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Puerto Rico Baffled by

High Asthma Rate

Serious Dropout Problem P3

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The San Juan Weeekly

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The San Juan Weekly

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The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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Serious Dropout Problem in Puerto Rico D

ropping out of school is a problem that affects many societies, including the Puerto Rican society. This problem is mainly due to lack of financial resources and family disintegration. In Puerto Rico there is no abrasive poverty as other global countries. However, while in Puerto Rico most people are supported by government aid, poverty is nonexistent.

This poverty is reflected in the poor family planning where households consist mostly of more than three members and only one of them works to support the others. The situation is aggravated when the member is unemployed and does not get a job immediately.

This is mainly the case in public schools. Some young people attending high school also have work responsibilities. Why? There are cases where the monetary income for the family is not enough. Thus, many unfortunately have to leave school to assist with the household expenses.

On the other hand, many of our

young girls end up pregnant before finishing there studies. Sometimes the girls are absent for a reasonable time but return to complete their scholastic degree. However, many in order to fulfill their new role as mother, stop studying to devote themselves full time to their new family. Sometimes they have to rely on a job that will provide enough to sustain themselves, in other cases their parents help raise their baby. Thus many are unable to obtain their graduation diplomas as they are obligated to leave school.

In the case of a young boy, this is the same. Now they have to assume parental responsibility. This means the boy has to start work to support his family. There are times when they can not meet both, and leave school and not graduating.

For many it is more attractive to go to work and earn a salary then to stay in school, in which they understand does not provide what they need. However, the dream of owning a property, many

times is never reached, because the opportunities for young people without a high school diploma tend to be those with low pay wages and night hours.

In others words, these young people become illiterate and lack skills needed to achieve their aspirations.

Many of these young dropouts lack the skills needed to achieve economic wellpaid employment. That is why many of theses young people only manage part-time employment or underemployment.

In Puerto Rico being a largely industrial country, there is a demand for workers with training, with high school diplomas and college degrees, preferably postgraduates. A high school diploma is essential for minimum wage jobs, but many young people do not understand that.

As studies show, some kids are more likely to be future dropouts, given the environment in which they are raised. These are the ones mostly with discipline problems, children of parents who did not complete their studies, low income or problems with the law. In fact, economic problems and family instability are the major reasons in the life of a dropout.

The School and the Student: The reality is that there is much talk of the reasons why young people leave school, but it is never talked about how on occasions the school abandons the student. A dropout will leave school simply because they are not offered the necessary educational tools needed for students starting the preschool years.

The root of the problem for the dropouts begin in their primary grades, the school leaves them out many times because of all the gaps during their elementary school years and go to higher grades without their basic skills.

One of the initiatives discussed was the creation and implementation of the Educational Opportunities Act in July 1, 1999. The purpose of the act is to provide educational assistance and scholarships to students whose families are economically disadvantaged. So far 81,422 grants have been awarded, with an investment of $25,744,061. This Act and other initiatives, will guarantee the access to the first year of postsecondary education to all the students admitted to the secondary level with a GPA of 3.00 points or higher.

The dropping out of school is an alarming problem. Children and the young people, when they leave school, they leave an important environment in life: school. School life, among other things, is responsible for cultivating the intellectual faculties, developing the capacity to view, promote the sense of value, to prepare for professional life, promote friendliness between students.

School is essential in the formation as a professional and as an individual.

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The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Strategies Againts School Desertion 1st Strategy Address the academic and social progress of children, with emphasis in preschool and preventive transitional grades. The study has found that the characteristics of students at risk can be identiďŹ ed in the third grade.

Identify and properly address these students will result in greater retention.

2nd Strategy Develop a positive school environment with capable staff and managers in providing effective care for the youths at risk. Under this strategy personal attention will be provided

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Enjoy our Executive Lunch Menu Monday to Friday from 12:00m to 3:00 pm

to students at risk, many students claim that the lack of attention from teachers and principals has been the principal cause of them dropping out of school.

3rd Strategy

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Set high expectations in the areas of attendance, academic achievement and discipline. It has been found that by demanding high expectations from the students, they develop the necessary self-esteem for their academic success.

tive to the needs of students at risk.

It is important that teachers have the ability to listen in order to orient them properly. An important point noted in this strategy is the collaboration between universities dedicated to preparing future teachers. Proposed are a quality curriculum and a more ri4th Strategy gorous acceptance of student teacher Select and train teachers recep- candidates.

Strategy V Provide variety of instructional programs for students at risk.

Because the youth at risk may be under developed, come from an economically disadvantaged household and have problems with the law, it is necessary to design effective programs to attack these problems from different points. Suggested are other alternatives, alternative schools, programs for children who speak English, compensatory education, and work-study experiences in an effort to reduce students dropping out of school.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

EPA Issues Annual Report On Chemicals Released Into Land, Air And Water In Puerto Rico T

he U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued its annual report on the amount of toxic chemicals released to the land, air and water by industrial facilities in Puerto Rico in 2009. The Toxics Release Inventory report showed an overall increase in the amount of chemicals released by 114 facilities that are required to report their releases to the Agency. The increase was largely due to the October 2009 explosion and fire at the Gulf Caribbean Petroleum Refining (CAPECO) facility in Bayamon.

Total releases to air, water and land by reporting facilities on the island increased by nearly 10% from 4.6 million pounds in 2008 to 5.1 million pounds in 2009.

EPA added 16 chemicals to the list of reportable toxic chemicals in November 2010. These chemicals are reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens, and represent the largest expansion of the reporting program in a decade. Data on the new chemicals will be reported by facilities on July 1, 2012.

Facilities must report their chemical releases by July 1 of each year.

This year, EPA made a preliminary set of data for 2009 available in July, the same month as the data was collected.

This is the earliest release of data to the public ever.

“This report informs the public and policymakers about the types of pollution in our communities and where they come from,” said Judith

Enck, EPA Regional Administrator.

“It is an invaluable tool that we all can use to better understand pollution problems and to take action to protect health and their local environment.

The data is a reminder that we need to work toward preventing pollution at the source.”

Since 1988, Toxic Release Inventory data has been provided to the public annually to help people learn more about the chemicals present in their local environment and gauge environmental trends over time. The inventory contains the most comprehensive information about chemicals released into the environment reported annually by certain industries and federal facilities. These facilities have permits issued under federal regulations that set strict limits on the amount of chemicals that they are allowed to release into the air, water or land. Many are required to install and maintain pollution controls.

Nationally, over 20,000 facilities reported on approximately 650 chemicals for calendar year 2009. The Toxic Release Inventory provides information to the public on which facilities are increasing and decreasing their output of toxic chemicals and compounds. With improvements in EPA’s system, the vast majority of facilities now report data electronically and detailed information about specific facilities is more readily accessible to the public.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly

Puerto Rico Baffled by High Asthma Rate S ix-year-old Jaycco Paris has only tossed the ball toward the basket for a few minutes when he plunks himself down on a bench to rest before he starts wheezing.

Jaycco is one of tens of thousands of children with asthma in Puerto Rico, which has one of the highest asthma prevalence rates in the world. His mother, Rosa Agosto, rarely lets him out of her sight and has banned him from his favorite sport, baseball, fearing the dust and exertion will send him to the emergency room.

“I’m thinking about his asthma all day,” said Agosto, who regularly freezes the few stuffed animals she let her son keep to kill any mites, a common asthma trigger. “That’s why I rarely let him out of the house.”

Puerto Rico is a U.S. Caribbean territory where children are nearly 300 percent more likely to have the respiratory ailment than white nonHispanic children in the continental United States. And this year, Puerto Rico has seen a jump in asthma cases, which health officials suspect might be linked to the heavy rains that have unleashed millions of spores.

The island, with a population of 4 million, already has 2.5 times the death rate stemming from asthma as the mainland, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Puerto Ricans in the U.S. also have been hit hard by asthma, with an asthma attack rate 2.5 times higher than for whites.

Adding to the problem is that Puerto Rican children do not respond as well as those from other ethnic groups to the number one medication prescribed to asthmatics: Albuterol, which comes in an inhaler used to relieve sudden attacks. As a result, several major pharmaceutical companies are working to create another medication, but they are still years away from doing so.

“What’s a challenge is that Puerto Ricans are not all the same,” said Dr. Esteban Gonzalez Burchard, director of the Center for Genes, Environments & Health at the University of California, San Francisco. “(They) are racially mixed.”

Those with European ancestry are likely most at risk of developing asthma, he said.

No one knows for certain why Puerto Ricans suffer so much from asthma, despite decades of research.

Theories include volcanic ash that drifts in from nearby Montserrat, clouds of Sahara dust that blanket the city in the summer and fungi that flourish in the tropical humidity — particularly bad this year, the wettest on record.

Some researchers suspect poverty and the fact that tens of thousands of people like Jaycco live in dingy public housing projects with mice and cockroaches — known asthma triggers.

“Asthma is huge in Puerto Rico,” Gonzalez said. “Compared to other populations, it’s extremely high.”

Puerto Ricans, even when living in the same environmental conditions as other ethnic groups,

Jaycco’s chronic asthma has forced him to miss several weeks of school this year. still show higher rates of asthma, he said, which suggests that genes are at least partly to blame.

U.S. and Puerto Rican health officials have launched many research projects to attack the problem, but in the meantime, it is costing the island untold amounts in lost productivity and missed school days, burdening a health care system already overwhelmed with wheezing kids.

Jaycco, whose Spiderman lunchbox is filled with medicine, has missed several weeks of school this year but his family tries to minimize his outbreaks. The boy, who lives in the Caribbean’s largest public housing complex, Luis Llorens Torres, is rarely left alone. Most of the time, he bikes, runs and skates inside the house under his mother’s watch. When outside, he carries a list of emergency phone numbers.

An average of 25,000 asthma-related emergency room claims are filed a year, and in the span of one year, nearly 90,000 Puerto Rican adults could not work or do regular activities because of asthma, according to a 2007 and a 2009 study by the island’s health department.

Asthma takes the fun out of childhood and makes parents anxious, because they do not know when the next attack might be coming, said Dr. Gilberto Ramos, a professor at the graduate School of Health at the University of Puerto Rico.

“There is nothing worse than watching a child have an asthma attack,” he said. “You think they are going to die.”

Asthma usually hits people in the U.S. Caribbean territory as infants.

Nearly 30 percent of children in Puerto Rico

are diagnosed with asthma, and the rate increases to 40 percent among kids in public housing projects, said Dr. Floyd Malveaux, former dean of the College of Medicine at Howard University.

“Unfortunately, the children in Puerto Rico do have the highest rates in the world,” he said.

“Whether it’s more genetics or more environment, we don’t know.”

Malveaux is overseeing a $1 million, fouryear program funded by the Merck Childhood Asthma Network that will target asthmatics in one of San Juan’s largest public housing projects next year. The aim is to provide access to better health care and teach parents and children how to prevent attacks.

A similar project in the early 2000s targeted two other housing projects in San Juan, where health officials monitored more than 200 asthmatics and visited their homes to encourage people to quit smoking and help eliminate mold, cockroaches and other allergens.

Emergency room visits dropped by 30 percent, but living and working in such an environment has its drawbacks, said Dr. Marielena Lara, a pediatrician and policy researcher at the RAND Corporation in California who was involved in the study. Drive-by shootings and other frequent violent incidents would force children to stay at home and miss appointments, and parents also had other priorities, she said.

“If you’re poor, you’re many times overwhelmed with getting out of poverty,” she said. “You might have less time to make an appointment with a doctor.”

Children with uncontrolled asthma can miss more than two weeks of school a year, often forcing single parents to forgo work. Even when children go to school, teachers have no training or resources to deal with an asthma attack, said Dr. Alberto Rivera Rentas, who researched the effect of fungi on asthma in Puerto Rico and works for the U.S. National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

People with asthma often feel like they are being suffocated and have a heavy weight on their chest. Some describe an attack as trying to breathe quickly through a very narrow straw. Jayyco says it’s as if his throat is tightening but he doesn’t say much more about it. “It bothers me,” he says with a shrug.

In the absence of any concrete explanations for the high asthma rate, health officials in the capital of San Juan are bolstering an education program that aims to reduce the number of emergency room visits by teaching patients how to manage the chronic disease.

An average of 2,000 people a month visit eight clinics that are part of the program to receive treatment for an asthma attack, said Hector Sorrentini, the city’s health director. This year, he said, there has been a significant increase in the caseload. Why? He’s not sure — it’s another part of the mystery.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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Mainland 10

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Unease Grows About Future of Financing for Pell Grants

By TAMAR LEWIN

W

ith the lame-duck Congress winding down and a $5.7 billion gap in financing looming for next year’s Pell grants — and a further $8 billion gap for the following year — there is growing uncertainty about the future of the grants, the nation’s most significant financial-aid program for college students.

After months of wrangling, Congress grappled Friday with stopgap financing to keep the government in business after the budget expires this weekend. But the temporary measures, probably extending to mid-February, will most likely continue the current budget without providing extra Pell money.

Earlier this year, Congress passed legislation that provided an extra $36 billion over 10 years to the Pell grant program and increased the maximum grant to $5,550, up from $4,050 five years ago. But with a new Congress arriving in January and determined

to cut spending, it is unclear whether that expansion is sustainable.

If Congress does not cover the gap in financing, millions of students could see their Pell grants reduced by more than 15 percent, with the maximum grant shrinking by about $845.

Financial aid officers are starting to worry about a program that is supposed to provide more than $30 billion next year to college students.

“Our students count on that money, and we don’t have the resources to try to make that up,” said Alice Murphey, director of financial-aid management at the City University of New York. “There’s always been a lot of support in Washington for Pell, and enough people on our side. This is the first time it’s ever looked like there wouldn’t eventually be a solution.”

Most students and parents are unaware of the uncertainty regarding the grants, Ms. Murphey said, but if they were cut, the reac-

tion would be intense.

“I think there would be a huge rebellion,” she said.

Bigger Pell grants have been a priority of the Obama administration, part of its commitment to expanding access to college and building a better-educated work force.

But with the recession sending more students back to school, the number of unemployed and low-income students eligible for Pell grants has grown rapidly — and with it, the gap in financing.

“Next year, there will be 8.7 million Pell recipients, and the cost of the program will be about $34 billion,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, who is lobbying for full financing for Pell grants. “It’s more than doubled in five

years. Congress has two choices now: they can add $5.7 billion more and keep the maximum award, or they cannot provide it and let the Pell for next year fall.”

Rich Williams, the higher-education associate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said extending the current budget into next year without fully financing the Pell program would be “the worst possible scenario” in avoiding major disruptions in financial aid.

“Congress promised students and families a $5,550 maximum Pell grant next year,” Mr. Williams said, “but if it isn’t funded by the end of this year, given the political situation, it’s going to be much, much harder. Next year the discussion in D.C .will be about reducing overall funding levels.”

Republicans Prepare for Looming Budget Battle

By CARL HULSE

T

he collapse of a government-wide spending package in the final days of this Congressional session sets up a politically charged fiscal showdown early next year, testing the determination of Republicans about to take over the House with promises to slash an array of domestic programs.

As Congress struggled to assemble a stopgap measure to finance the government at least into the first months of 2011, House and Senate Republicans on Friday hailed their ability to derail a $1.2 trillion spending measure put forward by Senate Democrats, and promised to use their new Congressional muscle to respond to public demands to shrink government.

“Beginning in January, the House is going to become the outpost in Washington for the American people and their desire for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government,” said Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the incoming House speaker.

“I will tell you,” he added, “we are going to cut spending.”

With the lame-duck session entering its final days, there was an air of partisan chaos on Capitol Hill as both parties scored important legislative victories and events changed on an almost hour-to-hour basis as the end of Democratic control of the House approached.

Both President Obama and Congressional Republicans claimed credit for the package of tax cuts and unemployment pay the president signed into law Friday. Democrats also appeared poised to repeal the ban on gay and lesbian troops serving openly in the military, a long-sought goal of the party and its progressive constituency.

The House advanced a major Pentagon policy measure that had previously been tied

up in the fight over the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. At the same time, a major immigration measure championed by Democrats and the White House seemed headed toward defeat as early as Saturday.

Republicans celebrated their blockade of the spending package, which Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, had to abandon after Republicans denied him the handful of votes from their side of the aisle that he was counting on to break a filibuster.

Republicans said their determination to kill the omnibus spending package even when top party lawmakers had inserted pet spending projects demonstrated that they were heeding the fervor of voters who were fed up with giant spending measures slipping through Congress in the final hours.

“The defeat of the omnibus should reassure every American that their voice is making a difference in Washington,” said Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and an outspoken foe of increased federal spending.

But the collapse of the Senate measure, which like its House counterpart would have financed government agencies through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, means Republicans could begin the new Congress with an immediate need to resolve the spending stalemate.

With the Senate making slow progress toward a stopgap measure, the House on Friday approved a plan to keep the government open through Tuesday and the Senate later followed suit to prevent a government shutdown after Saturday.

Aides said that behind closed doors, White House officials and some Democratic lawmakers were still trying to strike a deal to finance the government through September.

But the officials said it was much more likely that government financing would be extended only into February or March.

Republicans say that timeline will allow them to quickly put their stamp on the budget for the current fiscal year, and Mr. Boehner and his leadership team have vowed to eliminate about $100 billion in spending out of about $400 billion in domestic programs.

Both sides say reaching that goal will mean very difficult choices and Democrats, promising to resist Republican efforts, say Republicans may find it easier to talk about cutting than actually doing it.

“They have been really good about talking about the need to cut this and cut that, but they are never specific,” said Representative James P. McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “I think it is going to be tough.”

The 2011 spending fight could be complicated by the need to raise the federal debt limit to avoid a federal default — a vote that many new Republican lawmakers have indicated they would not make.

Republicans say the debt limit vote could also present an opportunity, allowing them to tie a package of spending reductions to the debt increase to make it more palatable.

Another complicating factor is that since Democrats retain control of the Senate, House Republicans must reconcile their spending proposals with those crafted by the Senate Appropriations Committee under the leadership of Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii. Senator Inouye is unlikely to agree easily to Republican spending cuts, creating a climate for gridlock as the two parties face off.

On Friday, Mr. Inouye chastised Congress for jettisoning the spending package crafted by his committee, saying that simply extending current funding levels left the government on autopilot and could lead to disruptions. He said it also left too much discretion for determining spending priorities to the

executive branch.

“And in two months we will find ourselves having to pass another 2,000-page bill that will cost more than $1 trillion or once again abdicate our authority to the Obama administration to determine how our taxpayer funds should be spent,” he said.

Mr. Boehner has made changing the culture of the Appropriations Committee a top interest of the new Republican majority, pressing new leaders of the panel to turn it into a center for budget cutting and stocking it with a few anti-spending advocates.

On Friday, he indicated that he would prefer that Republicans next year break up the enormous spending package that died in the Senate and pass a dozen spending bills individually to allow for better scrutiny — a process that could consume considerable time and subject the measures to multiple attacks on the floor.

“I do not believe that having 2,000-page bills on the House floor serves anyone’s best interests, not the House, not for the members and certainly not for the American people,” Mr. Boehner said.

Aides to Mr. Boehner later said the speaker-designate was referring to his desire to have an orderly appropriations process later in 2011 and was not referring to the spending package Republicans would have to quickly assemble in the opening weeks of the new Congress.

Lawmakers on both sides were running out of energy and patience as the session dragged on with no certain conclusion in sight. Even House Democrats who would be turning over control to Republicans seemed ready to call it quits.

“A lot of us just want to go home,” said Representative John B. Larson of Connecticut, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

11 Mainland

Budget Director Returns to Job, Armed for Battle

By JACKIE CALMES

J

acob J. Lew already had bruises after a month as President Obama’s budget director when, his former boss, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, belatedly hosted a farewell party for him. Amid the holiday splendor of a State Department reception room, colleagues sent him off with a memento — a helmet like diplomats wear in war zones.

“No doubt I will need this helmet,” Mr. Lew said, mindful of the budget battles ahead. “When we go to Afghanistan or in Iraq,” he added, “at least you put on body armor, you get into the armored vehicle, there are people who are protecting you. I’m now out there on my own.”

Even as he spoke, the House was finishing debate on the first major compromise between Mr. Obama and Congressional Republicans empowered by their midterm election gains — a package of tax cuts and unemployment aid that Mr. Lew helped negotiate. While the deal drew fire from both parties, liberal Democrats were especially enraged by a two-year extension of Bushera tax cuts for high incomes and wealthy estates and a reduction in payroll taxes for Social Security. In private caucuses, some turned their anger at the White House on Mr. Lew. “This is not a package we could have supported if it didn’t take care of the workers who are most vulnerable,” Mr. Lew said in an interview, echoing the pitch he made to Democrats in private.

