next step up is the LX-P. The new SE is one notch higher and costs $750 more. The leather seats come directly from the EX-L priced at $28,105. They are indeed attractive and comfortable and they quickly warm one’s derrière. But the interior still has expanses of unattractive plastic, resulting in a mixed socio-economic message. Consequently the SE falls short of new competitors like the 2011 Hyundai Sonata GLS. While that car lacks leather seats, it is arguably the class benchmark for interior elegance. It is also significantly less expensive than the Accord SE. A Sonata GLS I tested recently was $23,365, including an optional navigation system. One can minimize the Accord’s split-personality confusion by steadfastly looking out the windshield and driving. If you do, you’ll note a couple of things that haven’t changed despite Honda’s effort to freshen the Accord. One is road noise, a problem that Honda seems either incapable or
unwilling to address on many of its vehicles. Another is a high level of driving satisfaction. Mr. Swedlund said no changes were made to the suspension or steering, which is just fine. The car still strikes a good balance between a supple ride and spirited handling. For a front-drive car, the Accord is satisfyingly quick to change direction. The engine and 5-speed automatic are smooth, slick and responsive. Mr. Swedlund said improving fuel economy was a main goal in the Accord’s freshening. “We needed to get back into a position that we could be proud of in terms of fuel economy,” he said. For example, he said, Honda officials were unhappy that the 2010 Accord 4-cylinder was getting poorer
in-town fuel economy than the heavier Subaru Legacy with a 4-cylinder and all-wheel drive. To improve fuel economy, changes ranged from better aerodynamics to using a heater to warm the automatic transmission fluid, which reduced friction in the powertrain, Mr. Swedlund said. Consequently the ratings for the 2011 Accord 4-cylinder have improved by 2 m.p.g. in the city and by 3 on the highway. While the improvements to the 2011 Accord are pleasing, the competition has gotten much tougher in the last couple of years — not just with the new Sonata, but with the Malibu and Fusion as well. Honda may have rested on its laurels (even if they are plopped down on a leather, heated seat) a little too long.
ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR
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House Hunting in ... Morocco By LISA KEYS A FIVE-BEDROOM TRADITIONAL HOUSE IN TANGIER $772,000 (6.5 MILLION DIRHAMS)
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his traditional Moroccan home with interior courtyard, called a riad, is in the medina, or old city. It has three stories and 400 square meters of space (about 4,300 square feet, at 10.76 square feet to the square meter). The house is entered through a wooden door that dates to the 1890s. A renovation took place about five years ago; the walls and floors are new, as well as the mechanical and electrical systems, though antique details like decorative tiles, and wooden doorjambs and frames, are original. The ground floor has a small foyer with an adjacent storage room; a kitchen, with no cabinetry and a few appliances; and a bedroom and bath. The second story has a wraparound interior balcony that overlooks the courtyard. There are two bedrooms on this level, as well as the living room and an office. The third floor has two more bedrooms, one with an en-suite bath. This floor has access to the two-story
roof terrace. The lower level of the terrace is open to the elements; the upper level is covered and has views of the medina. The property also has 160 square feet of commercial space on the ground floor, currently being used as a souvenir shop. Boutiques and cafes are within walking distance; the airport is about 30 minutes away by taxi. MARKET OVERVIEW The financial crisis has had a relatively minor effect on Tangier’s market; the lower end has in fact
remained robust, said Robert Shaw, marketing director of Elite Moroccan Properties, based in England. He attributed this to Morocco’s growing middle class and the government’s efforts to improve infrastructure within the city. As for luxury homes, he said, prices have fallen 10 to 20 percent. In addition, there are fewer foreign buyers today than a few years ago, said Reinald Beck, the listing agent for the property featured here and director of the New Real Estate agency in Tangier. Over all, housing
prices vary widely according to location and condition, Mr. Beck said. Within the medina, the site of this house, prices range from $60 to $70 a square foot, for homes in need of renovation, to $95 to $112 a square foot for restored homes. This house has an asking price of around $167 a square foot, above average because of its central location. But price negotiation is a common practice here, Mr. Beck said. In newer parts of town, apartments designed for Westerners cost anywhere from $109 to $218 a square foot. Newly built luxury apartments and villas — a small portion of the market — sell for $185 to $205 a square foot, down from $240 a square foot before the financial
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ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR
tmsa.ma/index.php Moroccan Government: www. maroc.ma/PortailInst/An/home LANGUAGES AND CURRENCY Moroccan National Tourist OffiArabic; Moroccan dirham (1 dirce: visitmorocco.com ham = $0.12) Tanger Mediterranean Special TAXES AND FEES Agency (Tanger Med Port): www. Annual taxes are about $1,300.