But this episode was just a warm-up for what are likely to be bigger confrontations and arduous budget parleys in the next two years. With both Mr. Obama and Republicans vowing to bring down annual deficits swelling the nation’s debt — in very different ways — Mr. Lew becomes an even more crucial figure in the cabinet than budget directors typically are.

And if Mr. Obama were to take steps to reduce the long-term growth of popular domestic programs and military spending and to increase tax revenues — as his own bipartisan fiscal commission recommended — that will force Mr. Lew, renowned as one of the most unassuming officials in Washington, into more clashes with Democrats as well as Republicans.

Like his boss, Mr. Lew is part of an emerging strain of pragmatic liberals who believe Democrats must compromise with Republicans to reduce long-term deficits, or ultimately the mounting debt could force far more severe cuts in Medicare, Social Security and other programs benefiting lowand middle-income Americans.

Budgets are “a self-portrait of what we are as a country,” Mr. Lew said a decade ago as President Bill Clinton’s last budget director.

And for three decades. Mr. Lew has been at the center of power as the nation has lurched from deficits to surpluses and back again.

Now a boyish 55 years old, half a life-

time ago Mr. Lew was a remarkably young lieutenant to Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, the proud Irish-Catholic New Deal Democrat, as Mr. O’Neill repeatedly battled and compromised with President Ronald Reagan and a Republican-led Senate in the 1980s.

Among their deals was the 1983 law preserving Social Security by reducing benefits and increasing payroll taxes, and the 1986 tax code overhaul.

“Even to this day, when I talk with Jack, he’s one of the few people who understand the personality of the Congress,” said Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who was a Democratic congressman in the 1980s and, in the 1990s, Mr. Clinton’s first budget director and later his chief of staff.

Yet through all the years and backroom politicking, Mr. Lew has maintained a bipartisan reputation as a straight-shooter.

He “knows how to deal, and his word is good as gold,” said Billy Pitts, the top House Republican leadership aide in the 1980s. Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, long the Senate Republican leader on budget issues, said he rejected Mr. Lew’s request for the traditional courtesy call before Mr. Lew’s Senate confirmation vote because “I didn’t need to have him waste his time.”

“I’m a fan,” Mr. Gregg said. “Obviously we don’t have the same philosophy but that doesn’t matter. He is a pragmatist.”

At the farewell party at the State Department, where Mr. Lew was a deputy, Mrs. Clinton read “the top 10 things Jack will miss about working at State.” No. 8 was “riding shotgun with Roddy”; assigned a driver, Roderick Martin, Mr. Lew insisted on sitting up front with him. Mr. Lew would call to reassure a colleague “after a rough meeting,” Mrs. Clinton said, and he e-mailed the daughter of another “just to let her know that her mother’s doing fine in Iraq.”

Once confirmed as budget director, Mr. Lew had to hit the ground running, simultaneously negotiating with agencies over budget cuts and lawmakers over the tax deal.

“I’m not sure how I would have done this if I hadn’t done it six times before,” he said.

Mr. Lew said the common thread in all the budget and tax deals back to the Reagan era was his and his Democratic mentors’ insistence that the compromises fairly apportion benefits and pain. He considers his legacy to be his role, as Mr. O’Neill’s aide, in helping to develop so-called distributional analysis, which measures a bill’s impact among income groups.

For antipoverty programs in recent decades, “a lot of the expansions came while there was deficit reduction,” Mr. Lew said.

“So you don’t have to say that you leave your progressive values. And this last deal actually bears that imprint.”

Wendell Primus, who as a House committee aide in the 1980s worked with Mr. Lew on the distribution studies, said

they also helped to devise a strategy to get around Republicans’ opposition to spending for lower-income people: Join in the tax-cutting.

“We made the political calculus that it was easier to reduce taxes on those families than to increase food stamps or welfare benefits,” Mr. Primus said.

So it was that decades later Mr. Obama, in return for temporarily extending the Bush-era tax rates, got expanded tax credits for the working poor and for middle-income families with children and college costs.

After Mr. Obama’s election, Mr. Lew was in line to be director of the National Economic Council. But that job went to Lawrence H. Summers after Mr. Obama named Timothy F. Geithner to be Treasury secretary instead of Mr. Summers. Mrs. Clinton snatched Mr. Lew to be one of her two deputies at the State Department.

As first lady, she had worked with him on the development of the AmeriCorps national-service program and on the doomed health insurance legislation. After the Clinton administration, both moved to New York — Mrs. Clinton as senator and Mr. Lew as executive vice president of New York University and then as an executive at Citigroup. (He still splits his time between

Washington and New York, where his wife, Ruth Schwartz, works on education technology; a son lives in New York and a daughter in Washington.)

At the State Department, he managed its budget and oversaw the department’s “civilian surge” in Afghanistan and Iraq of aid workers and advisers for local governance, farming, education and health. Then last summer, when Peter R. Orszag decided to leave as budget director, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Lew to take the job again.

Mrs. Clinton, in an interview, said that when Mr. Lew told her about Mr. Obama’s job offer, “After I picked myself off the floor, I said, ‘I really can’t stand in your way or the president’s way, but I hope there’s some way that you can say no.’ ” She spoke privately with Mr. Obama.

Asked whether he had persuaded her that Mr. Lew should move, Mrs. Clinton replied, “Apparently not,” then acknowledged that Mr. Lew was perfect for the budget job.

Mr. Lew said Mr. Obama had argued that “the times really required someone with experience,” and “he needed me to do it.”

“When the president of the United States makes that case to you,” Mr. Lew said, “unless you think it would ruin your life, the right thing to do is say, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

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Mainland 12

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Proposed Amendment Would Enable States to Repeal Federal Law

By KATE ZERNIKE

T

he same people driving the lawsuits that seek to dismantle the Obama administration’s health care overhaul have set their sights on an even bigger target: a constitutional amendment that would allow a vote of the states to overturn any act of Congress.

Under the proposed “repeal amendment,” any federal law or regulation could be repealed if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states voted to do so.

The idea has been propelled by the wave of Republican victories in the mi-

dterm elections. First promoted by Virginia lawmakers and Tea Party groups, it has the support of legislative leaders in 12 states. It also won the backing of the incoming House majority leader, Representative Eric Cantor, when it was introduced this month in Congress.

Like any constitutional amendment, it faces enormous hurdles: it must be approved by both chambers of Congress — requiring them to agree, in this case, to check their own power — and then by three-quarters of, or 38, state legislatures.

Still, the idea that the health care legislation was unconstitutional was

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dismissed as a fringe argument just six months ago — but last week, a federal judge agreed with that argument. Now, legal scholars are handicapping which Supreme Court justices will do the same.

The repeal amendment reflects a larger, growing debate about federal power at a time when the public’s approval of Congress is at a historic low. In the last several years, many states have passed so-called sovereignty resolutions, largely symbolic, aimed at nullifying federal laws they do not agree with, mostly on health care or gun control.

Tea Party groups and candidates have pushed for a repeal of the 17th Amendment, which took the power to elect United States senators out of the hands of state legislatures. And potential presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin have tried to appeal to anger at Washington by talking about the importance of the 10th Amendment, which reserves for states any powers not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution.

“Washington has grown far too large and has become far too intrusive, reaching into nearly every aspect of our lives,” Mr. Cantor said this month.

“Massive expenditures like the stimulus, unconstitutional mandates like the takeover of health care and intrusions into the private sector like the auto bailouts have threatened the very core of the American free market. The repeal amendment would provide a check on the ever-expanding federal government, protect against Congressional overreach and get the government working for the people again, not the other way around.”

Randy E. Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown who helped draft the amendment, argued that it stood a better chance than others that have failed to win ratification. “This is something state legislatures have an interest in pursuing,” he said, “because it helps them fend off federal encroachment and gives them a seat at the table when Congress is proposing what to do.”

Professor Barnett, considered by many scholars to be the intellectual godfather of the argument that the health law is unconstitutional, first proposed the repeal amendment in a column published by Forbes.com in 2009.

Tea Party groups in Virginia contacted him. Virginia’s governor, attorney general and speaker of the House, all Republicans, then expressed their support. The speaker, William J. Howell, joined Professor Barnett in an op-ed article proposing the amendment in The Wall Street Journal in September.

Virginia was a particularly ripe place to start the argument. The attor-

ney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, was among the first attorneys general to try to overturn the federal health care law, filing a lawsuit minutes after President Obama signed the measure last spring.

Mr. Cuccinelli argued that the federal provision establishing a health insurance mandate was against a law the legislature had recently passed decreeing that no resident could be required to have health insurance. The judge who declared the mandate unconstitutional last week was ruling in that case.

This month, Mr. Cuccinelli wrote to the attorneys general of every state for their support of the repeal amendment.

The measure was introduced in the House by Representative Rob Bishop, Republican of Utah, who was a founder of the Western States Coalition, which advocates states’ rights.

Sanford V. Levinson, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas, called the proposal “a really terrible idea” because it would give the same weight to small states as it would to large ones, allowing those with a relatively small proportion of the national population to have outsize influence.

“There’s not the slightest chance it would get through Congress” or be ratified by the states, he said. “You can bet the ranch that there are enough state legislators in the large states who will not consider it a good idea to reinforce the power of small parochial rural states in which most Americans do not live.”

Even if it were approved, it would be extremely unlikely to have any practical effect, Professor Levinson said.

“Any bill that can get through the byzantine, gridlocked process of being approved by two houses and the presidential signature is wildly unlikely to be opposed by two-thirds of the states,” he said.

Marianne Moran, a lawyer in Florida who runs RepealAmendment.org, said that legislative leaders in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Texas and Utah, as well as Virginia, were backing the amendment.

“Considering we’ve had 12 states get on board in the last two or three months that we’ve been pushing this, I think we’re getting some speed,” she said. “No amendment has ever been ratified without a broad national consensus — it’s an uphill battle — but we’ve done it 27 times as a country, and I think we can get enough states to agree.”

Proponents say their effort is not directed at any one law or set of laws.

“Our desire is to have it in place so we can repeal as things come up,” Ms. Moran said. “What we’re trying to do is to draw a line in the sand saying the federal government has gone too far.”

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Advise and Obstruct T

he Senate’s power to advise and consent on federal judicial nominations was intended as a check against sorely deficient presidential choices. It is not a license to exercise partisan influence over these vital jobs by blocking confirmation of entire slates of well-qualified nominees offered by a president of the opposite party.

Nevertheless, at a time when an uncommonly high number of judicial vacancies is threatening the sound functioning of the nation’s courts, Senate Republicans are persisting in playing an obstructionist game. (These, by the way, are the same Senate Republicans who threatened to ban filibusters if they did not get an upor-down vote on every one of President George W. Bush’s nominees, including some highly problematic ones.)

Because of Republican delaying tactics, qualified Obama nominees who have been reported out of the Judiciary Committee have been consigned to spend needless weeks and months in limbo, waiting for a vote from the full Senate.

Senate Republicans seek to pin blame for the abysmal pace of filling judicial vacancies on President Obama’s slowness in making nominations. And,

no question, Mr. Obama’s laggard performance in this sphere is a contributing factor. Currently, there are 50 circuit and district court vacancies for which Obama has made no nomination. But that hardly explains away the Republicans’ pattern of delay over the past two years on existing nominees, or the fact that Senate Republicans have consented to a vote on only a single judicial nomination since Congress returned from its August recess.

At this point, the Senate has approved 41 — barely half — of President Obama’s federal and district court nominees reported by the Judiciary Committee.

Compare that with the first two years of the George W. Bush administration when the Senate approved all 100 of the judicial nominations approved by the committee.

The final days of the lame-duck session are a chance to significantly improve on this dismal record and to lift the judicial confirmation process out of the partisan muck.

Of the 38 well-qualified judicial nominees awaiting action by the full Senate, nearly all cleared the Judiciary Committee either unanimously or with just one or two dissenting votes. Some nominees have been waiting for Senate action for

nearly a year. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, should allow confirmation of all 34 nominees considered noncontroversial, including the 15 nominees cleared by the committee since the November election.

There are four other nominees who were approved by the committee over party-line Republican opposition. They, too, deserve a prompt vote rather than requiring President Obama to start the process over again by renominating them when the next Congress begins. That short list of controversial nominees includes Goodwin Liu, an exceptionally wellqualified law professor and legal scholar who would be the only Asian-American

13 Mainland

serving as an active judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His potential to fill a future Supreme Court vacancy seems to be the main thing fueling Republican opposition to his nomination.

Mr. McConnell is said to be negotiating a deal with Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, that allows for confirmation of 19 nominees approved by the committee before the election but denies consideration by the full Senate to the others.

That would be a disservice to the judicial system, to Mr. Obama’s nominees and to the idea that bipartisanship should exist, at last, in the advise-and-consent process for federal judges.

Mainland 14

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

R. Richard Rubottom, Who Helped Shape Cuban Policy, Dies at 98

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

R

. Richard Rubottom, a diplomat who influenced and helped hone United States policy toward Latin America in the late 1950s, a time of economic and political tumult that culminated in Fidel Castro’s takeover in Cuba, died Dec. 6 in Austin, Tex. He was 98.

His family announced the death.

Mr. Rubottom rose from modest roots — his parents ran a boardinghouse in central Texas — to become the “official most responsible for defining United States Cuban policy” in the years immediately surrounding the 1959 Cuban revolution, the historian Thomas G. Paterson wrote in “Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution” (1994).

Mr. Rubottom began grappling with foreign policy issues in Latin America as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1956 to 1960. In 1958 he accompanied Vice President Richard M. Nixon on a widely publicized tour of Latin America that was marred by violent demonstrations against the United States. After protesters in Caracas, Venezuela, shattered windows in the vice president’s car, news reports suggested that Mr. Nixon partly blamed Mr. Rubottom for allowing his motorcade to be put in harm’s way.

As a high-level strategist on American policy toward Cuba in the late 1950s, Mr. Rubottom was portrayed in books and news reports as a strong early supporter of the country’s repressive leader, Fulgencio Batista as he battled the rebellion led by Fidel Castro.

But Mr. Rubottom later worried that Mr. Batista’s “brutal retaliatory tactics” were eroding his support and questioned whether the United States should continue to sell tanks to Cuba after it became known that Mr. Batista was using them against his domestic opponents, a violation of American law. Mr. Batista ultimately canceled the tank order.

With the rise of Mr. Castro, Mr. Rubottom represented the State Department in meetings with military and intelligence officials on whether, how and when to try to eliminate him both before and after he seized power in January 1959.

Yet when Mr. Castro visited the

United States in April 1959 as Cuba’s new leader, Mr. Rubottom was on hand to greet him, and he was deputized to ask Mr. Castro what American aid he would like. Mr. Castro said none.

Some politicians and historians have criticized Mr. Rubottom for not identifying Mr. Castro as a Communist before he took control. But Adolf A. Berle, a former assistant secretary of state, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1962 that he knew for certain Mr. Rubottom had not known.

However, he and his deputy, William Wieland, were convinced that Mr. Castro was “a hopeless megalomaniac,” Mr. Berle wrote, and that the “optimistic image created by the uninformed American press” was wrong.

In 1960, Mr. Rubottom created a controversy by telegraphing Gov. Edmund G. Brown of California with an appeal by the Uruguayan government to halt the planned execution of Caryl Chessman, a convicted robber and rapist who had become a global cause célèbre for opponents of capital punishment. Governor Brown granted Mr. Chessman a 60-day reprieve, although he was ultimately executed.

Mr. Rubottom said he had merely been passing on information that related to American foreign policy — Uruguay opposed the death penalty — but his action ignited a debate over federal intervention in state matters and prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to issue a statement saying the execution was entirely a California matter.

Roy Richard Rubottom Jr. was born on Feb. 13, 1912, in Brownwood, Tex. He won a scholarship to Southern Methodist University, where he was president of his class and editor of the college newspaper. After graduating in 1932 with a journalism degree, he stayed on at S.M.U. to earn a master’s in international

relations in 1935.

Afterward he traveled the country as national secretary for his college fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha; sold kitchen appliances and oil field equipment; and served as an assistant dean at the University of Texas.

During World War II he served in the Navy in Mexico and Paraguay.

After his discharge as a commander in 1946, he became vice president of a bank in Corsicana, Tex. But his interest in foreign affairs led him to join the Foreign Service after taking a special exam for war veterans. His postings included Colombia and Spain.

Years later he was removed from his post as assistant secretary and appointed ambassador to Argentina in July 1960 after “persistent reports of dissatisfaction by Vice President Nixon,” according to The Times.

After leaving the State Department, Mr. Rubottom had a second career in higher education, serving as a vice president of Southern Methodist University; president of the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico; and as a professor of political science at S.M.U. Mr. Rubottom’s wife of 69 years, the former Billy Ruth Young, died in 2008. He is survived by his daughter, Eleanor Odden; his sons, Frank and John; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

When it came to improving inter-American relations, Mr. Rubottom was not above counting beans — literally. In 1958 he said in a speech that if each American used 12 more coffee beans in each cup of coffee, coffee consumption would rise by 600 million pounds, enhancing stability and prosperity in coffee-growing nations.

Fixing Error, Senate Passes Food Bill Again

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

T

he Senate on Sunday passed a sweeping bill to make food safer, sending it to the House in the waning days of the Congressional session.

It was the second time the Senate passed the bill, which would give the government broad new powers to increase inspections of food-processing plants and force companies to recall tainted food. The first time, three weeks ago, it was caught in a snag when senators mistakenly included tax provisions that by law must originate in the House.

The version passed Sunday was amended to avoid another such problem.

The bill would place stricter standards on imported foods and require larger producers to follow tougher rules for keeping food safe.

The legislation has bipartisan support, and supporters say passage is crucial in the wake of E. coli and salmonella outbreaks in peanuts, eggs and produce.

Recent domestic outbreaks

have exposed a lack of resources and authority at the Food and Drug Administration as it struggled to contain and trace the contaminated products. The agency rarely inspects many processors or farms, visiting some every decade or so and others not at all.

The bill emphasizes prevention so the agency could try to stop outbreaks before they begin. Farmers and food processors would have to tell the agency how they are working to keep their food safe at different stages of production.

Congress is rushing to wrap up for the year, and many people thought the bill was dead until it was resurrected by majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. who said it was necessary because the food safety system had not been updated in almost a century.

Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, called it “a huge victory for consumers following a weekend cliffhanger as both consumer and industry supporters prepared for bad news.”

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

15

Garden

Reigning Trowel in a Kingdom of Orchids

By NANCY BETH JACKSON “

A

nybody can have goldfish,” Robert Fuchs said, showing off the 12-foot-deep fishpond in his orchid-draped walled garden near the Everglades. In the pool, a glittering mass of Brazilian red-tail catfish churned the waters at feeding time and, on a ledge just above, a four-foot alligator named Wally waited for Mr. Fuchs to whistle, signaling that it was time for chicken thighs.

The fishpond began as a solution hole, a natural depression in the underlying coral reef, where Mr. Fuchs’s grandfather burned trash in the dry season. Mr. Fuchs deepened it, adding lush landscaping, a nearly 10-foot-high waterfall and a huge wooden observation deck, as well as an outdoor living area around his house, a few steps away.

The result is a subtropical paradise where you might expect to see Dorothy Lamour lounging in a sarong, a velvety white cattleya orchid behind her ear.

Or more likely, an exotic fuchsia vanda orchid, if Mr. Fuchs has any say. The president of R. F. Orchids, a nursery here, Mr. Fuchs does everything theatrically. “I like the wild factor, for people to go in and say, ‘Wow!’ ” he said, adding

that he specializes in the vanda because “it is probably the most flamboyant of all orchids.”

Mr. Fuchs, whose father and grandfather grew orchids in the farmlands near Homestead, was a junior high school art teacher in 1984 when he burst on the international orchid scene at the 11th World Orchid Conference in Miami. After his juicy red hybrid vanda won the grand champion title at that event, widely considered the orchid Olympics, he quit his day job.

Today, he is orchid royalty, perhaps the king of the orchids, as Susan Orlean suggested in her 1998 book, “The Orchid Thief.” His Homestead nursery has annual revenues of $1.5 million, and has won more than 800 awards — a record — from the American Orchid Society. Last month he presided over the 19th World Orchid Conference, again in Miami, and walked away with a slew of prizes, including the grand champion display exhibit award he had long coveted.

He lives an orchid lover’s fantasy on a 10-acre plot where his grandfather, Fred Fuchs Sr., had a concrete-block cabin, and where he himself has created a kind of private grand champion display exhibit. He and Michael Coronado, his life and business partner, share a

who is known not for relaxation but for extreme focus and compulsive attention to detail — attributes that have won him both admirers and enemies in the orchid world.

“His gift is that he can see how things will finish,” said his mother, Barbara Fuchs, by way of explaining his intense demeanor.

Mrs. Fuchs now lives in Tennessee but often visits, particularly when there’s an orchid exhibit to stage.

She and her late husband used to lead Latin American orchid tours; today, at 82, she accompanies her son, the second eldest of four boys and a girl, on his tours of places like Tibet and Cambodia.

In Mr. Fuchs’s garden, stone paths meander through a jungle of gingers, heliconia, exotic palms and several thousand orchids. He 3,800-square-foot, Mediterranean- designed the garden to give the eye style house with marble floors and somewhere to rest at every point cathedral ceilings that Mr. Fuchs along the path — on the cage of a built in 1987. (His grandfather’s ca- brilliantly colored macaw, a giant bin survives as a guest house, atta- bronze turtle, the lagoon-shaped ched to the new structure by a two- pool where a blue-black bottom sets car garage.) But the couple spend off a showy vanda mosaic. Maintemost of their time outdoors in their nance is low, as he lets the plants private, open-air garden and in grow naturally.

Some of the orchids are more three acres of orchid greenhouses, a than 60 years old, collected or dizzying kaleidoscope of colors.

“Mornings, I go out in the gar- grown by his grandfather. The elden with my cup of coffee,” Mr. der Fuchs introduced his grandFuchs said. “In the evening, I close son, now 61, to orchid hunting in the gate to the nursery and come the swamps when he was barely in grade school. To make sure he back.”

“It’s magical, enchanting, pea- didn’t disappear into an alligator ceful, relaxing,” said Mr. Fuchs, Continues on page 16

Garden

16

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Comes from page 15 hole, his grandfather tied a rope around his waist, yanking when the rope stretched taut. By 19, Mr. Fuchs had discovered his first natural hybrid, in Nicaragua, which is still in his collection.

“Orchids live forever as long as you take care of them,” he said.

“You have to have light and air movement. My main advice is don’t over-water. More people kill orchids through over-watering than anything else.” (Even an urban apartment dweller can have longterm success, he added. “Have a little fan going, grow the orchids in a tray with pebbles, keep a little moisture in, put a grow light over it and you’ll be rewarded.”)

Orchids are everywhere inside Mr. Fuchs’s home, but not all of them are alive. Mr. Fuchs collects orchid memorabilia, and his display cases overflow with crystal orchid prizes and antiques like a 500-year-old Chinese teapot with an orchid traced in red; a gold-and-ruby Fabergé egg with a jeweled orchid at its center; and a 150-piece set of antique porcelain with a hand-painted orchid design. Even the ultramodern den is decorated with 19th-century orchid lithographs.

Above the two-story coral-rock fireplace in the foyer is a painting of the hybrid Vanda Memorial Fred Fuchs by the botanical artist Angela Mirro. In the game room, competing with 19th-century Italian wing chairs in ostrich skin and 42 hunting trophies that he collected on African safaris, is a Tiffany-inspired stainedglass panel Mr. Fuchs designed — as large as a picture window in a

Florida tract home — depicting still more orchids.

Mr. Fuchs’s family came to Florida four generations ago, his German-born great-grandfather buying 160 acres in 1912 for $4,700 before deciding he preferred baking bread to growing beans. His grandfather started a small nursery where Mr. Fuchs raised and sold African violets as a 10-year-old. After retiring from the local post office, his father, a part-time gardener, devoted all his time to growing orchids and leading orchid hunts in Latin America. By the time Mr. Fuchs graduated from high school, he was so involved with orchids his parents gave him a greenhouse, but it was not until his 1984 success that he could afford to

raise orchids full-time.

Not everyone in the orchid world is a fan; he has been a controversial figure since he began winning international prizes, thanks largely to his strong personality.

In “The Orchid Thief,” Ms. Orlean says he “is brassy and opinionated and has at times gone out of his way to be argumentative.”

Martin Motes, another prizewinning vanda grower who lives a few miles away, calls him “a good marketer and an incredible salesman,” but adds that Mr. Fuchs is “a very dominant personality who can be relentless and needs to have absolute control.” Dr. Motes’s wife, Mary, wrote a darkly comic self-published novel in 2006 in which the villain, a controlling orchid society president, is clearly modeled on Mr. Fuchs.

Mr. Fuchs, who served two terms as trustee of the American Orchid Society and five as president of the South Florida Orchid Society, brushes off such criticism as the product of professional jealousies. He is not controlling, he said, “I’m organized and want to run it right, play by the rules and play with the team, but every team has a captain.”

At the recent World Orchid Conference, Mr. Fuchs faced stiff

competition from longtime rivals in the best display category. Employees kept him posted on the blooming status of the 1,000 orchids in his elaborate diorama, called “On the Road to Mandalay,” a 1,000-square-foot exhibit that incorporated an antique Chinese cart, a Buddhist offertory temple and plastic foam mountains designed by his brother Richard, who creates displays for a Florida supermarket.

By the time the judges assessed the scene, the mountains were ablaze in purple, lavender and white orchids.

What edged Mr. Fuchs ahead was the “color flow” he achieved in placing his plants, said Marianne Montoro, one of the judges. “You could erect the Eiffel Tower, but it’s still all about the quality of the flowers.”

Mr. Fuchs was clearly satisfied, though by no means ready to rest on his laurels. He would be heading off shortly to head the judging at an El Salvador orchid show and then leading a tour of gardens and museums in Fuji, Australia and New Zealand.

“Anybody can get to the top,” he said, “but staying there requires considerable effort.”

His mother, in town for the competition, offered another take.

“He’s a perfectionist,” she said. “He can’t help it.”

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

17

ART

When Overlooked Art Turns Celebrity

“The Wine of St. Martin’s Day,” once unappreciated in a dark corridor, is now attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and is being restored by the Prado.

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

T

he painting was beautiful, just not admired. Then suddenly, after more than four centuries, it was. It acquired a pedigree. The art hadn’t changed, but its stature had.

And there it was the other day, propped on an easel in the Prado’s sunny, pristine conservation studio here, like a patient on the table in an operating theater. The most remarkable old master picture to have turned up in a long time revealed its every blemish and bruise, but also its virtues.

In September the Prado made news.

It announced that this painting, “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day,” a panoramic canvas showing a mountain of revelers drinking the first wine of the season, and a few of them suffering its consequences, was by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Only 40-odd paintings by this 16thcentury Flemish Renaissance master survive. This one, from around 1565, came from a private seller, whose ancient family, unaware and clearly unconcerned, had kept it for eons in the proverbial dark corridor, in Córdoba, where it accumulated dirt. Then the Prado conservators took a look. What seemed to be the artist’s signature turned up beneath layers of grime and varnish.

What is it about the discovery of a new work by a textbook name? Headlines over the years have trumpeted this Bruegel, a possible Velázquez unearthed from a university museum basement in Connecticut, a supposed Michelangelo in the foyer of some New York town house where countless people over the years passed it before anybody made a peep. And much more.

The inevitable fuss that followed these announcements can be only partly chalked up to the popular fantasy of finding trea-

sure in the attic, or to the obvious prospect of seeing more great art. Truth be told, new discoveries aren’t always great. The art may have been in plain sight all along, like that Michelangelo statue, which languished in the French Embassy’s cultural services office on Fifth Avenue for most of the last century before its (now much doubted) attribution.

Or it may have been some murky painting already hanging in a museum, with a label saying it was the handiwork of an unknown “school of” someone or someplace, or by some obscure artist whose name didn’t make us pause.

Then the news breaks about its ostensible author, and we slap our heads, yet again, for relying on labels rather than on our eyes, a lesson finally learned, we tell ourselves before admiring the discovery because of its fancier label, as if anything had really changed.

Connoisseurship, notwithstanding the chemicals and gizmos modern science has concocted to aid in its detective work, remains an art. That’s the beauty part of it, and what also keeps alive the business of looking, the flip side of this business being how money and fame can sometimes make dreamers or opportunists out of even the most scrupulous experts and institutions. Is that really a Velázquez the Met announced that it owned? Or a Velázquez that Yale believes it found in its storeroom? Or a Michelangelo that came from the foyer?

In the case of the Bruegel, the signature was not the only argument for saying he did the picture. As with a few other works Bruegel painted, “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day” is done in tempera on fine linen, the pigment mixed not with egg or oil but glue.

What results is a fragile matte surface from which paint gradually falls away. Even with the later varnish removed, a gauzy scrim

seems to cloud the remaining image. Glue from a liner long ago added to the back of the canvas has also caused parts of the picture to pucker and bulge.

So the painting wasn’t easy to decipher, but, on close inspection, not withstanding the damage, it still looked exceptionally beautiful, almost more so for being fragile and ghostly. In the clear light of the conservation studio, you can admire the delicacy of faces and hands and feet, alive and varied, making a jigsaw of humane detail, Bruegel’s trademark: the cripple kneeling at St. Martin’s feet; the mother gulping wine with a baby still clasped to her breast; and the fallen drunk, limbs bent and splayed like a rag doll, face in the dirt.

Copies and an engraving based on the picture further obscured its probable link to Bruegel by attributing the image to his elder son, Pieter the Younger, whose studio turned out dim copies of the father’s art, or else to Jan, Bruegel’s other son. The former chief curator of Flemish painting at the Prado, having never seen “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day” except in reproduction, published an article in a Spanish journal in 1980 that also attributed it to Pieter the Younger.

But the other morning, Gabriele Finaldi, the Prado’s deputy director, recalled having noticed the painting two years ago. Its owner, a young heiress to the historic Medinaceli family, invited Mr. Finaldi to examine a different work that she wanted to sell. He told her he was intrigued by the Bruegel. A year later Sotheby’s, acting on the owner’s behalf, requested an export license to sell it abroad, and the Prado, unsure about the attribution, asked to inspect the picture first.

Privately, dealers are always boasting about spectacular finds: an unknown El Greco in a country home here, a long-lost Rubens in a private collection there. To ask

the original question another way: Why do we want these works to turn out to be by Velázquez and Michelangelo? After all, the art is the same either way.

Partly, of course, there’s the simple pleasure of a good yarn well told, and Michelangelo generally provides a better payoff to a whodunit than Baccio Bandinelli.

There’s big money involved too. When that Bruegel signature materialized, the Spanish Ministry of Culture invoked national patrimony law, which, as Mr. Finaldi acknowledged, amounts to a kind of state-sanctioned blackmail, albeit in service to the public.

The law meant the museum could prevent export and name its price. What might have gone for $100 million or more on the open market (who knows?), went for $9 million, which the government, near financial collapse, will take its time to pay.

The conservator in charge of the painting’s restoration, Elisa Mora, pantomimed the other morning how she still planned to remove the picture’s old lining and glue, a tricky process akin to peeling skin, she said, except, unlike skin, torn canvas doesn’t repair itself. Sometime next year the work should join the museum’s famous Bruegel, “The Triumph of Death,” a prospect that poses a few curatorial challenges because the new picture is so much bigger, painted differently and in much less robust condition, making the pair an odd couple.

At the same time, linking them to Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” with which the “Triumph” has long been exhibited, will require some fresh thinking and maybe the rearranging of a few rooms to get everything straight.

And then the public will finally get its newest old master. In the end we want another celebrity attribution like this one because we want to get things straight. History tries to make sense out of chaos, toward which the world inevitably inclines. Art historians create hierarchies, categories and movements; they attribute causes and effects to conjure an appearance of logic.

Attributing a picture to a household deity like Bruegel or Michelangelo affirms our sense of control, our ability to get a grip on our affairs, at least for the moment. We take comfort in mooring some grimy, forgotten canvas, another example of life’s flotsam and, implicitly, of our own fate, to one of the pillars of art history. After centuries in the wilderness, home. It’s the story of Odysseus in Ithaca, among countless other myths.

There is always hope, in other words, the chance of redemption no matter how belated, a slender thread to lead us out of oblivion, meaning it is not merely order we seek.

It is also the prospect of endlessly reordering the world, so that nothing is ever quite settled, so that everything remains possible, in life and in posterity, as in art. Today a neglected picture, a bedraggled Cinderella, like a surrogate self, hides in the attic. Tomorrow it’s at the Prado.

And ultimately, that Bruegel is us.

CULTURE

18

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Pompeii’s Longstanding Neglect

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

I

s Pompeii crumbling?

So it would seem, judging from the media maelstrom about several recent collapses at the ancient ruins here, including that of the Schola Armaturarum, a spacious hall used by a military association before it was engulfed with the rest of the city by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

A long tract on the north side of the Via dell’Abbondanza — a commercial hub of this formerly prosperous Roman city — is blocked by metal barriers, and some buildings are propped up with scaffolding as a precautionary measure.

Rubble sits on the road where the Schola Armaturarum stood, a remnant of the 1947 restoration that shored up the building after it was damaged by Allied bombing during World War II. The collapses at Pompeii have become a metaphor for Italy’s political instability and its inability to care for its cultural heritage. There have been calls for the resignation of the culture minister, Sandro Bondi, and investigators are beginning to address questions about the management of recent restoration efforts. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, sent a team of experts this month to examine the damage at Pompeii, a World Heritage site, and the findings are to be presented at a conference in June in Bahrain.

“Pompeii is fragile,” said Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, an archaeologist who supervised the site for the Culture Ministry from 1994 to 2009. “There’s the type

of construction, the shock of Vesuvius, the fact that it was buried for centuries in acidy terrain that ate away at the mortar.”

The pounding rains that soaked parts of Italy this fall were also a factor, he said, though far from the only one.

“The rain merely drew attention to a state of neglect that has dragged on for years,” Mr. Guzzo said. “Ordinary maintenance and programmed conservation are not carried out at Pompeii. That is the problem.”

Modern excavation of the ruins began in 1748. After that, the elements and tourism began to take their toll. Because maintenance of the 109-acre site (50 more acres are underground) has always been “irregular and insufficient,” Mr. Guzzo said, Pompeii suffers. “The state of preservation has decreased and will continue to decrease, always more rapidly,” he said. “Collapsing walls are inevitable.”

Stefano De Caro, a former superintendent here and until last month the director of antiquities at the Culture Ministry, said many natural and political issues had plagued the site: the stress produced by two million or more tourists a year, drainage, unruly vegetation, concerns about the staff levels for maintenance, tension with the site’s custodians and a sometimes difficult relationship with local government administrators.

“Pompeii is as complicated as it gets,” Mr. De Caro said.

A state of emergency was declared in July 2008, and a commissioner was appointed to cut through bureaucratic red tape and reclaim the site. Two years

and two commissioners later, the national government declared the emergency over. But some now say that the officials defaulted on their mandate. Prosecutors in the nearby city of Torre Annunziata have begun investigating recent work done to inspect and restore certain sites, including the Schola Armaturarum.

“The collapsing walls show us how this site was managed under the commissioner: all show, little substance,” said Antonio Irlando, a local architect who leads a conservation group that monitors Pompeii. “But then no one pays attention to you if you’re carrying out a census of mundane houses.”

Several things were done. New metal fencing with a “PompeiViva” (Pompeii Alive) logo went up along major streets at the site. Some buildings were opened, including two ancient houses that now offer elaborate multimedia programs.

Yet other projects have fallen short.

An adopt-a-dog program intended to address the site’s stray population ended abruptly, and dogs are straggling in again.

A new bike service functions only sporadically, and the opening of a new visitors’ center has been postponed. Most controversially, a significant renovation of the first-century B.C. amphitheater to host concerts in the warm months prompted some experts to challenge how the restoration was carried out. Others questioned how the money was spent.

“They identified emergencies that had nothing to do with the real problems of Pompeii,” said Ciro Mariano, a union leader and custodian at the ruins. “They didn’t need a commissioner, extra staff and a state of emergency” to contend with illegal guides or stray dogs. Meanwhile,

he added, “the real emergencies continued.”

Archaeologists and other experts generally agree that routine monitoring is important to long-term preservation.

Over the years Pompeii’s topography and general state of health have been evaluated several times, most recently through a project sponsored by the World Monuments Fund. A team of archaeologists, architects and information technology experts drafted a diagnostic program and created a master plan for mapping the ruins. They also recommended steps to maintain the site.

“It was a useful tool, a good foundation, but only as long as it was kept up to date,” said Giovanni Longobardi, an architecture professor at Roma Tre University who helped design the project, which examined wall surfaces, paintings, plaster, floors and protective coverings.

“It assisted the people who managed the site to make the best decisions they could.”

The work abruptly ended in 2006 after its financing was not renewed.

Now, about 30 percent of Pompeii is considered adequately secured, and Mr. Guzzo said it would take about 260 million euros (roughly $348 million) to safeguard the excavated ancient city. A 1997 law granted Pompeii fiscal independence, and the site generates about 20 million euros a year from ticket sales and other proceeds. There’s simply never enough money to go around.

That said, collapses are hard to predict.

“But the more you care for the site,” Mr. Guzzo said, “the more you reduce the danger.”

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

19

New York Times Editorial Ben Franklin’s Nation

By DAVID BROOKS

A

fter you read this column, go to YouTube and search “Hans Rosling and 200 countries.” You’ll see a Swedish professor describe the growth of global wealth over the past 200 years.

He presents an animated time-lapse chart. It starts in 1810, when the nations of the world were clumped on the bottom lefthand side of the chart because they had low income and low life expectancy. Then the industrial revolution kicks in and the nations of the West surge upward and to the right as they get richer and healthier. By 1948, it’s like a race, with the United States out front.

Then, over the last few decades, the Asian and Latin American countries begin to catch up. With the exception of African nations, living standards start to converge.

Now most countries are clumped toward the top end of the chart, thanks to the incredible reductions in global poverty and improvements in health.

This convergence is great news, but has created a psychological crisis in the U.S.

Since World War II, we’ve built our national identity on our rank among the nations.

Some people interpret this loss of leaddog status as a sign of national decline.

Other people think we are losing our exceptionalism. In a world of relative equals, the U.S. will have to learn to define itself not by its rank, but by its values.

What is the core feature of the converging world? It is the rise of a gigantic global middle class.

In 2000, the World Bank classified 430 million people as middle class. By 2030, there will be about 1.5 billion. In India alone, the ranks of the middle class will swell from 50 million to 583 million.

To be middle class is to have money to spend on non-necessities. It also involves a shift in values. Middle-class parents have fewer kids but spend more time and money cultivating each one. They often adopt the bourgeois values — emphasizing industry, prudence, ambition, neatness, order, moderation and continual self-improvement.

They teach their children to lead different lives from their own, and as Karl Marx was

among the first to observe, unleash a relentless spirit of improvement and openness that alters every ancient institution.

Pew Research Center surveyed the global middle class and found middle-class people more likely than their poorer countrymen to value democracy, free speech and objective judiciary. They were more likely to embrace religious pluralism and say you don’t have to believe in God to be good.

Over the next few decades, a lot of people are going to get rich selling education, self-help and mobility tools to the surging global bourgeoisie. The United States has a distinct role to play in this world.

American culture was built on the notion of bourgeois dignity. We’ve always been lacking in aristocratic grace and we’ve never had much proletarian consciousness, but America did produce Ben Franklin, one of the original spokesmen of middle-class values. It did produce Horatio Alger, who told stories about poor boys and girls who rose to middle-class respectability. It does produce a nonstop flow of self-help leaders, from Dale Carnegie to Oprah Winfrey. It

did produce the suburbs and a new sort of middle-class dream.

Americans could well become the champions of the gospel of middle-class dignity. The U.S. could become the crossroads nation for those who aspire to join the middle and upper-middle class, attracting students, immigrants and entrepreneurs.

To do this, we’d have to do a better job of celebrating and defining middle-class values. We’d have to do a better job of nurturing our own middle class. We’d have to have the American business class doing what it does best: catering to every nook and cranny of the middle-class lifestyle.

And we’d have to emphasize that capitalism didn’t create the American bourgeoisie. It was the social context undergirding capitalism — the community clubs, the professional societies, the religious charities and Little Leagues.

For centuries, people have ridiculed American culture for being tepid, materialistic and middle class. But Ben Franklin’s ideas won in the end. The middle-class century could be another American century.

We’ve Only Got America A

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

F

ormer President José María Figueres of Costa Rica has a saying I like: “There is no Planet B” — so we’d better make Plan A work to preserve a stable environment. I feel the same way about America these days. There is no America B, so we’d better make this one work a lot better than we’ve been doing, and not only for our sake. When Britain went into decline as the globe’s stabilizing power, America was right there, ready to pick up the role. Even with all our imperfections and mistakes, the world has been a better place for it. If America goes weak, though, and cannot project power the way it has, your kids won’t just grow up in a different America. They will grow up in a different world. You will not like who picks up the pieces. Just glance at a

few recent headlines.