downturn. WHO BUYS IN TANGIERS Traditionally, the majority of foreign buyers in Tangier are from France and Spain, Mr. Beck said; there are also buyers from Asia, Britain, Europe and America. Foreign buyers in Tangier tend to be “more adventurous” than those who seek properties in Marrakesh, which has more development, Mr. Shaw said. “A buyer has to see beyond the city as it is at the moment,” he said. “It’s actively being transformed from a poorer, less visually stimulating city into a city that will be a serious reference point on the entrance to the Mediterranean in 10 years’ time.” BUYING BASICS There are no restrictions on foreign buyers of residential properties in Morocco, said Loic Raboteau, the
joint head of the French and North Africa Law Department at the International Property Law Center in Britain. But foreigners are prohibited from buying agricultural land. Purchase-side costs are 7 to 8 percent. This includes notary fees, which run 0.5 to 1 percent; a 1 percent land registry tax; a 3 percent stamp duty; and a 0.5 percent transfer tax. Real estate agent fees are 6 percent and are typically split between buyer and seller, though this fee is often negotiated, Mr. Beck said. The use of a lawyer is recommended; fees are approximately 1 percent of the purchase price, Mr. Raboteau said. Most buyers pay in cash, Mr. Beck said, though financing of up to 50 percent is available to foreigners. Interest rates are about 5.2 percent. WEB SITES
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Herman
Speed Bump
Frank & Ernest
BC
Scary Gary
Wizard of Id
Two Cows And A Chicken
Cartoons
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Games
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 60
60 December 9 - 15, 2010
HOROSCOPE Aries
(Mar 21-April 20)
Libra
(Sep 24-Oct 23)
Relax and unwind if at all possible. The pace of things is going to be hectic, but during this coming Retrograde Mercury phase you have to be measured and careful. Get things organised and be aware that plans could be subject to delays. Live with current confusion and be patient.
The whirlwind of social activity will soon engage your attention. You may not feel in the mood but you might as well show willing. Cheer up once and for all: the best is yet to come. It will soon be Christmas after all. Ditch a negative way of thinking and be all you can be. Be positive and see what happens.
Taurus
Scorpio
(April 21-May 21)
(Oct 24-Nov 22)
Stand your ground this week, but try to be calm and serene as you go about your business. Be cautious about big commitments during Stationary Mercury, but be brave and do not let anyone dissuade you from a plan of action that feels good. Go with the flow of your intuition.
Take things one step at a time and do not rush into a new romantic connection, unless you are really sure. Do trust that strong intuition of yours. You will need to find a short cut. A lot of nonsense needs to be bypassed with some cute moves. Keep relationships straightforward at this time.
Gemini
Sagittarius
(May 22-June 21)
(Nov 23-Dec 21)
There is no point resisting the inevitable. Things are uncertain it is true. Stationary Mercury needs careful handling. You would be wise to err on the side of caution. Trials and tribulations may test your patience. Be careful with travel plans also. Do what you have to do. Prepare to celebrate!
At long last things will start to come good. Are you ready to embrace the right stuff? Jupiter your ruler moves forward in Pisces, but Stationary Mercury makes things complex. You need to know what you want. How you go about your business really counts.
Cancer
Capricorn
(June 22-July 23)
Despite the challenges of stationary Mercury you can now overturn whatever it is that stands in your way. Be tenacious and focused enough to achieve great things; why not? Take a hint in a love situation. Do expect some good to come out of a disagreement. Good communication counts for a lot.
Leo
(July 24-Aug 23)
Use common sense to make a decision. You are going to have to light up your life with some big moves soon. Prepare to be amazed by what comes about. Listen to your own heart and mind. Others may well have an opinion, of course, but in this case, you must listen to yourself only. Keep your cool.
Virgo
(Aug 24-Sep 23)
Watch out for carelessness when you are trying to make a point. Stationary Mercury requires careful handling and so do you. Hurting someone’s feelings will not have the desired effect. If you can not say it right- do not bother at all. Keep your counsel if needs be, but speak up when it matters.
(Dec 22-Jan 20)
You are in a great position to consolidate recent gains. The pursuit of personal happiness should be a priority. What else is there after all? Be cautious during this Stationary Mercury Phase. You need to know what is what before you act out of turn. Be cool with your lot.