The world system is currently being challenged by two new forces: a rising superpower, called China, and a rising collection of superempowered individuals, as represented by the WikiLeakers, among others. What globalization, technological integration and the general flattening of the world have done is to superempower individuals to such a degree that they can actually challenge any hierarchy — from a global bank to a nation state — as individuals.

China has put on a sound and light show these past few weeks that underscored just how much its rising economic clout can be used to warp the U.S.-led international order when it so chooses. I am talking specifically about the lengths to which China went to not only reject the Nobel Peace Prize given to one of its citizens — Liu Xiao-

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bo, a democracy advocate who is serving an 11-year sentence in China for “subversion of state power” — but to intimidate China’s trading partners from even sending representatives to attend the Nobel award ceremony at Oslo’s City Hall.

Mr. Liu was represented at Friday’s Nobel ceremony by an empty chair because China would not release him from prison — only the fifth time in the 109-year history of the prize that the winner was not in attendance. Under pressure from Beijing, the following countries joined China’s boycott of the ceremony: Serbia, Morocco, Pakistan, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Colombia, Ukraine, Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Vietnam and the Philippines. What a pathetic bunch.

“The empty chair in Oslo’s Town Hall last Friday was not only that of Liu, but of China itself,” observed Rowan Callick, a columnist for The Australian. “The world is still waiting for China to play its proper, full role in international affairs. The perversity of such a successful, civilized nation playing a dominant role as a backer — if sometimes merely by default — of cruel, failed or failing states is intensely frustrating.”

It gets worse. The Financial Times reported that “outside Mr. Liu’s apartment in Beijing, where his wife Liu Xia has been held under house arrest since the award was announced, large blue screens were erected, preventing television cameras from having a view of the building.”

Clearly, they are feeling insecure.

If China had said “We disagree with this award and we will not be attending. But anytime one of our citizens is honored with a Nobel, it is an honor for all of China.” It would have been a one-day story, and China’s leaders would have looked so strong.

As for the superempowered individuals — some are constructive, some are destructive. I read many WikiLeaks and learned some useful things. But their release also raises some troubling questions.

I don’t want to live in a country where they throw whistle-blowers in jail. That’s China.

But I also don’t want to live in a country where any individual feels entitled to just dump out all the internal communications of a government or a bank in a way that undermines the ability to have private, confidential communications that are vital to the functioning of any society. That’s anarchy.

A China that can choke off conversations far beyond its borders, and superempowered individuals who can expose conversations far beyond their borders — or create posses of “cyber-hacktivists” who can melt down the computers of people they don’t like — are now a reality. They are rising powers. A stable world requires that we learn how to get the best from both and limit the worst; it will require smart legal and technological responses.

That will never be easy. It will be a lot easier with a healthy America, committed to its core values, powerful enough to project them and successful enough that others want to follow our lead — voluntarily.

20 December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weeekly

LETTERS Revolutionary Road Without our help the students of UPR cannot prevail against scoundrels who’ve made a career out of lying, cheating and stealing.

Ygrís Rivera tricked the student strikers in the summer. Had she not, it would all be over and done with by now. And this time the Governor is smokeand-mirroring relief for the $800. I put a gun to your chest and tell you it’ll be okay, I’m taking care of everything---you just hand over your wallet and watch right now.

Even with the $800 rip-off, five out of six students can afford to go on studying, it’s the attrition of the middle class what it’s all about. So if that’s you, get off your butt and on the street and bring a dozen eggs and on to Fortaleza!

Their fascination with the flashing lights on patrol cars had surely escaped no one’s notice.

Then came helicopters. Nowhere else are they used to patrol a city, appropriate police use is hot pursuit, lighting up an area or emergency transport.

Doing a beat on a chopper disturbs people’s sleep and is dangerous---helicopters are the most unsafe of aircraft and a pilot inevitably gets dizzy going round and round like that. And what can you really spot from up there?

Latest police toy is the taser. They tase the handcuffed to their hearts’ delight. And doing so can propitiate strokes, epileptic seizures, permanent neural/brain impairment, patches of blindness and suspected Parkinson’s and Lou Gehring. The devices were developed for use on attackers in lieu of shooting them. Technology viciously perverted.

Frágola Serpieri, Santuce

Mara Andere, Miramar

The Nightsticks Next Time Ygrís Rivera cheated outrageously on the students. She led them to believe they’d won and knifed them in the back once she had what she wanted.

Has anybody, specially grinning Fortuño, stopped to think the stage is set for mayhem come January?

Only now campus activists, who’ve by now earned the respect of students at large, won’t see the Commonwealth Government as an entity they can deal with, but as an unforgiving and treacherous foe.

They’ll have become revolutionaries.

That’s the way it was in 1970 when the police injured and murdered students and the students snipered dead the captain of the Riot Squad and burnt down the ROTC that was then on campus. Not to mention a earlier time when the nacionalistas and the cops fought pitched battles on the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan. It was irresponsible and stupid not to settle reasonably with the students, who, after all, were getting stepped on to begin with. Why should your tuition exemption, that you earned, be taken away because you get a handout from the feds? How can anybody say that wasn’t stealing?

The penepeístas, marionettes of the wealthy that they are, intend to price higher education beyond the reach of the middle class, which in the long run means cheaper wages and uncontested hegemony for the Milla de Oro crowd. We might even go back to the sugar-cane economy and the misery our island lived in back then, in contrast to the opulence of our latifundistas, those with the last names we all recognize despite the century or so gone by.

Rina Rinaldi , San Juan

Police at Play A Puerto Rican cop looks like a charging bull on TV, but they’ve a childish inside that makes them all the more dangerous.

elitist oligarchy, the sort of thing the three fellows above saw plenty of in Europe, enough to grasp how wrong such a socioeconomy is.

A couple of centuries have gone by and what was higher education then is minimal functionality of mind now. Without it, you can’t even vote intelligently and you get a government of Fortuños and Aníbales. University is now basic education within the intent of the Constitution Framers.

It’s hardly shameful for UPR students to go on strike. And only a fiend of disingenuity, or a boda fide nincompoop, would blame them for unintended consequences thereof. The students are, rather, to be admired and respected for fighting for a better Puerto Rico. What’s an indignity on all of us is that they have to do it, the outgoing generation doesn’t have the sense to leave an honorable and equitable lot behind for them.

Belisario Badillo, Hato Rey

To Kill a Reinita UPR Strongman de la Torre calls in the police “to protect from student violence.”

What we’ve seen instead is activists meticulously respectful of people and property. They only slipped yesterday when they smashed that privatesecurity windshield. Our TVs have shown us students and others savagely assaulted by the police.

Electrified and kicked into the groin repeatedly while crushed against the floor and pepper-sprayed by ambush point blank into the eyes.

But mice bite, the cat must be defended. When what’s building up happens, don’t ask why.

Frágola Serpieri, Santuce

From Under the Heel Current UPR students will be out in a jiffy and profs and employees haven’t much at stake either.

It’s parents of young children the phasing away of the middle class hurts the most, the victims these days of penepeísta gangster rule, precisely the ones who can’t hit back. We who’ve got so many bills to pay and jobs or small businesses to hold on to and no time to hit the street nor can we risk getting in trouble.

Abuse of Language To UPR President de la Torre: You call student strikers terrorists because they smashed some windshields. Like your fellow troglodytes Sen. Melinda Romero and FBI Director Luis Fraticelli, you don’t know how to talk. Had those kids shown up at your house and slit the throats of your family, they’d be terrorists. Buy a dictionary.

Revictimizing Our Young Crisálida Martínez, San Juan

Revictimizing Our Young To Gov. Fortuño: With the $800 “quota” what you’re doing is getting even with the UPR for the summer strike, that you caused because you had no business pocketing those earned tuition exemptions. Like if you weren’t paid your salary, your outrageous salary, because you’re getting a windfall campaign contribution from big business, and aren’t you ever?

Caramelo Rodríguez, Old San Juan

Mariano Marte, Santurce

Legacy In a democracy every citizen has a right to an education. It says so in the Constitution. Jefferson and Franklin and Webster made the point that a republic would be an exercise in futility without such a guarantee.

Back then, grammar school and high school didn’t make a high professional of you either, but placed the nation above a community of lumpen, cogs in an economic mechanism subservient to an

It’s the Money Fortuño’s goose in cooked in 2012. As was Aníbal’s in 2008. Why do Fortaleza incumbents do the worst possible jobs? It might be to right away start collecting their obscene pensions—higher than what a US president looks forward to—and that was Muñoz Marín’s mischief. Would they not best have to fall back on their social security like the rest of us?

Ana Montes, Las Lomas

The San Juan Weeekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

21

LETTERS Your Most Ungracious Majesties To Debonair Charles & Unsightly Camilla: How’d you fancy that? How much a new window for a Rolls? You had bloody nerve running into students like that. Realise you two are naught but social parasites on Britain’s purse and you’re soon to be outed. As everybody else in Europe acknowledges, education is a prerogative of the common folk as well. Go get yourself jobs and earn your keep!

Heather of Liverpool

eling so good.

CAP number of visits required for the same thing.

CAP number of patients cooped up in the doctor’s office, waiting all morning to be seen, sharing all their germs, to the physician’s eventual profit.

CAP insurer deductables, exclusions, exemptions and maximums.

CAP uninsureable medical moneymakers injurious long-term: growth-hormone therapy, botox, corneal ctups, liposuction, esophageal ligation and sex-change surgery.

Jackson Winters, Isla Verde

Darth Fortuño

Hard to Tell

His Sith Majesty managed to partisanize the Supreme Court and now he’s using it to abridge freedom of speech and assembly. His latest antics are eerily reminiscent of Senator Palpatine remonstrating before the Senate in Star Wars, the part where he demands and is granted dictatorial power. The toads around Fortuño applauded as he moved the newspaper around. Padmé would’ve wondered, “Is this the way liberty dies, amid thunderous applause?” And his apprentice Darth Sancha. This would all be funny if it weren’t a tragedy for this island community. One thing’s for sure, he’s no American, Americans don’t put up with garbage like that.

The police commander in charge of “field operations” lamented on TV that many communities islandwide beg for a tiny fraction of the police presence the UPR is getting. That he can’t figure why his gorillas are unwelcome on campus.

Is the man genuinely challenged upstairs or is he just making fun of us?

Adam Cramer, Santurce

Progressive???

In the bad old days you couldn’t go to the beach in Puerto Rico. Because, unless you trekked deep into the country, coastlines were taken over by gentry “country clubs.” Muñoz Marín changed all that, he made the whole circumference of the island into the public domain and there’s even a law mandating access to beaches everywhere.

You guessed it. Fortuño wants to reprivatize them.

The governments of Ghana and Ivory Coast best be warned that penepeísta galleons will soon likely appear off their shores in an initiative to reignite the slave trade.

Agustín Manzano, SJ

DON’T CAP Medical Malpractice CAP outrageous doctor fees.

CAP the confusing and never-ending schedules, procedures, rules and regulations, that drive you nuts, particularly the HIPAA, all the aggravation you don’t need when you’re not fe-

NATHAN ARBUNCLE, SANTURCE

I Smell a Rat A fellow got booted from the Legislature for corruption. That’s like being expelled from the Nazi Party for anit-Semitism.

Something else is brewing around this guy in there. Might not our media embark on some investigative journalism and dig up what it is?

Guillaumette Tyler, Puerta de Tierra

Do This Follow-up With half the police force at the UPR nonsense, criminals must be having a field day all over Puerto Rico. You might confirm this by comparing carjackings, murders, buglaries, etc. for today islandwide with daily average.

Lisa Bay, Caparra Heights

Law & Injustice You’re expected to instruct your kids to respect the law. But beyond often being simply idiotic, does the law respect the people?

The first thing apparent of criminal law is an obsessive protection of property. In Puerto Rico somebody beats you up and it’s a misdemeanor assault worth a fine of a few hundred for the pols to buy themselves suits with. But if you’re “intimidated,” and relieved of your wallet full of pics and credit cards and a few tens, they need not

even touch you, it’s eight to ten years in the pen.

How come the integrity of the person is deemed trivial and property inviolate? Unless you’re the governor and somebody throws an egg at you and misses.

Because the laws are drafted for the rich by the rich. We live under a form of government that’s corrupt and hypocritical and teaching your kids something different is perpetuating the denial we all seem to live in.

Anita Roig, Santurce

Ignorance as Oppression To Robert McCarroll: You don’t finally comprehend that uneducation is the cage the politicians and the wealthy who own them keep Puerto Rican minds in.

Mastering English usually means to become educated. And when you do that you don’t settle for minimum wage anymore. And you see through the lies of the politicians and you don’t vote for them, unless you’re lying along with them.

In our time privilege is not only maintained by owning land or factories. Knowledge is increasingly marketable. So those who have don’t want others to get it. English included.

In the age of the Internet, at the threshold of highest-tech communications ever, you’d expect learning to be a its most efficient and cheapest, yet what’s charged only goes up, it’s entry into the oligarchy what you’re paying for, what you can’t afford rather.

Samaria Salcedo, Caparra Heights

UPR Gauntlet What Ygrís Rivera, de la Torre and Fortuño have been doing all along under the guise of negotiating is filibustering. And the desperate fiscal situation is a joke in the face of the most wanton waste in every imaginable useless procedure and bureaucrat orneriness on campus. Works on your adrenalin.

Javier Acevedo, Ocean Park

Kids & Monkeys Today there was no police in Puerto Rico. Half of them were in the various UPR campuses and the rest after that monkey in Dorado. Doubtless crime dipped.

Agustín Manzano, SJ

Kitchen

22

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly

Potato and Onion Frittata

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

T

his dish is based on the classic omelet of Spain, tortilla española. In the authentic dish, the potatoes are fried, and most recipes call for copious amounts of oil. In this version, I steam the potatoes to cut down on oil and use a waxier variety of potato with a lower glycemic index. Waxier potatoes also have a better texture when steamed instead of fried.

1 pound boiling potatoes, peeled if desired and cut in small dice (1/2 to 3/4-inch) 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 medium yellow or red onion, finely chopped Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste (about 3/4 teaspoon) 6 large eggs 1. Steam the potatoes until tender, about eight minutes, and set aside.

2. Meanwhile, heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium heat in a heavy 10-inch nonstick skillet, and add the onions and a generous pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, until tender but not browned, about five minutes.

Add the potatoes to the pan, and toss together gently so that the potatoes don’t break apart. Season generously with salt and pepper. Remove from the heat.

3. Beat the eggs in a bowl, and add 1/2 teaspoon salt and a generous amount of freshly ground pepper.

Stir in the potatoes and onions.

4. Return the pan to the stove, and heat the remaining olive oil over medium-high heat. Drizzle in a drop of egg; when it sizzles and cooks at once, scrape the eggs and vegetables back into the pan. Shake the pan gently while you lift the edges of the frittata, and tilt the pan to let egg run underneath and set. When the bottom of the frittata has set, turn the heat to low and cover the pan. Cook gently for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, heat the broiler.

5. Uncover the pan, and slide under the broiler for a minute or two (watch closely) to set the top. Remove from the heat. Let the tortilla set in the pan for a few minutes, then slide out onto a serving plate. Allow to cool to room temperature, and cut into small diamonds to serve as hors d’oeuvres.

Variations: You can add other vegetables to this to make beautiful tapas. Try 1 cup thawed frozen peas, 1 cup diced steamed carrots or 1/2 to 1 cup chopped blanched greens. Stir into the eggs with the potatoes.

Yield: Serves 10 as a tapa.

Advance preparation: Tortilla española is usually served at room temperature, so you can make this hours before serving. You can even make it a day ahead and refrigerate it, but be sure to allow it to come to room temperature before serving.

Nutritional information per serving: 103 calories; 6 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 127 grams cholesterol; 9 grams carbohydrates; 1 gram dietary fiber; 45 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 5 grams protein

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly

23

Kitchen

Herb Crêpes With Goat Cheese Filling

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

C

repes make delicious, easy finger foods. Cut them in half, top with a filling, then fold them in half and again in half, so they’re like little coronets. These thin pancakes are easy to make in today’s heavy, nonstick crepe pans. Give the batter plenty of time to rest so that the flour swells and softens; that will make the crepes delicate.

For the crepes: 2 large eggs 3/4 cup milk 1/2 cup water 3 tablespoons canola oil 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 ounces whole wheat flour (1/2 cup les 1 tablespoon) 2 ounces all-purpose flour (scant 1/2 cup less 1 tablespoon) 2 to 3 tablespoons finely chopped tarragon, parsley, chervil or chives (or a combination) Butter for the pan 1. Place the milk, water, eggs, canola oil and salt in a blender. Cover the blender, and turn on at low speed. Add the flours, and increase the speed to high. Blend for one mi-

nute. Transfer to a bowl, cover and refrigerate for one to two hours. When ready to cook, stir in the herbs.

2. Place a seasoned or nonstick 6- to 8-inch crepe pan over medium heat. Brush with butter or oil. When the pan is hot, and just before it begins to smoke, remove from the heat and ladle in three to four tablespoons of batter (depending on the size of your pan). Tilt or swirl the pan to distribute the batter evenly, and return to the heat. Cook for about one minute until you can easily loosen the edges with a spatula. Turn and cook on the other side for 30 seconds. Turn onto a plate. Continue until all of the batter is used up. You’ll get about 12 crepes with an 8-inch pan, 16 with a 6-inch pan.

For the filling: 3/4 cup low-fat cottage cheese 6 ounces goat cheese 3 tablespoons plain low-fat yogurt Freshly ground pepper 1. Combine the cottage cheese and goat cheese in a food processor fitted with the steel blade, and blend until smooth. Add the yogurt and pepper, and blend together. Transfer to a bowl. Cover and refrigerate until

ready to use.

2. Cut each crepe in half. Spread a scant tablespoon of the herbed goat cheese on the less cooked side of each crepe. Fold in half, then in half again.

Arrange on a platter. To serve warm, heat for 30 seconds in a microwave or for 10 minutes in a low oven.

Yield: Serves 10 as an hors d’oeuvre.

Advance preparation: Crêpes are good keepers. You can store them in the freezer or in the refrigerator for a couple of days. Stack between pieces of parchment or wax paper so

they don’t stick.

Nutritional information per serving: 162 calories; 10 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 53 grams cholesterol; 11 grams carbohydrates; 1 grams dietary fiber; 261 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 9 grams protein Nutritional information per serving (each crepe): 83 calories; 5 grams fat; 1 grams saturated fat; 36 milligrams cholesterol; 8 grams carbohydrates; 1 grams dietary fiber; 116 grams sodium; 3 grams protein

Turkey and Rice Casserole With Yogurt Topping

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

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his Middle Eastern dish can also include fried stale pita bread that you douse with chicken or turkey stock before topping with the casserole. In the days after Thanksgiving, I’m likely to have all of these ingredients on hand — but not pita, so here I’ve done without it.

1 teaspoon ground allspice 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground pepper 1 medium onion, chopped 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 cup basmati rice, rinsed in several changes of water 2 1/2 cups chicken or turkey stock Salt to taste 3 garlic cloves 2 cups shredded turkey 2 cups drained yogurt or thick Greek-style yogurt 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 1/4 cup crushed or finely chopped walnuts

1. Mix together the allspice, cinnamon and pepper, and divide into 2 equal portions (1 teaspoon each). Set aside.

2. Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium heat in a heavy 2- or 3-quart saucepan. Add the onion and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, until tender, about five minutes. Add the rice and 1 teaspoon of the spice mixture, and stir until the grains begin to crackle. Add 2 cups chicken stock and salt to taste (1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon). Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer 15 minutes until the liquid has been absorbed by the rice. Remove the lid, and place a kitchen towel over the pot, then return the lid. Allow to sit undisturbed for 10 minutes.

3. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Oil a 2-quart baking dish. Heat the remaining tablespoon of oil over medium heat in a large, heavy skillet, and add the garlic. As soon as it begins to smell fragrant, in a few seconds, add the remaining spices and the turkey. Stir together for about a minute until the tur-

key is coated with the mixture. Remove from the heat. Season to taste with salt.

4. Spread the rice in the casserole in an even layer. Top with the turkey.

Douse with the remaining stock.

5. Place the garlic in a mortar and pestle with a pinch of salt and purée.

Stir into the yogurt along with the lemon juice. Spread over the turkey in an even layer, making sure to completely cover the turkey so that it doesn’t dry out in the oven. Sprinkle on the nuts.