Aquarius
(Jan 21-Feb 19)
Pay attention to new and unusual options. You will not know if something is going to work unless you give it a try. Be careful during this Mercury retrograde phase. Things will work out well, but you might need to be patient as you go about your business. Take your time.
Pisces
(Feb 20-Mar 20)
Keep up to speed within a competitive situation. You can win out, as long as you do not miss a crucial moment. A change of scene may be the right thing. However, make sure you have found what you are looking for before you make a move. Ditch a habit that is holding you back. Christmas is coming.
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Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 59
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December 9 - 15, 2010
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Sports
Woods Finds Old Comfort Level in Southern California By KAREN CROUSE
T
iger Woods jumped on the question by the sportscaster Jim Hill the way Hill, a former N.F.L. defensive back, used to jump on receivers’ routes. “With all the talk about this past year,” Hill began, “are you tired of it or is it. ...” “Yes,” Woods interjected. For the embattled Woods, this week is about getting back to his roots, and that does not mean a return to Buddhism. After a two-year absence, Woods, a Southern California native, is competing in the Chevron World Challenge, an 18-player invitational benefiting the Tiger Woods Foundation. It is Woods’s first competitive event in Southern California since 2008, when he won the United States Open in San Diego. Woods sat out his tournament in 2008 with a knee injury and was conspicuously absent last year, withdrawing because of injuries sustained in a car accident last November that pulled back the curtain on his serial adultery. A year marked by seismic changes in his life — a divorce, a new swing coach, the loss of his No. 1 world ranking — will officially end in a place that conjures warm memories of a more innocent time. “This is home,” said Woods, who grew up in Orange County and used to make the hourlong drive here with his father, Earl, as a child to watch Greg Norman’s event. Woods, 34, has known Hill since 1981. As Hill recalled, he did an on-camera interview with Woods, who was 6 at the time, in which he asked Woods why he liked golf so much. Woods did not answer, so Hill repeated the question, at which point Woods turned to his father and told him he had to go to the bathroom. Hill laughed and said he still has the exchange on film. Over the years, Hill added, he has playfully threatened Woods with unearthing it. At the end of the 25-minute news conference, Woods stepped from the podium and into an embrace with Hill that, despite being on an impossibly tight schedule, Woods seemed in no hurry to extricate himself from.
Woods insisted he is the new old Tiger. “It’s been difficult,” he said, referring to the past year, “but also it’s been very rewarding at the same time. It forced me to look deeper into myself and look where — how I grew up and how those things didn’t match with the person who I am, and getting back to that, getting back to how my parents raised me, basically.” Woods has won this event four times, most recently in 2007. He did not record a victory in 12 PGA Tour starts in 2010, the first time since he turned professional in 1996 that he failed to win a tournament. He said repeatedly that he was very excited about the future because of the work he had done on and off the course. On the driving range, Woods has completed a major swing change involving less of a weight shift and more rotation. In his personal life, he has submitted to treatment for a undisclosed addiction and devised a strategy, he said, for steering clear of any relapse. “It’s creating boundaries,” Woods said, “and like I said from the very get-go, there was some boundary failure.” His news conferences remain the same as they were, with Woods in a stilted dance with reporters in which he keeps everybody at arm’s length. He talked about trying to become a little better “each and every day” and spoke of being a “new man,” without elaborating. In “His Father’s Son,” a recently published book on Woods by Tom Callahan, the golfer’s former swing coach, Hank Haney, is quoted saying he would not have been surprised if
Woods had followed the example of Michael Jordan and left his sport after the death in 2007 of his father, a former Green Beret. “When Earl died, I thought there was a strong possibility Tiger was going to give it all up to go in the service,” Haney said. Asked if he had entertained the notion, Woods said, “I didn’t.” When pressed, he added: “Well, I’ve always wanted to become a Seal. That’s something that I told my dad from the very get-go, either I’m going to become a professional golfer or I’m going to become a Navy Seal.” Woods continues to view golf as his calling, and it is obvious the sport continues to hold his attention. He was never more expansive than when addressing the mechanics of his swing. Woods’s facial expression softened and his voice took on a less protective, more professorial tone, as he explained: “I’m getting to the same impact position a different way, and that is very different. But also some of the motor patterns when I feel impact, I’ve been here before. So that’s not new.” His inner Urkel also was evident on the practice green when Woods spent several minutes engaged in a discussion with Sean O’Hair, with both taking half swings with their putters to help illustrate their points. Woods has an insatiable desire to learn from other athletes who are the best in their fields. During the 2008-9 N.B.A. season, he phoned Kobe Bryant out of the blue. Bryant said they had a meal together when the Lakers played at Orlando and picked each other’s brains. “His attention to details is the greatest,” Bryant said Sunday after the Lakers’ loss to Indiana. Bryant, who weathered a scandal when he was accused of rape in 2003, said he had not spoken to Woods since Woods crashed his car and his life swerved out of control. Bryant moved beyond his scandal, and the fallout from it, one day at a time, and that is what Woods is trying to do. “Just live it day by day,” Woods said. “That’s all I can do.”