Place in the oven and bake 15 to 20 minutes, just until warmed through. Do not allow the yogurt to bubble. Serve hot or warm.

Yield: Serves six.

Advance preparation: You can make this through Step 4 a day before you warm and serve it.

Nutritional information per serving: 331 calories; 12 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 40 milligrams cholesterol; 33 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams dietary fiber; 84 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 24 grams protein

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The San Juan Weekly

Steamed Dumplings: Homemade Is the Way

By MARK BITTMAN

S

TEAMED Chinese-style dumplings — often called shu mai, although there are many other types — are a real treat.

Sadly, though, when served in restaurants they are often disappointing, with too-dense filling, not much flavor and a wrapper that’s chewy rather than tender.

For the most part, the best shu mai are made from scratch, at home. Though they can require a lot of skill, if you focus on quality rather than appearance they will taste better than any you’ve eaten.

Having said that, I’ll admit mine are a bit rustic in appearance.

I use a filling of shrimp and

a lot of seasoning, including a big handful of cilantro and a fair amount of scallions. I purée half the shrimp and cilantro with the scallions and then roughly chop the remaining half by hand, then I meld everything with a soy-based seasoning sauce.

The process ensures that there’s enough “glue” to hold the mixture together, without turning everything to a thick, dense paste. I end up with nice chunks of shrimp with enough air to keep everything light. Ta-dah!

I don’t have the patience (or skill) for pleating, so I lightly dampen the outer edge of the (storebought) wrapper, spoon in a litt- the top. A few minutes’ of steale filling, then pinch the wrapper ming makes the wrappers tender closed in four corners, leaving a and the filling pink and opaque.

With some fresh lime juice bit of the filling showing through

added to the remaining soy seasoning mixture, you have a bright dipping sauce. Grab your chopsticks.

Shrimp and Cilantro Shu Mai Time: About 30 minutes 1/2 cup soy sauce 1 tablespoon rice wine 1 tablespoon sesame oil 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger 1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined 1/2 to 3/4 cup fresh cilantro leaves 1/4 cup roughly chopped scallions, white parts only 10 to 12 round dumpling skins Juice of 1 lime.

1. Combine the soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil and ginger in a bowl. Put half the shrimp, half the cilantro and all the scallions in a food processor and pulse; add just enough of the soy mixture to create a smooth paste, about 1 to 2 tablespoons. Transfer to a bowl.

Roughly chop the remaining shrimp and cilantro, add them to the bowl and stir to combine.

2. Place a dumpling skin on a work surface, moisten

the edges with water, and put 1 teaspoon of the filling in the center. Gather the edges of the wrapper up around the filling, squeezing gently, to pleat the sides; some of the filling should remain exposed. Repeat with the remaining dumpling skins and filling, keeping the dumpling wrappers and dumplings covered with damp towels while you work.

3. Rig a steamer in a large pot over an inch of water; bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Meanwhile, add the lime juice to the remaining soy mixture to make a dipping sauce.

4. Put as many dumplings in the steamer as you can fit in a single layer and cover the pot.

Cook until the exposed filling turns pink and the wrappers are tender, 4 to 6 minutes, then transfer the dumplings to a serving platter. Repeat with the remaining dumplings. Serve with the dipping sauce.

Yield: 10 to 12 dumplings.

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Did Three Wise-Men Really Visit Infant Jesus?

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he Three Wise Men (also referred to as the Three Kings, and as the Magi) were always a part of the Nativity scene. The story of a visit of wise men to the Christ Child is told in the Bible in Mathhew 2:1: "...Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem . . ."

The notion that three wise

men travelled from afar on camels to visit the infant Jesus as he lay in the manger is not exactly in the Bible. Most of the details about these wise men have all been added over the years from sources outside .

Matthew doesn't say how many wise men came from the east, doesn't mention their names, and doesn't provide any details about how they made their journey.

It has generally been assu-

med that the wise men (or magi) were three in number because Matthew 2:11 makes mention of three gifts: "... they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh." Several Eastern religions have claimed up to twelve wise men made the journey to Bethlehem. The Bible passage doesn't mention their names or their method of travel either. It is only assumed they traveled by camel and

they could have easily traveled by foot. The Bible doesn't claim these men to be kings, however it is speculated they were at least learned men and perhaps even astrologers.

According to medieval legend the names of three were Melchoir, King of Arabia, who brought gold; Gaspar, King of Tarsus, whom brought myrr; and Balthasar, King of Ethiopia, whom brought frankincense. These three names do not come from the Bible and did not appear in Christian literature until five hundred years after the birth of Jesus. Obviously the pilgrimage of these kings had some religious significance for these men, otherwise they would not have taken the trouble and risk of travelling so far. But what was it? An astrological phenomenon, the Star?

According to the book “Desire of Ages”, by Ellen G.White, the "wise men" who came seeking the Christ-child were not idolaters; they were upright men of integrity. They studied the Hebrew Scriptures and there found a clearer transcript of truth. In particular, the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament claimed their attention, and among these they found the words of Balaam: "There shall come a Star out of Jacob," (Numbers 24:17). They probably also knew and understood the time prophecy of Daniel (Daniel 9:25,26), and came to the conclusion that the Messiah's coming was near.

In Matthew, noble pilgrims followed a star to Israel to pay homage to the newborn Christ Child.

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They asked King Herod the Great for assistance in finding the child.

Herod could not help them but asked the men to return with news of the child. Warned in a dream, they did not return to Herod.

Matthew 2:1 - “After Jesus had been born in Beth´le·hem of

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Ju·de´a in the days of Herod the king, look! astrologers from eastern parts came to Jerusalem...”

Matthew 2:7 - “Then Herod secretly summoned the astrologers and carefully ascertained from them the time of the star’s appearing” Matthew 2:16 “Then Herod,

seeing he had been outwitted by the astrologers, fell into a great rage, and he sent out and had all the boys in Beth´le·hem and in all its districts done away with, from two years of age and under, according to the time that he had carefully ascertained from the astrologers.”

Jesus was still an infant, probably about a year old, when his parents were startled by these mysterious visitors. They were wealthy men, maybe even nobility, from ancient Persia or Babylon–modern day Iran or Iraq. They had observed the sudden appearance of a new star. Modern scholars have speculated it might have been a supernova or comet. More traditionally it has been interpreted as supernatural light created by angels.

In any case, these Wise Men understood this celestial phenomenon to

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be an omen announcing the fulfillment of ancient prophecies about the birth of the Messiah. They had traveled all the way to Jerusalem to worship the new born divine king.

It is interesting to note that in Matthew 2:11 it states: ...and when they went into the house they saw the young child with Mary its mother, and, falling down, they did obeisance to it.” The statement of coming into a house instead of a stable (or cave) and seeing a “young child,” not a newborn, leads one to think that the wise men didn’t arrive until quite some time after Jesus’ birth. It is believed that the wise men came from the east by following a bright star that led them to to Bethlehem.

Many believe that these gifts brought to the Christ Child by the wise men may well have been the origin of our present-day custom of gift giving at Christmas - or as may religious people believe it it a showing of our desire to emulate the unselfishness of Christ. Whatever the origin, the practice has become universal.

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Life and Death Decisions Weigh on Junior Officers police, unexpectedly declined to participate.

Captain Bonenberger, a graduate of Yale who protested the invasion of Iraq before he joined the Army, had deployed to Afghanistan once before, as a lieutenant in 2007, but had not commanded a combat unit. Now he had the prospect, terrifying but also thrilling, of shouldering greater responsibility than he had ever known.

“You have the ability, and the responsibility, to imagine and implement the strategy that will turn your districts from red to yellow to green,” he said. “Taking command of Alpha

By JAMES DAO

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he hill wasn’t much to behold, just a treeless mound of dirt barely 80 feet high. But for Taliban fighters, it was a favorite spot for launching rockets into Imam Sahib city.

Ideal, American commanders figured, for the insurgents to disrupt the coming parliamentary elections.

So under a warm September sun, a dozen American infantrymen snaked their way toward the hill’s summit, intent on holding it until voting booths closed the next evening. At the top, soldiers settled into trenches near the rusted carcass of a Soviet troop carrier and prepared for a long day of watching tree lines.

Then, an explosion. “Man down!” someone shouted. From across the hill, they could hear the faint sound of moaning: one of the company’s two minesweepers lay crumpled on the ground. The soldiers of Third Platoon froze in place.

Toward the rear of the line, Capt.

Adrian Bonenberger, the 33-year-old company commander, cursed to himself. During weeks of planning, he had tried to foresee every potential danger, from heat exposure to suicide bombers. Yet now Third Platoon was trapped among mines they apparently could not detect. A medical evacuation helicopter had to be called, the platoon moved to safety, the mission drastically altered. His mind raced.

“Did I do the right thing?” he would ask himself later.

Far from the generals in the Pentagon and Kabul, America’s front-line troops entrust their lives to junior officers like Captain Bonenberger. These officers, in their 20s and early 30s, do much more than lead soldiers into

combat. They must be coaches and therapists one minute, diplomats and dignitaries the next. They are asked to comprehend the machinations of Afghan allies even as they parry the attacks of Taliban foes.

As commander of Alpha Company, First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, Captain Bonenberger was in charge not just of ensuring the safety of 150 soldiers, but also of securing the district of Imam Sahib, a volatile mix of insurgent enclaves and peaceful farming villages along the Tajikistan border.

In his first three months of command, he had led soldiers in bruising firefights, witnessed the aftermath of a devastating car bomb, nominated soldiers for valor awards and disciplined others for insubordination. He had put in countless 18-hour days writing reports, accounting for $30 million in equipment and planning missions, at least one of which he had to abandon when his Afghan partners, the local

Company was one of the crowning achievements in my life.”

Many officers fondly recall their days as platoon leaders and company commanders as the most fulfilling of their military careers. Yet the Army each year faces an exodus of captains from the service. Burnout, secondguessing by superior officers and the prospect of dull administrative jobs after deployment are often cited as reasons.

Captain Bonenberger would soon face questions about the events on Qurghan Tapa, from both himself and his superiors. But in the relentless world of the front-line commander, he also had to put them out of his mind and advance the battalion’s mission.

That was best, he believed, for his company’s morale — and for his own sanity.

“You don’t have the luxury of letting yourself really feel,” he said later.

“That is the part of me that I could very happily see going away if I weren’t in

the Army. But in the Army, it is absolutely essential. You can’t dwell on it.”

Frequent Ambushes Imam Sahib is the northernmost district of Kunduz Province, an ethnically diverse region of rice paddies and cotton and wheat fields. Once considered secure, the province has seen a sharp rise in insurgent violence and intimidation since 2008.

Soon after arriving in March, battalion commanders discovered that a third or more of the province was controlled by insurgent groups, a mix of Taliban supporters, criminal gangs and radical separatists from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. By summer, American units were being ambushed almost every time they crossed the invisible borders into those contested areas, including in Imam Sahib.

Alpha Company stumbled into a series of fierce firefights in July just a few miles east of Imam Sahib city, the district’s government center. The next month, a car packed with mortar shells exploded near a convoy of American and Afghan trucks in the village of Qurghan Tapa, killing eight Afghan police officers and militiamen and wounding two American soldiers.

The bombing was devastating to the local police, who lost several top officers. But it was also wrenching for Captain Bonenberger, who had taken command of Alpha Company just weeks before. In the following days, the company battled insurgents around Qurghan Tapa, and the experience cemented his resolve to control the nearby hill.

“It’s all related for me,” he said in early September. “It all started with that suicide bombing.”

But the Taliban were not Captain Bonenberger’s only concern. The Afghan police could be unreliable partners, sometimes skipping planned missions, sometimes fleeing when shooting began.

The allegiances of the district police chief were also unclear. The Americans had received complaints that he was using the police to help his brother, a member of Parliament who was running for re-election. Other rumors connected the chief’s family to militias that smuggled drugs and weapons across the Tajikistan border.

Even more worrisome, the district governor was the brother of a Taliban

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28 December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Comes from page 27 commander who controlled villages south of Imam Sahib city. The governor claimed he had been trying to get his brother to support the government, but the Americans assumed that anything they told the governor’s office would be shared with the Taliban.

Captain Bonenberger had to consider those issues in early September as he planned one of his first major missions, building a checkpoint atop Qurghan Tapa hill that would be manned by the Afghan border police.

On the day before the mission was to begin, he led a convoy of nearly 20 vehicles carrying snipers, a mine-clearing team, a mortar crew and two infantry platoons to Imam Sahib. All that was needed was final consent from the district police chief, Col. Kajum Ibrahimi.

But Colonel Ibrahimi, who had supported the hill operation during previous meetings, suddenly had a litany of objections. Captain Bonenberger told him, “All I need is 10 men.”

“I can’t do 10,” Colonel Ibrahimi replied.

“I’ll take five,” Captain Bonenberger said.

“I cannot help,” the colonel concluded.

Captain Bonenberger walked out of the meeting deflated and perplexed. Was the chief trying to protect his brother’s re-election prospects? Was he afraid of another car bomb? Or was internal police department politics at play? (The provincial police chief had just been fired.) The captain assumed that he would never know what had changed.

The mission was scrapped, but Captain Bonenberger remained deter-

mined to secure the hill. And so, just a week later, the company returned to Imam Sahib.

This would be a scaled-back operation, without the Afghan police, using two American platoons to hold the hill just overnight, until polls closed the next day. “After that, we’ll have to break it down,” Captain Bonenberger said.

“It’s not my hill, it’s Giroa’s hill,” he added, referring to the government of Afghanistan. “If they want it, they’ll have it. If they don’t, then we’re not going to stay.”

Renewed Concerns Early on the morning of Sept. 17, Sgt. First Class Dean Lee huddled with members of Alpha Company’s Third Platoon inside the walled district police headquarters in Imam Sahib city.

Sergeant Lee, a 36-year-old from Buffalo on his third combat deployment, took seriously his role as the platoon’s father figure, prowling the compound in his Red Sox cap looking for unfinished work and undisciplined soldiers. He has three daughters and is an evangelical Christian, but he can also tell a raunchy story and defuse tense moments with a joke.

This day he urged the soldiers to be on the lookout for antipersonnel mines. Then he said a prayer and sent them to their trucks. “Make sure your boots are tied,” he quipped, reminding them that an officer recently lost an unlaced boot in the mud of a rice paddy.

As the Alpha Company convoy approached Qurghan Tapa hill, Lt. Nathaniel Bleier, the leader of Third Platoon, called Captain Bonenberger on the radio and voiced renewed concerns about antipersonnel mines. Could they pepper the hill with mortar rounds or grenades to detonate buried explosives

The San Juan Weekly before scaling the hill, he asked.

Captain Bonenberger told Lieutenant Bleier that he had considered that idea but decided against it. There was no guarantee that mortars or grenades would detonate all the mines, he said.

Worse, some of the rounds might not explode, leaving new dangers for the soldiers. An explosives team from the Navy attached to the battalion had assured him, he said, that they could find just about any antipersonnel mine buried in the hill.

The mission went forward.

Waving his mine detector in front of him, Petty Officer First Class John Kremer, 27, of the Navy led Third Platoon up a narrow path along the edge of the hill. He listened intently to his device, calm as a man sweeping his front porch, as it squawked and buzzed at hints of buried danger.

A boom broke the afternoon quiet, and suddenly Petty Officer Kremer was on the ground, seriously wounded. Soldiers in the trenches nearby at first thought they were taking mortar fire. But when they learned that the minesweeper himself was down, a sickening realization set in: they might be surrounded by hidden explosives that the detectors could not sense because they were made of plastic. “We’re screwed,” one soldier muttered.

Sergeant Lee’s first instinct was to rush toward the wounded man. But he knew there were probably other mines nearby, so he stopped 10 yards short, holding back a young medic, Specialist Donovan Lovelace, who was also racing to the petty officer.

“Where do I walk?” Sergeant Lee shouted to a second minesweeper who was bending over Petty Officer Kremer.

“In someone else’s the tracks,” the minesweeper replied.

Sergeant Lee took one step and then another before arriving at a rut where the footprints ended. He looked left, glanced right and, finding no tracks ahead, leaped across the rut. The medic followed.

Within minutes, two other medics reached the scene, rapidly applying tourniquets to both of the sailor’s legs and giving him morphine before carrying him by stretcher down the hill, walking slowly behind the second minesweeper. A Blackhawk helicopter swooped in and took the sailor away, leaving an eerie silence in its wake.

Near the middle of the hill, Captain Bonenberger was on the radio explaining the situation to battalion headquarters while a platoon leader began ordering the remaining soldiers off the hill. At the top, Specialist Matthew Hayes shouldered his M240 machine gun and began stepping gingerly from his trench.

The specialist’s parents had both died in a car accident when he was an infant. He was known as the platoon’s practical joker, easily identified by the huge Mountain Dew tattoo on his left forearm. “In my mind, I thought we were safe because there were a lot of footprints,” he said later.

But when he shifted the weight of his 28-pound weapon, a mine detonated beneath his feet.

From below the cusp of the hill, Captain Bonenberger watched a dark cloud spiral skyward, trailed by chunks of debris. “That guy’s dead,” he said out loud, knowing that this time, someone from his own company was down.

Specialist Hayes would later recall waking up on his back several feet from where he had stepped on the mine. “I just smelled something burning and kind of opened up my eyes and I saw the dust,” he said. He looked at his

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly

right leg, spotted what looked like bone and did not look at it again. “I thought for sure it was blown off.”

A few yards away, Specialist Lovelace could see Specialist Hayes on the ground, his face taut with pain.

Just a few minutes before, the medic had been sitting beside the gunner, his best friend in the unit, trying to collect himself after the first mine explosion.

Now their eyes met and Specialist Hayes called to him: “Doc!” For the second time in an hour, the medics stepped carefully in footprints to reach a wounded man. Sergeant Lee gripped his hand as Specialist Hayes screamed for morphine to dull the intense throbbing in his leg.

But the specialist could also see anguish in his sergeant’s eyes and found himself trying to comfort him.

“Hey, I’ll be able to buy shoes half price,” Specialist Hayes said as Sergeant Lee helped carry him down the steep path.

At the bottom, Specialist Lovelace tapped the wounded soldier on the shoulder, bent to his ear and said over the roar of an incoming helicopter, “Drinks on me when we get back.”

Specialist Hayes touched his friend on the cheek. And then he was gone, the chopper taking off in a hail of gunfire from insurgents a quarter-mile away.

The senior medic, Sgt. Jerry Price, wrapped an arm around Specialist Lovelace in the whirlwind left by the departing helicopter. “You did really good,” the sergeant told him. But the specialist wept anyway.

Quiet Doubts That evening, Sergeant Lee gathered Third Platoon inside police headquarters in Imam Sahib city. A trash fire gave light to their darkening corner of the walled compound as he tried to make sense of the day. Specialist Hayes had a chance of keeping his leg, he told the men, but he admitted later that he did not believe it himself.

A soldier asked him, “Why was

that hill so important?”

Sergeant Lee answered in a voice so low he was almost inaudible. Because the Taliban could have used it to “rain hellfire” on Imam Sahib, he said.

But he also had doubts, which he had kept to himself, about whether securing the hill was necessary.

“You don’t always agree with the mission,” he said later. “But it’s what you’re paid to do when you are a soldier.

We have a mission to accomplish.”

Captain Bonenberger rode back to the police headquarters lost in thought about the injured men. But as his truck pulled into the police compound, he learned that the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Russell Lewis, had already arrived to check on the company. Captain Bonenberger steeled himself for the meeting.

He had taken command of Alpha

Company in July after spending the first three months of his deployment behind a desk in the battalion’s planning cell, barely able to contain his desire to lead a company. On his first visit to Imam Sahib, just days before assuming command, he joined a squad of soldiers who charged a machine-gun nest after their convoy was ambushed.

His new soldiers were impressed by his willingness to fight. “You can see it in his eyes,” one of the most seasoned ones said. The soldier had a name for the look: “the dark relish of mayhem.”

But the soldiers did not always know what to make of their new commander. He could be bookish one moment — a biography of Lord Curzon, British viceroy of India at the turn of the last century, was on his nightstand — and proudly lowbrow the next (“Hot Tub Time Machine” was a favorite movie). He listened to heavy metal music as well as Stravinsky. Violence in sports bothered him, yet here he was, planning missions to kill Taliban.

He was raised in Branford, Conn.

His father was a corporate lawyer who had opposed the Vietnam War and studied classical guitar at Yale. His mother had been a painter who became a librarian, teaching Adrian and his younger sister an appreciation for gospel music.

But from childhood, he was fascinated by the soldiering life, immersing himself in Homer’s “Iliad” and, later, World War II histories. In high school, he considered applying to West Point,

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but was dissuaded by his father and grandfather.