Roger Federer Beats Nadal in Final of ATP Finals By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
R
oger Federer turned his high-profile, season-ending match against Rafael Nadal into little more than an exhbi-
tion.
Federer gave his rival little chance to mount a challenge in the 22nd meeting between two of the greatest players of all time, winning his fifth season-ending title 6-3, 3-6, 6-1 at the ATP World Tour Finals on Sunday. Federer won an incredible 92 percent of the points played on his first serve in the final, and lost only 13 points on serve in the entire match. “I was able to stay offensive. Rallies were never that long,” said Federer, who has won the season-ending tournament in Houston, Shanghai and London. “That kind of maybe frustrated him.” Nadal, the top-ranked Spaniard who won the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open this year, was able to break Fede-
rer once in the second set, but he appeared to tire as the match wore on. On Saturday, Nadal spent more then three hours and three sets beating Andy Murray to reach the final of the tournament for the first time in his career. “I know I didn’t spoil his vacation after this because he’s had an amazing year,” Federer said. “A year that any player dreams of.” The win cut Nadal’s career record to 14-8 against the second-ranked Swiss player. In Grand Slam finals, Nadal is 5-2 against Federer, but Federer has now beaten Nadal all three times they have faced each other in the final tournament of the season. In the first set Sunday at the O2 Arena, Federer lost only three points on his serve, and broke Nadal once. He then lost five points on serve in both the second and third sets, but four of them came in one game, giving Nadal his only break of the match. “I don’t want to say I gave it to him, but obviously Rafa is good enough off se-
cond serves he’s going to win at least 50 percent off them usually, unless you’re on a roll and he doesn’t kind of figure out your second serve,” Federer said. “But at that point, he was into the match. He knew the importance of it. He was able to find a way to break me in that game.” The decisive shift came early in the third set on Nadal’s serve with the Spaniard trailing 2-1. He took a 40-15 lead when Federer sent a return long, but Federer then reeled off the next four points — the last when Nadal sent a forehand wide — to earn the break and essentially end Nadal’s chances of winning. On match point, Federer hit a forehand winner on the line, but the crowd apparently thought the ball was out as they sat quietly in the arena. Then Nadal started coming to the net to shake hands with Federer, who raised his arms in victory to set off a standing ovation. Federer has won a record 16 Grand Slam titles, the last coming at this year’s
Australian Open, and he and Nadal have combined to win 21 of the past 23 majors. “Everybody saw the match of yesterday, so everybody’s free to think his own opinion,” Nadal said. “I’m not going to say I lost the match because I was tired. What I’m going to say and what I feel is I lost the match because I played against a very good Roger Federer in one of his favorite surfaces. And when he’s playing like this, it’s very difficult to stop him, no?” After ending his semifinal streak at major championships at Roland Garros and then faltering at the last two Grand Slam tournaments, Federer has played some of his best tennis of the year this week in London. He won all three of his round-robin matches in straight sets, and then swept Novak Djokovic on Saturday to reach the final. “You played unbelievable all during the week,” Nadal said to Federer on court after the match. “So well done for everything.”
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December 9 - 15, 2010
Rondo Leads Celtics to Fourth Consecutive Victory By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
R
ajon Rondo scored a seasonhigh 23 points and had 12 assists to lead the Boston Celtics to their fourth straight win, 106-87, on Tuesday night over the host Cleveland Cavaliers, who can now start concentrating on LeBron James’s visit. Rondo missed his first three shots before hitting 11 of his next 14 to help the Celtics build a 20-point lead in the fourth period. “He’s the one who runs our team,” the Celtics’ Kevin Garnett said. Glen Davis added 17 points, Marquis Daniels had 16 and Kevin Garnett pulled down 10 rebounds as Boston avenged an early-season loss to Cleveland. Anderson Varejao and Daniel Gibson scored 16 apiece for the Cavaliers. On Thursday, James will make his first trip to Cleveland since announcing this summer he would sign with Miami. “I’m sure a lot of them will make their feelings known,” the Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert said, referring to Cavaliers fans. “But as long as everybody plays by the rules and doesn’t go over the top, everything will be fine.” GRIZZLIES 98, LAKERS 96 Mike Conley scored 10 of his season-high 28 points in the fourth quarter, and host Memphis sent Los Angeles, the defending N.B.A. champions, to its third straight loss. It is just the second three-game skid for the Lakers since they traded with Memphis for Pau Gasol to team him with Kobe Bryant. The Grizzlies now have won four straight at home and four of five
over all. The Lakers had a chance to at least tie the game at the end. Conley lost the ball when he drove the lane and crashed into Gasol. Kobe Bryant passed to Ron Artest for a 3-pointer for the win, but Rudy Gay blocked the shot. Gay finished with 14 points, Zach Randolph had 13, Xavier Henry had 12 and Marc Gasol had 10 and 9 rebounds. Bryant finished with a gamehigh 29 points but was 9 of 25 from the field. Pau Gasol had 15 points and 14 rebounds. MAGIC 90, PISTONS 79 Mickael Pietrus scored 13 points and J. J. Redick had 10 as host Orlando pulled away from Detroit. Rashard Lewis added 20 points and Vince Carter had 13 for the Magic, which has won seven of eight games. Tayshuan Prince had 16 points for Detroit, which has lost four of five games. 76ERS 88, TRAIL BLAZERS 79 Elton Brand scored 18 points, and Jrue Holiday and Andres Nocioni added 11 each in host Philadelphia’s win. Philadelphia trailed, 72-70, midway through the fourth before going on a 15-4 run that put the game away with 1 minute 50 seconds left. Andre Iguodala, who entered the game averaging 14.8 points, was held to 7. Wesley Matthews scored 26 points and LaMarcus Aldridge added 20 for the Blazers. BOBCATS’ JACKSON SUSPENDED The N.B.A. suspended Bobcats guard Stephen Jackson for one game without pay for verbally abusing the referee Eli Roe and failing to leave
the court in a timely manner after his ejection from Saturday’s loss to Milwaukee. The suspension — to be served Wednesday when Charlotte visits New Orleans — will cost Jackson about $103,000 based on his $8.45 million salary. It comes on top of the $50,000 fine Jackson received earlier
this month for verbally abusing officials after a loss at Detroit. Jackson, averaging a team-best 18.1 points, has said he is singled out for his direct personality. SURGERY FOR CELTICS’ WEST Boston guard Delonte West is recovering from surgery to repair his broken right wrist.
Jeter Resumes Talks With Yanks By TYLER KEPNER and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
T
he Yankees have resumed talks with Derek Jeter after contentious public posturing early last week. The sides met on Tuesday in Tampa, Fla., though they were not close to an agreement on a new contract. The meeting, which was first reported by foxsports.com, was confirmed by two people in baseball.
Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman left New York on Tuesday and declined to comment when reached late Tuesday night. The Yankees have offered Jeter a three-year, $45 million contract, and they seem to be standing firm. Jeter’s side has asked for four or five years at $23 million or $24 million per year. The reason for the gap is that the sides value Jeter based on different standards. Jeter’s agent, Casey Close, has emphasized his client’s iconic
value to the Yankees and their brand. The Yankees, through Cashman, have voiced concerns about Jeter’s careerworst season in 2010 and his longterm viability as a shortstop turning 37 next June. Cashman invited Jeter to test the open market last week, though Jeter has never shown any desire to play for another team. One team that had a shortstop vacancy, the San Francisco Giants, filled it by agreeing to terms with Miguel
Tejada on a one-year, $6.5 million deal on Tuesday. The Los Angeles Dodgers signed the former Giants shortstop Juan Uribe to play multiple infield positions for three years and $21 million, further limiting Jeter’s options, if he really had any to begin with. No team is likely to match the Yankees’ offer to Jeter, who probably has more value to them than to any other team. It stands to reason that some movement could take place because the sides are speaking again.