He chose Yale, majoring in English literature and graduating in 2002.

Early the next year, he protested near the United Nations when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the American case for war in Iraq, believing that the Bush administration was exaggerating the threat.

Yet by late 2004, he was talking to military recruiters, fueled by a mix of idealism and outrage. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib had made him wonder whether better leaders in the Army would have prevented the atrocities. He burned to test his own leadership skills.

A year later, he was a second lieutenant, only the second person from his Yale class to join the military, to his knowledge. (A blue-and-white “For God, for Country and for Yale” banner hangs over his desk at the company headquarters in Kunduz.)

On his first deployment in 2007, as a lieutenant with the 173rd Airborne Brigade to Paktika Province in eastern Afghanistan, he carefully studied the leadership styles of his commanders.

One worked hard to build a sense of camaraderie among his soldiers. Another berated subordinates in front of others.

He knew which one he would try to emulate. As Alpha Company commander, he tried to keep an open

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Comes from page 29 door. And to build team spirit, he ordered coins of his own design sent to Kunduz, where he distributed them to his soldiers. Each bore the Alpha Company insignia, a “gator.”

To him, leadership could make the difference between a unit that comes home “emotionally healthy” and one where everyone “just goes crazy with drinking.”

“I’m convinced that the only responsible way to be a leader in this life is to be compassionate,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you don’t do hard things and set rules for people and enforce the breaches in discipline when they happen.”

In the days immediately after the minefield incident, he would acknowledge wondering “if there is other stuff I could have done.” But as his truck pulled into the police compound in Imam Sahib in the hours after it, he was deluged by reports of new crises.

An improvised explosive device had been found in the shopping district. A police checkpoint had received intelligence of an impending Taliban attack. And his First Platoon, which had stayed at the base of Qurghan Tapa hill, was bracing for a possible attack.

Captain Bonenberger briefed Colonel Lewis, grabbed some food

and then headed back to his truck.

“I’m done with my grieving,” he said.

“There’s work to be done.”

Back Into the Fray Third Platoon met for a group counseling session two days later with the battalion chaplain and a mental health counselor. Specialist Alan Bakula, a decorated young soldier who was injured in the elbow and face by the mine that Specialist Hayes hit, told the group he was “never so scared in my life” as when they withdrew from the hill, calling it “the longest walk of my life.”

Staff Sgt. Robert Kennedy, Specialist Hayes’s squad leader who was also injured by shrapnel from the blast, described the helplessness all the soldiers felt when facing mines they could not fight. “You’re thinking you could have done more,” he said to the soldiers.

“Thinking that is good. But doing enough is good, too.”

Captain Bonenberger threw the company into new missions, telling his platoon leaders that work would help the soldiers get past the casualties. Within a week, Third Platoon was back patrolling near the base of Qurghan Tapa hill while First Platoon visited a village where American troops had not been before.

That village, Naghma Bazaar, bordered contested territory just northwest of Qurghan Tapa. A village

The San Juan Weekly elder and a doctor at the local clinic welcomed the American soldiers when they arrived. But then the mission took a worrisome turn after a mine-clearing truck fell into a ditch, stranding the platoon for hours.

When the Afghan police officers accompanying the Americans received reports of insurgent fighters gathering nearby, one of the officers challenged Lt. Matt Vinton, the First Platoon leader, to chase them away. Estimating that there were at most a dozen insurgents, Captain Bonenberger gave the effort his blessing.

Lieutenant Vinton led two squads across a rice paddy, and within minutes a rocket-propelled grenade burst overhead. Gunfire erupted, and the soldiers began to whoop.

They had wanted a fight, and they found one. The soldiers bounded across a field and through an irrigation ditch, taking cover behind fallen trees and haystacks. They cleared a small building from which insurgents had been shooting, then moved to a second compound across the road.

There, a terrified family emerged from a back room. As Lieutenant Vinton tried to calm them, an old man wept uncontrollably in a high-pitch wail while a young boy sang to himself, clutching the bottom of his father’s jacket.

Taliban fighters had forced their way into the house and demanded food and milk, the old man told the Americans through their Afghan interpreter.

When the shooting began, the fighters fled into the fields with barely a trace.

The soldiers searched for bullet casings and other telltale signs of the insurgents, then returned to their trucks.

They were elated because they had chased the Taliban from the village, if only for a day. “Schoolyard bullies,” Captain Bonenberger called them.

More important, the soldiers felt a sense of catharsis in having fought flesh-and-blood enemies for a change.

The frustration of Qurghan Tapa lifted, at least for the moment.

“After the minefield incident, the greatest feeling on earth was getting shot at, because it gave you a reason to shoot back,” Lieutenant Vinton said later.

New Frustrations Doctors amputated both of Petty Officer Kremer’s legs in the days after he was injured on Qurghan Tapa hill.

He was eventually flown to San Diego, where he lives with his wife and daughter, who was born just weeks before the minefield incident. He has reenlisted, saying he wants to rejoin his explosives disposal team after he finis-

hes rehabilitation.

Specialist Hayes lost his right leg and headed to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He says he will probably leave the Army when his rehabilitation is over next year. His wife and 20-month-old daughter have joined him in an apartment on the hospital’s campus.

The specialist was initially angry about his injury, but says he came to grips with it while staring at the stump of his leg in a German hospital. These days, he reassures his platoon-mates in Afghanistan that he is improving, cracking jokes on Facebook about his plight.

“It’s got a hemi,” he said in one post showing a photograph of his new prosthetic leg.

Throughout the fall, Captain Bonenberger immersed himself in missions. Some yielded successes: an insurgent commander changed sides, villagers near Naghma Bazaar formed militias allied with the government, and Third Platoon killed a Taliban leader in its fiercest firefight of the year.

But there were also new frustrations: a major mission in Imam Sahib was canceled just hours before it was to start, this time because the battalion’s resources were needed elsewhere.

“For now, it’s jabs,” Captain Bonenberger said of the smaller-scale missions he was conducting instead.

He had again reviewed his preparations for the Qurghan Tapa hill operation and concluded that he had done all he could to avoid casualties.

“Bottom line was, there wasn’t any system that I had that was going to increase our chances of having an effective clearance of that hill,” he said.

He was less certain about his future in the Army. His contract will be up next year, and he was not sure he would re-sign. “I’m definitely on the fence about that one,” he said.

“Part of it is just the exhaustion of constant campaigning, and part of it is the bad things that have happened that I take ultimate responsibility for,” he said. “I’m getting pretty well tired of seeing dead bodies, that’s for sure.”

For now, though, he had many more missions to plan and a company of soldiers to worry about. And he still had to decide what to do about Qurghan Tapa hill. Should the battalion clear it of mines and build that checkpoint? Or should they just level it with bombs?

So many decisions to make, so many reports to write. Captain Bonenberger turned to his computer and began to type.

San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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FASHION & BEAUTY

Wildly Abrasive For the record, the liver, not the skin, is the body’s largest eliminator of waste, Dr. Alster said. “Regular environmental exposures and toxins, does your skin eliminate those?” she asked rhetorically. “No, it doesn’t.”

Yet word is spreading about the joys of dry brushing, stoked in part by erroneous claims that it can — would that it were so! — improve the look of cellulite. Never mind that over a decade ago dry brushing was the anticellulite treatment of choice for Bridget Jones, a character not known for her judgment.

Devotees like Ms. Chavkin who brush their skin often with abrasive fiBy CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

N

OT long ago, Jessica Chavkin, a children’s clothing designer who lives in Gramercy, returned from a two-week trip to smog-saturated Beijing and Shanghai, and booked a Deep Sea Detox massage and body wrap treatment, costing $165, at a Bliss spa.

“My skin just felt puffy,” she said. She also spent $35 more for a process called dry brushing, which entailed natural bristles being run over her skin in short, quick strokes.

Why did a rubdown with a scratchy brush sound good?

Ms. Chavkin, 28, swears it feels both soothing and stimulating. In fact, she also dry brushes before showering with a brush Bliss gave her for at-home use. “It exfoliates and sloughs off dead skin cells,” she said. “The second thing is it gets circulation going, and third, it gets toxins moving out of my body.”

Ah, toxins — that modern-day bugaboo the spa crowd has been attacking with increasing ferocity; first internally, with high colonics and BluePrint juice cleanses, and now externally, with dry brushing, an ancient ritual once done in Japan and Greece. Dry brushing is being promoted by spas and in magazines as a way to purge unwanted substances from skin (along with other benefits: Glamour.com promised a good brushing would render skin “über-touchable” before sex). Some of today’s proponents say skin brushing can eliminate up to a pound of toxins a day.

Such claims irk Dr. Tina S. Alster, a clinical professor of dermatology at Georgetown University Medical Center, who said, exasperated: “It sounds trendy. Everyone wants to flush toxins from their skin. Give the body more credit than that.”

bers at home, discover the ritual in a spa.

But you don’t need a professional: Beauty products like the Ultimate Detox set ($50) from Elemental Herbology, a British company, sold at Spacenk.com, include exfoliating sisal mitts. Eight Body Moisture, a body-product line from Edmond, Okla., offers a ginger lime dry brushing kit ($43) that includes instructions imploring users to stroke “toward the heart.” Mitts and bristly brushes can also be found at natural food stores. The International SPA Association doesn’t track how many treatments feature dry brushing, but it has been done quietly (if not altogether painlessly) in spas for years.

All body treatments offered by Dermalogica start with a vigorous skin brushing. That’s about 3,500 spas nationwide, said Annet King, the director of global education for Dermalogica.

“It’s our belief and understanding that dry body brushing is a fantastic technique to improve detoxification,” and spur a sluggish lymphatic system, said Ms. King, 41, who said she took a hard-bristle brush to her skin daily, even though it “stings.”

This year, Mama Mio skin care began offering two spa treatments, with cutesy names like Bootcamp for Tum-

mies, that begin with dry brushing, said Ann Marie Cilmi, a spa consultant in Manhattan who counts Mama Mio among her clients. More than 50 spas nationwide offer these type of treatments at roughly $150 apiece.

In 2011, Bliss spas plan to sell their own natural-bristle brush. Their most popular body treatment (out of 10) is currently the FatGirlSlim, which the company’s Web site calls a “detoxifying, circulation-stimulating, body-toning treatment” that “includes dry brushing.”

(The Bliss spa in SoHo and the one in the W hotel at 541 Lexington Avenue sell three times as many FatGirlSlim sessions as other locations in Dallas and Miami Beach — presumably New Yorkers just feel dirtier.) “People are becoming more aware that ‘If I eat a bunch of cheese, and eat a bunch of chocolate cake, it will go to my face or my rear,’ ” said Wendy Allred, education manager at Bliss. “ ‘I kind of need to go detox.’ ” A daily brush at home, or as part of a $150 FatGirlSlim treatment, will help guests fit into their cocktail dresses bet-

ter, she maintains.

After brushing, Mrs. Allred said, “I always say it feels like I went to the gym all week, even though we all I know I didn’t.”

Andrea Layman, a 31-year-old hairstylist from Laguna Niguel, Calif., had not heard of body brushing until the model Molly Sims gushed about it in Health Magazine this year. It is “great for your circulation,” Ms. Sims told her interviewer. “Oh my God, it’s amazing.”

After some research on the Internet, Ms. Layman was sold. “A lot of the models do it to reduce cellulite, and to keep their skin looking really good, and to stay thin,” she said. Ms. Layman, who now body brushes twice a week before showering, said her skin feels “amazing” and she has lost weight (though she admitted this could be the result of

her workouts).

Dry brushing does get rid of dead skin cells, increase circulation (as a brisk walk would) and help the lymphatic system work better and decrease bloating (as a massage would), Dr. Alster said. However, the grander claims are more suspect.

While Ms. Cilmi, the spa consultant, said body brushing done religiously over time “does definitely reduce the appearance of cellulite,” this is unlikely, said Dr. Carolyn Jacob, a dermatologist in Chicago. Why? Cellulite is a complex problem that involves thin skin and the kind of fibrous bands holding in women’s fat. Dry brushing “won’t change fibrous bands at all,” Dr. Jacob said — a dagger to the hearts of women with cottage-cheese thighs. Twisting the dagger, Dr. Jacob cautioned that avid dry brushers put their skin at risk for inflammation, redness and an eczema-like itchy rash.

Indeed, it’s remarkable that a practice that is stimulating at best, agonizing at worst, is offered by spas that purport to pamper. “It’s pretty intense,” said Steve Capellini, a spa consultant in Miami, adding “some spas are not willing to offer strongly stimulating treatments to their customer. They want something more soothing.”

Day and luxury spas that do offer body brushing rarely make it a standalone treatment. Instead, it is often done after a body wrap or a massage, as at Bliss, or before, as at the Spa at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach, Calif., where the director, Liza Esayian said: “Some people have a cup of coffee to start their day. Dry brushing is that for me.”

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The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

For Autistic Children, Therapy on Four Legs

By KAREN JONES

S

HADOW, a black Labrador retriever, knows how to interact with people without overreacting to them — a necessity for a welltrained therapy dog, said her owner and handler, Ani Shaker.

Considered “bombproof,” meaning she will remain calm in nearly any situation, Shadow, and Ms. Shaker, volunteer at the Anderson Center for Autism in Staatsburg, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley north of New York City.

“As soon as I get her working vest out, she jumps up and her little tail starts wagging,” Ms. Shaker said.

“She loves the work. That’s what she lives for, and I can tell she knows she is helping someone else feel good.”

Shadow and Ms. Shaker, an equestrian trainer, are one of six teams that have been volunteering at the Anderson Center for two years.

They are part of the Good Dog Foundation, a nonprofit based in New York that provides therapy services throughout the East Coast.

Unlike service dogs who live 24/7 with people with disabilities, therapy dogs visit treatment centers and residential schools. The Good Dog teams go through a nine-week training course, said Susan Fireman, executive trainer and program coordinator for upstate New York, the Berkshires in Massachusetts and Litchfield County, Conn. “These dogs have to be very calm and be able to

absorb a certain amount of stress without becoming stressed themselves,” she said.

One in every 110 children in the United States has an autism spectrum disorder, with autism disorder being the most commonly recognized subtype, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children with autism have mild to severe degrees of difficulty with social, communication and emotional skills. It is usually a lifelong disability with no definitive cause or cure. Autism, which is classified as a developmental disability, is four times more likely to occur in boys.

“We are hearing more and more from families we serve that therapy dogs have had an overall positive effect on their children,” said Marguerite Colston, vice president of constituent relations at the Autism Society, a national grassroots organization.

Because each person with autism experiences it differently, there is no certainty a therapy dog will help, she said, but for certain individuals, a dog “has eased their anxiety and has even helped some to open up to others, as individuals with autism are typically more withdrawn and less likely to socialize.”

The Anderson Center is a yearround residence and school for children and young adults ages 5 to 21 with moderate to severe symptoms, said Dr. Austin Rynne, its director of health and related services. “The

children we serve here cannot be served in their own school district,” he said. “They cannot work and have difficulty being managed at home.”

Dr. Rynne said he incorporated the dogs into the curriculum two years ago, not as a playful diversion but to determine whether they could help the educational process.

“We are not trying to make these kids become dog lovers,” he said. “We want to use the dogs as a medium to achieve our pre-existing educational goals.”

Because many children with autism tend to inhabit a private inner world, constructing a bridge to that world is essential, said Dr. Rynne. He said the therapy-dog program was doing just that with some students.

One 11-year-old boy, who has been at the Anderson Center for three years, is nonverbal and makes requests by pointing to pictures (yes, no, bathroom, toys, food and so on).

When he was first introduced to Shadow a year ago, he refused to enter the room with her and would run away if she looked at him.

Now, he requests the opportunity to walk, pet and feed Shadow, and the interaction helps him develop communication skills that can be transferred to relationships with peers and teachers, Dr. Rynne said.

And when this boy becomes frustrated and throws a tantrum, Shadow’s calming presence seems to help him regain his self-control, he added.

Dutchess, a golden retriever who loves people, tennis balls and treats, was “born to be a therapy dog,” said her owner and handler, Mark Condon, a biology professor at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Dutchess, who was also trained by the Good Dog Foundation, and Professor Condon have been volunteering at Anderson since August 2009.

One of their students is a 16-year-old boy who has verbal and aggression problems, said Courtney Peggs, an occupational therapist assistant who works with them. Before his therapy with Dutchess, the boy relied on caregivers or teachers to lead his social interaction, a condition called prompt-dependent. Now, she said, the boy is becoming more

functionally independent.

Miss Peggs prepares for a dogtherapy session by arranging tennis balls, treats, a pet brush and a water container in the auditorium. The boy “knows he has to come to me to make the request of which object to choose,” she said.

Once the boy is given the O.K., he takes the object to Dutchess, to their mutual delight. “I have seen him carry over what he has done with Dutchess independently,” she said. “It’s been amazing.”

Professor Condon said he believed strongly in the power of the human-canine connection and that Dutchess provided the boy unique assistance.

Professor Condon observed that the boy “just evens out when Dutchess is around, adding: “Some days he seems to be somewhere else, but he likes her so much that he temporarily leaves that place to be with her.

That force is stronger.”

Elizabeth Olson, an education specialist at Hope Elementary School in Carlsbad, Calif., teaches students with moderate to severe autism in grades kindergarten through third.

Her yellow Labrador retriever mix, Yori, has joined her in the classroom this semester and is a big hit, she said.

She said Yori, who was trained by the Canine Companions for Independence, a nonprofit that provides assistance dogs for people with a range of disabilities, helped bridge the communication barrier in her classroom.

“My students are all functionally nonverbal,” she said. “They are very content as a whole not to speak, but they want to speak to Yori. There is one student who I spent years trying to teach to say hello and goodbye.

Then one day he started saying hello and goodbye to Yori. Soon he said it to me, and now he does it with his fellow students.”

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

w

G

lenn Monroig (born April 22, 1957), is a composer, guitarist, and singer of various different types of music styles, such as salsa, boleros and rumba. He is credited with having recorded the first rap song in Spanish.

Early years Monroig was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico where he received his primary and secondary education. Monroig, his brother Gilberto Jr. and sister Linda were in constant contact with the world of music and were influenced at an early age by their famous father, the renowned singer of boleros, Gilberto Monroig. His professional debut as a singer was at age 14 when he sang at his father’s night club La Guitarra de Gilberto and later went on to perform at places like Ocho Puertas La Tea and other cafe theaters in old San Juan.

First recording In 1980, Monroig recorded and had his first “hit” with “Jamas te voy abandonar asi otra vez” (I’m never gonna leave you this way again). In 1982, he represented Puerto Rico in the “OTI” Music Festival with the song “Mirame a los Ojos” (Look into My Eyes). That year he also started his own record label “Mamoku” and later also founded his own recording company called “Sitting Duck”.

The first Spanish language rap song

External audio You may listen to Glenn Monroig’s “Por Siempre” here.

In 1983, Monroig recorded “No Finjas”, the first Spanish language rap song. In 1984, he recorded and sang the song “Me Dijeron” (I was told), which treated the sensitive subject of homosexuality in a respectful way.

In 1986, Monroig had one of his greatest “hits’ with “Por Siempre” (Forever). He started composing by converting English songs into Spanish, such as “Forever” which was originally written by Kenny Loggins.

Glenn Monroig

33

34 Among the singers who have worked with Glenn are: • Emmanuel, • Luis Enrique, • Cheo Feliciano, • Lucecita Benítez, • Nydia Caro, • Yolandita Monge, • Lunna, • Kenny Loggins (when he visited Puerto Rico), • His father Gilberto.

With Lunna, Monroig recorded “A Todo Dar” (Everything Goes), the “first” digitally produced album in Puerto Rico. Monroig also wrote the anti-drug theme song for the Government of Puerto Rico’s campaign against drugs. The theme has been recorded by Ednita Nazario, Danny Rivera, Sophy and the group Menudo.

Some of the other different styles of music that he has recorded are boleros such as “Intimo”, rumbas such as “Rumbo a rumba” and blues with “Nevando en Puerto Rico”.

In the 1990s, Monroig established the “Mezza Lunna Recording Studios” in San Juan, where he continued to work with national and internationally known artists. He also produced and directed musical videos for various artists.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

2003-present On September 2003, Monroig presented his “Esos son otros 20 pesos” (That will be another 20 dollars/ That’s another story) concert at the Antonio Paoli Hall of the Luis A. Ferre Center for the Performing Arts (Centro de Bellas Artes) in San Juan.

Monroig is currently involved in all of the aspects of music.

After several years of inactivity Monroig released A papi in 2007.