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Sports
Miami Off to Slow Start After Free-Agent Coup
By HOWARD BECK
T
he night began with a plume of white powder, a ritual that LeBron James conceived in Cleveland and took, along with his other talents, to South Beach. Heat fans, the ones who arrived on time Monday, cheered reflexively. For years, the puff of talcum signaled greatness and anticipation, like the lingering smoke from a starting gun. Now it just looks like a cloud, shadowing James and coating everyone around him in chalky dust. The Miami Heat is not dominating the N.B.A., nor threatening the record books, nor inspiring visions of a 72-win season. Through 18 games, 8 of them losses, James’s new team has inspired only consternation and controversy. James and Dwyane Wade are struggling to blend their electrifying skills. Chris Bosh is struggling to redefine himself. Erik Spoelstra, the N.B.A.’s secondyoungest head coach, is struggling to pull them together and avert catastrophe, which could include losing his job. That smoky celebration in July, when the stars preened on stage and James predicted multiple titles — “not two, not three” — looks more awkward every day. “I think it’s come a lot slower, personnel-wise, than we thought,” James conceded. “As far as the record, those are things that you can’t control.” It was a curious assertion, given that James came here for the express purpose of uniting with Wade and Bosh, to create a superteam worthy of the basketball history books. A monstrous winning percentage was sort of implied. Yet Miami is fifth in the Eastern Conference, barely ahead of the Cavaliers, his hometown team, the one he spurned last summer. On Thursday, James will make the journey home, for a nationally televised grudge match with his former team and its fans. Two months ago, fans would have expected a rout for Miami. But the Heat has shown more stagger than swagger, to the great glee of Cavaliers fans. A grass-roots Laugh at LeBron movement was started on Twitter this week, urging the Quicken Loans Arena crowd to mock James rather than boo him. That might be the most benign suggestion anyone
has made. In July, angry fans burned James’s jersey. To mark his return, a local bar, the Barley House, is holding a LeBron James Roast, which will feature the roasting of a pig with James’s No. 6 branded on it. Although the league will not provide details, security is expected to increase drastically for Thursday’s game. No matter the response, it promises to be an intense evening for all involved. James grew up in Akron, Ohio, and grew into a two-time most valuable player during his seven years with the Cavaliers. He led them to the finals in 2007 and to consecutive 60-win seasons before Cleveland bowed out, ingloriously, to the Boston Celtics in the second round last spring, in what turned out to be his farewell. “I think it’s going to be very emotional for myself,” James said. “I got a lot of great memories in that city. So many times, from ups and downs and a lot of thing that I’ve done in my life. I give a lot of thanks to that city, a lot of thanks to those fans for giving me the opportunity to not only showcase my talent, but grow from a young boy to a man in my seven years. “So it’s going to be very emotionally draining.” The Heat has already endured it share of tumult. Miami started the season 5-4, then followed a threegame winning streak with a three-game losing streak, including stunning upsets by Memphis and Indiana. Bosh was the early scapegoat, for failing to deliver nightly double-doubles. The blame then passed to the Heat role players, particularly the big men, for failing to provide an inside scoring threat or protection at the rim. Even Heat fans have come under fire, for failing to arrive on time and stay through the final buzzer, making American Airlines Arena look half-empty. The trend was so disturbing that the team started a campaign urging supporters to Fan Up. Now the focus is on Spoelstra, who has reportedly clashed with James and is being blamed for the Heat’s stilted offense. “We all know that we’re not playing at a high level right now,” Spoelstra said. “We can play much bet-
ter and get to another level that we all anticipated. How long that will take, I don’t know.” Even the leader of the free world is urging patience. “It takes some time for the team to come together,” President Obama told ABC’s Barbara Walters last week. The most pointed observation came Sunday, when Tracy McGrady — a former star in the mold of James and Wade — said that those two look “terrible” on the court together. “They’re rhythm players that need the ball,” McGrady said. Scouts have made the same observation: Wade and James appear to be taking turns as the primary playmaker and scorer, rather than finding a way to blend their talents. In their victory over Washington on Monday, James carried the load in the first half, scoring 20 points, then watched Wade go for 22 points in the second half. Wade said it was only the second game this season when “we both felt comfortable with each other taking over, and not necessarily worrying about when we’re going to get a shot or when we’re going to get the ball.” “We will learn each other,” Wade insisted. Until they do, the Heat may be just another talentrich, chemistry-poor team trying to forge an identity, instead of the basketball behemoth everyone expected. “Players and coaches know that talent alone doesn’t do it,” James said, suggesting that the news media had perhaps expected too much, to soon. “But it takes time.” James and Wade seem committed to the task, no matter how long it takes. First, they must deal with a tense homecoming in Cleveland. Some have questioned whether it is wise for James to taunt Cavaliers fans with his talc toss. James said he “probably will,” then demurred. “We’ll see,” he said with a light grin. “I may change, I don’t know.” Wade, ever the supportive teammate, said James should not have to change his routine. “If he don’t throw it up,” Wade said, “I’ll throw it up for him.”
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