The production was intended as an homage, and is composed of twenty-seven songs originally sang by Gilberto Monroig, released in a two disk set. The album includes Monroig’s commentary on several matters including his relationship with his father and parts of his life. The music was composed by Franky Suárez and was performed by more than fifty musicians. The production was well received by the Puerto Rican media, with mainstream newspaper Primera Hora calling Monroig’s performance a “prodigious interpretation, which defies the atmosphere and displays his strength and vocal versatility”, while at the same time illustrating a “man of marvelous sapience and an exquisite taste for romantic and candent melody.” The musical soundtrack received a similar reception, being regarded as “excellent interpretations”. After twelve year without publishing an entirely original proposal, Monroig announced the release of a new production in October 2008. Among the themes included there is a song

name “Claro” which criticizes the political situation of Puerto Rico.

Personal life He had a long romance with Camille Carrion and became a second father to Carrion’s daughter, Paloma Suau. Monroig is currently married to graphic designer Sonia Rivera with whom he has a daughter - Salomé born in 2004. Glenn Monroig has been an outspoken supporter of many causes, such as the anti Castro movements.

My Fair Lady - Not so Fair

B

ernard Shaw never imagined that this play Pygmalion would eventually turned into the Broadway hit under the title of “My Fair Lady”. It ran for several years with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. Not to be compared ever. They were unique as Higgins and Eliza. If one play does not admit translation is this one. That peculiar phonetical blunders

of speech pertaining to the low class around the area of the Convent Garden with Welsh and Gallic influence as a manner of speech can not be transferred to any language. Even the Madrid version that we also witnessed with Paloma San Basilio was not so convincing.

This local version is a semi-professional attempt to the Puerto Rican ambiance att had a magnificent varied scenery as well as lavish lav costumes. They did quite an impressi pressive presentation. However in the aspect of acting and singing the whole aspec thing did not fare so well. Miss Maneiro has a fine tone of voice. Maybe her singing was better than her acting which show showed some improvement in the second act at the races at Ascot. This is the con most hilarious scene of the play and she mo grew up to rendered the best of it. gre Opposite to Eliza, Higgins was am ambivalent and his acting was better in the first act in spite of lacking the ironic cinisism in his arrogant outiro burst, thus, singing “I am an ordinary bu ma man”, with no avail. In the second act

he lost control of his acting, overacting the situation of Eliza’s escapade with Freddy.

By far the second act was lots better faring.

Higgins’ mother, surely added some good acting in her portrayal of her aristocratic composure.

Perhaps the best o Eliza’s singing came with her emphatic “Shoe Me”. Freddy, her boyfriend in spite of undertaking the most beautiful music of the score written by Lerner and Loewe, (of all the musicals they have done together), “On the Street Where You Live”. This “romanza” demanded a stranger Freddy; more feeling, more baritone notes.

The chorus, as the crowd of peasant and riff-raff, was excellent. They came to rescue the drunkard father of Eliza singing “Take Me to the Church on Time” In the first act they also did enhance the ocassion in “With a Little Bit of Luck”.

Going back to the first act, the two most alluring songs, “I could Have Dance All Night” brought the house down.

To people that are not familiar with the English language, this version of “My Fair Lady” en español, has been quite a treat.

Max González

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

35

Staph’s Trail Points to Human Susceptibilities

By GINA KOLATA

S

cientists have finally found an answer to one of the great mysteries about the most deadly bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus — why it attacks primarily humans and not animals. And they now have an idea of why some humans are particularly susceptible to these bacteria that kill 100,000 Americans a year, far more than any other microbe.

In a study released on Wednesday, researchers at Vanderbilt University report that staph evolved to zero in on particular regions of human hemoglobin so it could burst the cagelike molecule and feed on the iron inside. People who are resistant to staph, they suspect, might have slight genetic variations that tweak the hemoglobin regions the bacteria seek, making them impervious to the attack.

The work is part of a more general look at genes and disease. With new tools to look in detail at slight genetic variations, researchers are asking why some people get some diseases and others do not and why some die from diseases that others almost shrug off. With staph, for instance, 30 percent of the population harbors the bacteria in their noses, with no signs of infection.

Staph experts say the discovery, published in the Dec. 16 issue of Cell Host & Microbe, answers a lot of questions about the bacteria and shows them new directions

for research.

“It’s terrific work,” said Frank DeLeo, acting chief of human bacterial pathogenesis at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “It really is moving the field forward.”

The work began in 2002 when Eric P. Skaar was a postdoctoral fellow and fascinated by staph.

“Staph is the worst infectious threat to public health,” he said. “It is the No. 1 cause of heart infections and skin infections, the No. 1 cause of soft tissue infections. It is a big cause of pneumonia. It is the No. 1 hospital acquired infection.”

The bacteria can take up residence in any tissue of the body, he added.

Staph, he said, “is sort of a creepy bug.”

But it, like all organisms, needs iron, and Dr. Skaar wondered how it got it. The answer, he discovered, is that the bacteria “pop open red blood cells and grab the iron.”

Now, as an associate professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. Skaar asked a question no one had thought to ask before: Do the bacteria like some hemoglobins more than others?

He grew staph in the lab, giving them blood from different animals, from mice to baboons to humans. Staph definitely preferred human blood, he reported in the new paper, but there also was a definite trend, the higher up the evolutionary scale an animal was, the more the bacteria liked its

blood.

Then Dr. Skaar and his colleagues found the protein on staph that attaches to hemoglobin and discovered that it grabs onto segments of the blood protein that are specifically in humans. It can attach to similar segments in animal hemoglobins, but less avidly.

Finally, the researchers infected two strains of mice. One was normal lab mice, with normal mouse hemoglobin. The other had half human hemoglobin and half mouse hemoglobin. The strain with human and mouse hemoglobin had 10 times as much bacteria growing in its organs.

That explains why it has been so frustrating to study staph infections in mice, said Mark S. Smeltzer of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Researchers use mice, which are cheap and readily available, to study treatments and vaccines for staph. But it has been so hard to infect them — scientists have to inject them with so many bacteria, Dr. Smeltzer said, that “to my mind it is unrealistic.”

It was just so much more than were required for many, if not most, infections of humans, he explained. The new study explained why and suggested a way around the problem — using mice with human hemoglobin — he added.

But, for Dr. Skaar, the result also suggested an answer to one of the most pressing questions about staph infections in people: Why do one-third of the population

have the bacteria in their noses and not get sick while, for others, a staph infection can be lethal?

“In my opinion, that is the most important question in Staph aureus biology right now,” Dr. Skaar said.

His work, he said, suggests that there are genetic factors that determine susceptibility to infection between species. Are there also genetic factors that determine susceptibility within a species, the human species?

He has a way of finding out. There are well-characterized minor genetic differences in hemoglobins among different people.

And Vanderbilt Medical Center has a gene bank with the DNA of thousands of its patients. Dr. Skaar is using that gene bank now to look at the hemoglobin genes of all the patients who had staph infections and compare them with the gene sequences of patients who were not infected. He expects that if there are variations among human hemoglobins that determine susceptibility to staph, he is likely to find them.

His hope, he said, is that in the future a patient will come to a hospital and, as part of a routine work-up, doctors will determine from the person’s hemoglobin whether to worry about staph. Those who are susceptible would get intravenous antibiotics before risky procedures like surgery.

“That’s the most exciting possibility,” Dr. Skaar said. “Just knowing you were more susceptible would be very valuable.”

36 December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly

The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

T

he holiday season brings many joys and, unfortunately, many countervailing dietary pitfalls. Even the fittest and most disciplined of us can succumb, indulging in more fat and calories than at any other time of the year.

The health consequences, if the behavior is unchecked, can be swift and worrying.

A recent study by scientists in Australia found that after only three days, an extremely high-fat, high-calorie diet can lead to increased blood sugar and insulin resistance, potentially increasing the risk for Type 2 diabetes. Waistlines also can expand at this time of year, prompting self-recrimination and unrealistic New Year’s resolutions.

But a new study published in The Journal of Physiology suggests a more reliable and far simpler response. Run or bicycle before breakfast. Exercising in the morning, before eating, the study results show, seems to significantly lessen the ill effects of holiday Bacchanalias.

For the study, researchers in Belgium recruited 28 healthy, active young men and began stuffing them with a truly lousy diet, composed of 50 percent fat and 30 percent more calories, overall, than the men had been consuming. Some of the men agreed not to exercise during the experiment. The rest were assigned to one of two exercise groups. The groups’ regimens were identical and exhausting.

The men worked out four times a week in the mornings, running and cycling at a strenuous intensity. Two of the sessions lasted 90 minutes, the others, an hour. All of the workouts were supervised, so the energy expenditure of the two groups was identical.

Their early-morning routines, however, were not. One of the groups

ate a hefty, carbohydrate-rich breakfast before exercising and continued to ingest carbohydrates, in the form of something like a sports drink, throughout their workouts. The second group worked out without eating first and drank only water during the training. They made up for their abstinence with breakfast later that morning, comparable in calories to the other group’s trencherman portions.

The experiment lasted for six weeks. At the end, the nonexercising group was, to no one’s surprise, super-sized, having packed on an average of more than six pounds. They had also developed insulin resistance — their muscles were no longer responding well to insulin and weren’t pulling sugar (or, more technically, glucose) out of the bloodstream efficiently — and they had begun storing extra fat within and between their muscle cells. Both insulin resistance and fat-marbled muscles are metabolically unhealthy conditions that can be precursors of diabetes.

The men who ate breakfast before exercising gained weight, too, although only about half as much as the control group. Like those sedentary big eaters, however, they had become more insulin-resistant and were storing a greater amount of fat in their muscles.

Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance. They also burned the fat they were taking in more efficiently. “Our current data,” the study’s authors wrote, “indicate that exercise training in the fasted state is more effective than exercise in the carbohydrate-fed state to stimulate glucose tolerance despite a hypercaloric high-fat diet.”

Just how exercising before breakfast blunts the deleterious effects of overin-

dulging is not completely understood, although this study points toward several intriguing explanations. For one, as has been known for some time, exercising in a fasted state (usually possible only before breakfast), coaxes the body to burn a greater percentage of fat for fuel during vigorous exercise, instead of relying primarily on carbohydrates. When you burn fat, you obviously don’t store it in your muscles. In “our study, only the fasted group demonstrated beneficial metabolic adaptations, which eventually may enhance oxidative fatty acid turnover,” said Peter Hespel, Ph.D., a professor in the Research Center for Exercise and Health at Catholic University Leuven in Belgium and senior author of the study.

At the same time, the fasting group showed increased levels of a muscle protein that “is responsible for insulin-stimulated glucose transport in muscle and thus plays a pivotal role in regulation of insulin sensitivity,” Dr Hespel said.

In other words, working out before breakfast directly combated the two most detrimental effects of eating a high-fat,

high-calorie diet. It also helped the men avoid gaining weight.

There are caveats, of course. Exercising on an empty stomach is unlikely to improve your performance during that workout. Carbohydrates are easier for working muscles to access and burn for energy than fat, which is why athletes typically eat a high-carbohydrate diet. The researchers also don’t know whether the same benefits will accrue if you exercise at a more leisurely pace and for less time than in this study, although, according to Leonie Heilbronn, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who has extensively studied the effects of high-fat diets and wrote a commentary about the Belgian study, “I would predict low intensity is better than nothing.”

So, unpleasant as the prospect may be, set your alarm after the next Christmas party to wake you early enough that you can run before sitting down to breakfast. “I would recommend this,” Dr. Heilbronn concluded, “as a way of combating Christmas” and those insidiously delectable cookies.

Multivitamins Can Disrupt Users’ Sleep

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

T

HE FACTS Millions of Americans take multivitamins daily, looking to get all sorts of health benefits. But when it comes to a good night’s sleep, can these pills do a disservice?

Over the years, anecdotal reports have suggested as much, with some users claiming that multivitamins shorten sleep and lead to more frequent awakenings in the middle of the night. In one study in 2007, researchers recruited hundreds of subjects and investigated their sleep habits — including looking at their use of vitamins and medications — then had them keep sleep diaries for two weeks.

After controlling for age, sex and other variables, the scientists found a slightly higher rate of poor or interrupted sleep in people taking multivitamins.

But because they found only an association, they could not rule out the possibility that people with poorer sleep are simply more likely to seek out multivitamins.

If there is an effect, the problem is separating the effects of individual vitamins. There is some evidence that B vitamins may play a role. Some studies have shown that ingesting vitamin B6 before bed can lead to very vivid dreaming, which can wake people up. B6 helps the body convert tryptophan to serotonin, a hormone that affects sleep. Other studies have shown that vitamin B12 can affect melatonin levels, promoting wakefulness.

For those who suspect their multivitamins may be curtailing sleep, the best solution may simply be to take the pills in the morning, or at least several hours before bed.

THE BOTTOM LINE There is evidence that multivitamins may disrupt nighttime sleep.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

37

Birds Do It ... We Do It ... and No One Knows Why

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

E

veryone yawns, but no one knows why. We start when we are in the womb, and we do it through old age. Most vertebrate species, even birds and fishes, yawn too, or at least do something that looks very much like it. But its physiological mechanisms, its purpose and what survival value it might have remain a mystery.

There is no shortage of theories — a recent article in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews outlines many — but a dearth of experimental proof that any of them is correct.

“The lack of experimental evidence is sometimes accompanied by passionate discussion,” said Dr. Adrian G. Guggisberg, the lead author.

Hippocrates proposed in the fourth century B.C. that yawning got rid of “bad air,” and increased “good air” in the brain. The widely held modern view of this theory is that yawning helps increase blood oxygen levels and decrease carbon dioxide.

If this were true, Dr. Guggisberg writes, then people would yawn more when they exercise. And people with lung or heart disease, who often suffer from a lack of oxygen, yawn no more than anyone else.

Researchers have exposed healthy subjects to gas mixtures with high levels of carbon dioxide and found that it does not lead to increased yawning. In fact, there is no study that shows that oxygen levels in the brain are changed one way or the other by yawning.

In other words, observation and experiment suggest that the best way to increase blood oxygen levels is not yawning, but rapid breathing.

There is no question that yawning occurs most frequently before and after sleep, and the subjective feeling of drowsiness accompanies increased yawning. So maybe yawning helps keep us awake.

Researchers tested this hypothesis by inducing yawning in human subjects and then observing brain activity with encephalography as they yawned. The EEG produced no evidence that yawning increased vigilance in the brain or central nervous system.

Some researchers have suggested the opposite — that yawning lowers arousal and helps us go to sleep. But even though yawning and drowsiness occur together, no experiment has shown a causal connection between the two.

Could the purpose of yawning be regulation of body heat? Researchers have shown that contagious yawns (induced with yawning videos) can be decreased when a cold pack is placed on the forehead, and increased with a warm pack. But the experiment, Dr. Guggisberg says, did not control for other factors — a nice warm pack is likely to increase drowsiness, and a cold pack to increase wakefulness, making it impossible to determine the effect of temperature.

While Dr. Guggisberg finds the evidence for the thermal regulation theory inconclusive, Andrew C. Gallup, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, disagrees.

“In rat experiments, yawning is preceded by rapid increases in brain temperature and following the yawning a return to lower temperatures,” he said. “That suggests an association with a thermoregulatory function, although it can’t be interpreted as causal.”

Dr. Gallup outlines his position in an article accepted for publication in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, the same journal in which Dr. Guggisberg’s review appears.

Another theory is that yawning helps equalize pressure in the middle ear with outside air pressure. But that function can be fulfilled by other techniques — chewing or swallowing — so there is no reason to believe that yawning has an essential evolutionary advantage. And there is no evidence that yawning increases with air pressure changes.

So what purpose does yawning serve?

Children under 5 are not subject to contagious yawning, but adult humans, chimpanzees, monkeys and dogs — animals with advanced social skills — are. Apparently an understanding of the mental states of others is required before yawning becomes catching.

That idea is supported by M.R.I. observation in humans: watching others yawn activates brain regions related to imitation, empathy and social behavior.

For Dr. Guggisberg, this social interpretation is the only one that appears to account for all the aspects of the phenomenon. But Dr. Gallup points out that solitary species yawn, too, and that chimpanzees and humans yawn when they are alone.

Dr. Gallup conceded that yawning might have some social function in some species. But he said, “Any social function that it has would be a derived feature, and not a more primitive underlying feature of the behavior.”

Dr. Guggisberg, a researcher at the University of Geneva, offered a conclusion that few experts will find objectionable. “Yawning,” he said “is a very rich and complex phenomenon.”

38 December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly

Narcotic Painkillers May Pose Danger to Elderly Patients, Study Says

By BARRY MEIER

O

lder patients with arthritis who take narcotic-based drugs to relieve pain face a higher risk of bone fracture, heart attack and death when compared to those taking non-narcotic drugs, according to a government-financed study published Monday.

The study, in The Archives of Internal Medicine, appears to be the first large-scale effort to look at the comparative safety risks for the elderly taking different classes of painkillers. The use of narcotic painkillers has increased in recent years because of a prevailing belief that such drugs were safer for older patients than non-narcotic drugs like Advil and Motrin.

The review, financed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, appears to undercut that assumption. The report, which was based on an analysis of patient health care records, was conducted by researchers at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.

“Doctors should not assume that opioids are a safer alternative,”

to other painkillers, said Daniel H. Solomon, the study’s researcher, said in a telephone interview on Monday.

“They seem to carry profound risks to cardiovascular system as well as increased risk fractures and appear to be associated with increased risk of death.”

The study does not raise questions about the use of powerful narcotics like OxyContin to treat severe pain resulting from cancer or other conditions.

To conduct the study, Dr. Solomon reviewed the experience of Medicare recipients in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania who were found during a six-year period to have osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis.

Using statistical methods, researchers divided those patients, predominantly women with a mean age of 80 years, into three groups based on their pain medications.

Patients in one group received a narcotic-based painkiller. The second group took a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug like Advil or Aleve.

The third group took another class of pain drugs called coxibs, which include Celebrex and Vioxx, a drug that is

no longer on the market.

Because the study was based on records, it could not identify all factors that might have contributed to a patient’s problems. But researchers found that the overall risk of death was twice as high for patients taking a narcotic painkiller when compared to those taking a nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drug.

More specifically, patients in the narcotic group were four times more likely to experience a compound bone fracture, apparently as a result of a fall, and they were twice as likely to have a heart attack. The cardiovascular risks posed by narcotics were the same as for drugs like Celebrex and Vioxx, which have come under scrutiny for that hazard.

The review also found that the rate of gastrointestinal bleeding among patients taking narcotics was about the same as those taking drugs like Advil and Aleve. A principal reason that medical experts have advocated narcotics in older patients is the belief that they reduce such problems.

In an commentary accompanying the new report, two physicians

at Yale University Medical School, Dr. William C. Becker and Dr. Patrick G. O’Connor, wrote that the study’s findings, like those regarding bleeding ulcers, could be skewed by undocumented patient use of over-the-counter painkillers. They added, however, that the high incidence of bone fractures, which often lead to fatal complications in the elderly, were troublesome.

In a related study that was also published Monday in The Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Solomon and other researchers looked at the comparative risks posed by different narcotics.

Using the same patient records, they reported that cardiovascular risks were highest for codeine and that codeine and oxycodone, the active ingredient in drugs like OxyContin, posed higher mortality-related risks than hydrocodone, the active ingredient in drugs like Vicodin.

The Food and Drug Adminstration recently moved to stop sales of one narcotic painkiller, proproxyphene, citing its heart risks.

The drug was used in both Darvon and Darvocet.

Mercury Prompts a Sick in Day Care May New Call to Limit Tuna Mean Healthier in School C Y

By RONI CARYN RABIN

onsumers Union is urging pregnant women to avoid eating tuna altogether and advising small children to limit consumption after tests on dozens of cans and pouches of tuna found mercury in every sample. The tuna was bought in the New York metropolitan area and online.

“White” tuna generally contained more mercury than “light” tuna, but some light tuna contained enough that a woman of childbearing age eating less than a can a week would exceed federal recommendations for mercury consumption, the new Consumer Reports study says. The metal can affect fetal development.

The average amount of mercury found by Consumer Reports in white tuna samples was 0.427 parts per million, compared with the average 0.353

p.p.m. found in F.D.A. tests in 2002-04.

The average in light tuna was 0.071 p.p.m., lower than the 0.118 p.p.m. found by the F.D.A. Consumers Union urges women of childbearing age to be more careful about their tuna consumption than current F.D.A. guidelines advise, because mercury accumulates in the body over time.

Children who weigh less than 45 pounds should limit intake to 4 ounces of light or 1.5 ounces of white tuna a week, and heavier children no more than 12.5 ounces of light or 4 ounces of white tuna a week, Consumers Union says.

The National Fisheries Institute took issue with the report, saying the Consumer Reports recommendations were “reckless” and had “the potential to harm public health,” because fish contains omega-3 fatty acids, which may be beneficial during pregnancy.

By RONI CARYN RABIN

oung children in day care get more ear and respiratory tract infections than other children their age, a new study reports. But once they reach elementary school, they are sick less often.

The Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development followed 1,238 Canadian children from 5 months old, in 1998, to 8 years, in 2006.

The researchers compared the infection rates of children in large and small day care centers with the illness rates of those cared for at home, differentiating between children who started day care at younger and older preschool ages.

Children who started going to large-group care centers before age 2 ½ had 61 percent more ear and respiratory infections with fever than those at home, but once they reached elementary school, they had 21 percent fewer respiratory infections and 43 percent fewer ear infections (with no difference in gastrointestinal infections).

The study was published last week in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The lead author, Dr. Sylvana Côté, a professor of social and preventive medicine at the University of Montreal, said the results should be comforting to parents who worry about the health of children in day care. These children may be at an advantage during the school years, she said, because “when they are learning to read and write, they don’t miss many days of school.”

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

39 SCIENCE / TECH

Study of Baby Teeth Sees Radiation Effects

By MATTHEW L. WALD

M

en who grew up in the St. Louis area in the early 1960s and died of cancer by middle age had more than twice as much radioactive strontium in their baby teeth as men born in the same area at the same time who are still living, according to a study based on teeth collected years ago by Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, published on Dec. 1 in The International Journal of Health Services, analyzed baby teeth collected during the era when the United States and the Soviet Union were conducting nuclear bomb tests in the atmosphere. The study seeks to help scientists determine the health effects of small radiation doses, and to say how many people died from bomb fallout. There is very little reliable data on the relationship of radiation to cancer at low doses, so scientists instead use extrapolations from higher doses, which introduces large uncertainties into their calculations.

The study implies that deaths from bomb fallout globally run into the “many thousands,” said the authors, Joseph J. Mangano and Dr. Janette D. Sherman, both of the Radiation and Public Health Project, nonprofit research group based in New York.

However, a scientist with long experience in the issue, Kevin D. Crowley, the senior board director of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board at the National Research Council, urged caution in interpreting the findings.

“It sounds like the best you could do is say this is an association,” he said.

“An association is not necessarily causative.”

R. William Field, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, praised the authors for exploring the association between fallout in teeth and cancer, but he that said the sample size was too small and that the study had other limitations.

He called for follow-ups.

The study’s authors had previously tried to link strontium in the teeth of

children growing up near nuclear power plants to releases from those plants, but those findings have not met with much scientific acceptance. Strontium levels in a person’s body may have more to do with where the person’s food was farmed than with where the person lives. In addition, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calculated that the doses from radioactive strontium in the environment add only about 0.3 percent to the average American’s background exposure.

But this study tries to link differences in tooth contamination more directly with health outcomes. The study measured the ratio of calcium, a basic building block of teeth and bones, to strontium 90, which is absorbed just as calcium is. The authors said they were using strontium as a proxy for all long-lived fallout components, and they picked boys born in a period when there was a lull in atmospheric testing, so that the boys’ exposure to short-lived radioactive materials, in utero or in the first few months of life, was minimized. They limited their research to

boys because men seldom change their names and thus were easier to trace.

The authors found that among 3,000 tooth donors, born in 1959, 1960 or the first half of 1961, 84 had died, 12 of those from cancer. The authors selected two “control” cases, people still living, for each of those who had died. The controls were born in the same county, within 40 days of the person who later died. The study compared incisors with incisors, and molars with molars.

The people who would later die of cancer had an average of 7.0 picocuries of per gram of tooth; the control cases, who have never had cancer, had an average of 3.1 picocuries per gram.

But the picture is not completely clear. Measurements of the teeth of people who later had cancer but survived it did not show strontium levels markedly different from those who had never had cancer, according to the study. One reason may be that those nonfatal cancers were often polyps and melanomas not related to radiation.

Big Brains Steal Insects’ Breath Away

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Tuberculosis: World Health Organization Endorses a Device for Quicker Diagnosis

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

T

he World Health Organization is endorsing a new tuberculosis testing apparatus that does not need trained laboratory technicians and takes less than two hours.

Dr. Mario Raviglione, director of the agency’s Stop TB campaign, called it a “major milestone” in diagnosis of selected patients — despite drawbacks like its expense, fragility and need for electricity. Tuberculosis killed 1.7 million people last year, the W.H.O. estimates.

At present, confirming that a patient has tuberculosis usually requires a lab technician trained to read sputum under a microscope. If doctors suspect drug-resistant tuberculosis, it can take up to three months to grow enough

to see which antibiotics will kill it.

The new machine, developed by Cepheid, an American company, and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, can confirm tuberculosis and tell if it is resistant to the most common TB drug, rifampicin.

The W.H.O. recommends it for patients who doctors suspect have a drug-resistant strain (globally, about 3 percent do) or who are also infected with the H.I.V. (which is common in some countries, like South Africa).

Even at lower prices for poor countries, each unit, about the size of a countertop coffee machine, costs $17,000, and each test requires a $17 cartridge. It also needs a computer, and annual maintenance costing more than $1,000.

And for case follow-up, the old timeconsuming methods must still be used.

T

here is a type of cockroach that can go without breathing for seven minutes at a time, and a moth pupa that can go several hours without breathing.

Now a new study in The American Naturalist reports that there is a commonality among insects displaying this behavior: they have large, complex brain structures.

The behavior, known as discontinuous gas exchange, is seen only in certain insects, and only when they are in a resting state.

“If you’ve got a big brain, it’s costly to run,” said Philip Matthews, a physiologist at the University of Queensland in Australia and the study’s lead author. “If you go into a sleeplike state, you can save energy.”

When in this state, the insect will stop breathing for a long period of time, followed by a series of short breaths, and then one long breath.

To conduct the study, Dr. Matthews and a colleague, Craig White, studied the brains of several species of insects that display this behavior.

They found that when the insects’

brains were removed, they displayed discontinuous breathing patterns.

“They have a nerve cord comprised of ganglia, which are kind of like mini-brains,” said Dr. Matthews. “We think that when the insect is active, the brain is sending a constant message to breathe, but when it’s inactive the ganglia take over.”

The breathing pattern has been seen in different species of wasps, ants, moths, butterflies, grasshoppers, beetles and cockroaches.

Previously, scientists have hypothesized that insects display this behavior to more effectively retain water.

But this seemed unlikely when the breathing pattern was found among insects in dry deserts and in the humid tropics.

SCIENCE / TECH 40

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Rare Albatross Expands Its Breeding Grounds

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

T

wo pairs of the short-tailed albatross, thought to remain only on two Japanese islands, have been found nesting on Kure Atoll and on Midway Atoll, American wildlife refuges in the Hawaiian Islands.

Until now, the last remaining breeding colonies of the birds were thought to have been on the Japanese islands. The total adult population of the species is only about 3,000.

The new finding brings hope that the bird might propagate beyond Japan, said Jessica Hardesty Norris, director of the Seabird Program at the American Bird Conservancy, a conservation organization.

“Where they breed in Japan is a pretty decent habitat, but there’s a really

active and nasty volcano,” she said. “It could wipe out the species, so we are excited about the prospect of another viable colony.”

The short-tailed albatross is a striking bird, with a bright pink bill, a white body and a golden-colored crown and nape.

Although the bird once thrived in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, the appeal of its feathers for hats and other decorative purposes led to a drop in population in the late 19th century.

Some breeding grounds in Torishima, Japan, were damaged in a volcanic eruption in 1939, and the number of nesting pairs fell to about 10.

The birds that were recently found include one male-female pair, with a fertilized egg, and one female-female pair with two eggs. It is still unclear whether the eggs of the same-sex pair are fertilized.

Poisoned Debate Encircles a Microbe Study’s Result

By DENNIS OVERBYE

T

he announcement that NASA experimenters had found a bacterium that seems to be able to subsist on arsenic in place of phosphorus — an element until now deemed essential for life — set off a cascading storm of criticism on the Internet, first about alleged errors and sloppiness in the paper published in Science by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues, and then about their and NASA’s refusal to address the criticisms.

The result has been a stormy brew of debate about the role of peer review, bloggers and the reliability of NASA, at least as it pertains to microbiological issues, almost as toxic as the salty and arsenic waters of Mono Lake in California, from which Dr. Wolfe-Simon of the U.S. Geological Survey scooped up some bacteria last year.

Seeking evidence that life could follow a different biochemical path than what is normally assumed, Dr. Wolfe-Simon grew them in an arsenic-rich and phosphorus-free environment, reporting in the paper and a NASA news conference on Dec. 2 that the bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria, had substituted arsenic for phosphorus in many im-

portant molecules in its body, including DNA. But the ink had hardly dried on headlines around the world when microbiologists, who have been suspicious of NASA ever since the agency announced that it had found fossils of microbes in a meteorite from Mars in 1996, began shooting back, saying the experimenters had failed to provide any solid evidence that arsenic had actually been incorporated into the bacterium’s DNA. In a scathing commentary on her blog RRResearch, Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, ran through a long list of what she said were errors and omissions in the paper, which she summarized in the end as “lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information.”

Among other mistakes, she and others say, the experimenters failed to wash the bug’s DNA before testing it for arsenic, thus leaving the possibility that the arsenic detected there was just stuck to the outside of the giant molecule, like mud on the bottom of a shoe, a process she described as “Microbiology 101.” Over the course of a week her blog, which normally has a few hundred visitors a day, recorded almost 90,000 hits before the furor died down. She has also sent a letter to Science.

Things got nastier when NASA and Dr. Wolfe-Simon refused to respond to such criticisms, which quickly leapt from Dr. Redfield and others’ blogs to Wired and Slate and The Observatory, a blog covering the science press for the Columbia Journalism Review. According to CBC News, Dwayne Brown, a NASA spokesman, said that the agency wouldn’t debate science with bloggers and would stick to peer-reviewed literature. The online tech magazine Gizmodo ran a highly doctored picture of Dr. Redfield and Dr. Wolfe-Simon staring lightning bolts at each other.

In a statement on her own Web site, Dr. Wolfe-Simon noted that the paper had been carefully peer-reviewed and said, “We’ve been concerned that some conclusions have been drawn based on claims not made in our paper,” but did not elaborate on what those mistaken claims were.

In the interest of stimulating healthy debate, she said, Science was making the paper available free of charge (although registration is required) for a couple of weeks. The experimenters are compiling a list of answers for frequently asked questions, which can be sent to gfajquestions@gmail.com and will eventually be posted online.

Dr. Redfield said Mr. Brown’s reaction was silly. “We are the peers,”

she said.

Conversation and arguing have always been an important part of how science has been done, she said.

Once upon a time it was by mail, and was private and slow. “Now,” she said, “the conversation is carried out in public in ways everyone can see.”

She added, “This kind of intellectual analysis and give and take is a big chunk of the fun of doing science.”

Nevertheless, she said she sympathized with Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s position as a woman in science advocating a controversial view, and she agreed with her decision to keep a low peer-reviewed profile. More arguing, as a blogger who goes by the name of Isis pointed out in a post titled “Don’t Like Arsenic Bacteria?

Put Your Experiment Where Your Mouth Is!,” will not solve the problem.

Only more data, which will probably be forthcoming, will tell whether the GFAJ-1 bug is weird life that has found a new way to live, or just tough and able to survive in arsenic.

If the original paper was right, that would be “great,” said Dr. Redfield.

But the opposite could also be presented as a demonstration that life is such a powerful force.

“NASA can spin it either way,” she said.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

41 SCIENCE / TECH

Before You Lift a Weight, Get Some Advice

By JANE E. BRODY

I

t seems unfair when people get hurt while trying to do something good for their bodies. But that is exactly what happened to nearly a million Americans from 1990 to 2007 when they sought to improve their strength and well-being through weight training — exercises done with free weights or on gym equipment called resistance machines.

To be sure, these injuries are less common than, say, those linked to running, cycling or competitive sports. But a national study, published online in March by The American Journal of Sports Medicine, revealed that these mishaps are on the rise and that they spare no body part, gender or age group.

The study covered 25,335 people aged 6 to 100 who were taken to emergency rooms with weight-training injuries. The research team, from the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said that worked out to nearly one million such injuries throughout the country, an increase of 48 percent from the beginning of the 18-year study period to the end.

This year Jessica Cleary, a 40-year-old mother from Chicago, joined the growing number of injured weight trainers. Ms. Cleary said in an interview that she had been working out with free weights and on resistance machines about five times a week for several years. She believed she was well trained, having been guided by a personal trainer for eight months. But on a fateful day last May she slid off a leg-strengthening machine head first, and her neck landed hard on a metal part of the equipment.

Unable to talk and having trouble breathing, she was taken to an emergency room, where tests showed she had fractured her larynx. A challenging operation and three mon-

ths of recovery later, she said she felt lucky to have ended up with “only a paralyzed vocal cord” and a permanently raspy voice.

“At another gym on a similar piece of equipment, a woman broke her neck,” Ms. Cleary told me.

Safety First Men were injured in more than 80 percent of cases described in the study — hardly surprising since they are the primary users of weight rooms. But the study showed that weight-training injuries were rising faster among women, many of whom have only recently taken up the activity to help with weight control, bone density and overall ability to perform life’s chores.

Yours truly is now among them. Soon after my husband’s death in March, I realized that without his brawn at my disposal, I needed to enhance my ability to wield heavy tools and carry big loads without hurting my back or shoulders. So, guided by a personal trainer and knowing I have little time to spend in a gym, I learned some simple core-strengthening exercises and bought two sets of free weights to use at home.

I decided to research and write this column in part because I hope to avoid an injury that could make matters worse instead of better.

In the study, sprains and strains to the upper and lower trunk were the most common injuries, and in two-thirds of cases, they resulted from people dropping weights on themselves.

More than 90 percent of injuries were incurred using free weights, which were responsible for 24 percent of fractures and dislocations.

While people aged 13 to 24 had the greatest number of injuries, the largest increase occurred among those 45 and older, many of them people like me who want to delay or reverse age-related muscle loss and improve the quality of their later years.

An author of the Ohio study, Dawn Comstock, principal investigator at the Children’s Hospital’s Center for Injury Research and Policy, said that “before beginning a weight-training program, it is important that people of all ages consult with a health professional, such as a doctor or athletic trainer, to create a safe training program based on their age and capabilities.”

It is critical as well to get proper instruction on how to use weight-lifting equipment and learn the proper technique, Dr. Comstock said.

Ralph Reiff, athletic trainer and director of St. Vincent Sports Performance in Indianapolis, agreed. “The worst thing a person can do is go into a gym, look around to see what other people are doing, and then start doing it,” he said. Before starting out, he said in an interview, ask a qualified professional to “sit down with you to discuss your goals and the activities you currently do, and then design an individualized weight-training program that is safe relative to any problems you may have.”

In seeking guidance, he said, “don’t be afraid to ask about a trainer’s qualifications.

“Is the trainer certified by the American College of Sports Medicine or the National Athletic Trainers’ Association? Your body is too valuable to take advice from someone without a credible education.”

He recommended that those considering weight training should first be evaluated as to their abilities and limitations — “can you do a full squat, raise your arms over your head, rotate your trunk with your feet flat on the floor and knees bent?” This would be followed by personalized dos and don’ts in the weight room.

Too Much of a Good Thing The most common cause of weight-training injuries, Mr. Reiff said, is trying to do too much — doing too many repetitions, using too much weight or doing the workout too often.

These practices can result in muscle injury and torn tendons and ligaments, as well as inflammation of the tendons and bursae (the cushionlike sacs around the joints) — all debilitating injuries that can discourage someone from returning to the gym. Lifting weights that are too heavy can injure the rotator cuff in the shoulder or strain the back.

Muscles get stronger when they are worked hard, developing microtears that are healed with protein-rich tissue. But when muscles are overstressed, the serious tears that can result are anything but strengthening.

In bench pressing, it is best to use a spotter to make sure the activity is done safely.

A second common cause of injury is poor technique, Mr. Reiff said. Improper alignment while lifting or using resistance machines can place unnatural or uneven stresses on various body parts. You must have respect for the equipment and know how to use it safely in relation to your size and abilities. The machines themselves can sometimes be a hazard, as Ms. Cleary discovered.

After an injury, it is critical to give the body the time and treatment it needs to heal before returning to weight-training. This does not necessarily mean totally abandoning a strengthening workout. If shoulders are injured, for example, legs can still be worked safely, and vice versa.

SCIENCE / TECH 42

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Effort Falters on San Francisco Bay Delta

By FELICITY BARRINGER

A

high-stakes effort to remake the San Francisco Bay Delta, the West Coast’s largest estuary, is looking as fragile as the degraded delta itself these days.

Four years into the effort, the distance between competing water constituencies has only been widening as self-imposed deadlines come and go.

Farmers and cities in Southern California are pressing for a return to the abundant supply of water delivered through the 1,000-square-mile delta before a drought and legal rulings to protect endangered fish led to constraints two years ago. Environmentalists want ironclad guarantees that threatened fish like the minnow-size delta smelt will not be wiped out for want of water.

The Bay Delta Conservation Plan, a federal and state initiative, would re-engineer the delta to make it safe for native species and would establish a framework for water distribution for the next 50 years. The delta, where California’s two largest rivers come together, supplies about one-quarter of the freshwater used by about 23 million Californians.

The goals of the plan are to keep vegetables and fruit trees growing in the Central Valley, taps running in Southern California and native fish swimming in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and in the briny western reaches of the delta, which the rivers feed and give it its formal name.

But the Westlands Water District, which serves some of the wealthiest and most powerful agricultural interests, has pulled out of the negotiations, saying it doubts it will get the water deliveries it had expected.

“The original purpose was to restore our water supply,” said Tom Birmingham, the general manager of the district, which snakes along the western edge of the Central Valley and serves 600 farms, according to its Web site.

The route the water takes is not without risks. Because of 160 years of farming and the construction of 1,100 miles of levees, delta lands have sunk and are now 3 to 20 feet below sea level. Mindful of how Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, planners are also focusing on the possibility that a big earthquake or storm could break crucial levees and allow saltwater from the bay to inundate the delta, which could shut off a large source of the freshwater supply for months.

Among the proposed solutions to the environmental and engineering issues is a $13 billion tunnel that would tap into the Sacramento River farther upstream and divert water around the delta. The tunnel, which could be 33 feet in diameter and 33 miles long, would be designed to be more resilient to earthquakes. It could also elimi-

nate the springtime problem of newly hatched young smelt being sucked into giant pumps south of the delta that pull the river water into the distribution system.

Another proposal calls for a canal system to serve the same purpose. And a third calls for installing gates to isolate one of the northernmost channels of the San Joaquin River, setting aside a permanent habitat for fish.

Both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and the incoming Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, support the twin goals of making the supply of water running through the delta reliable and protecting the species that have dwindled.

As Spreck Rosekrans, a delta expert for the Environmental Defense Fund, said, “The reliability of our water systems is key to California’s economy.”

But Mr. Birmingham said that no agency contracting for water from federal or state projects “is going to spend billions of dollars on the implementation of a program that isn’t going to provide benefits to them.”

While he did not specify what water deliveries would be adequate, Mr. Birmingham and other Westlands officials had expressed comfort with the option most closely studied, which could ensure that the district gets more than 70 percent of the maximum flows that it contracts for.

In 2009, that flow was reduced to 10 percent of the contracted amount; a political outcry ensued.

The district originally joined in the conservation effort partly to win exemptions from some provisions of the Endangered Species Act. The premise is that helping to create or restore habitat for a species can outweigh the harm imposed by another activity — in this case, transporting water south through the federal and state systems.

The precise relationship between flows of river water and fish mortality is not clear. Still, environmentalists and fishermen note that the years of abundant water for farmers and Southern California cities corresponded to years when fish populations crashed — in the case of the smelt, almost to the vanishing point. (Judge Oliver W. Wanger of Federal District Court ruled Tuesday that the 2008 federal plan to protect the smelt was critically flawed and sent it back to the Fish and Wildlife Service for reconsideration.)

The work on the Bay Delta Conservation Plan had nonetheless been moving in a direction favorable to Westlands interests for much of the past year, with most of the attention devoted to a set of flow-related criteria that would assure the district of supplies they considered sufficient.

Then, federal and state biologists reported in September that those criteria could deprive the smelt of crucial water flow.

In November, David Hayes, the In-

terior Department’s No. 2 official, made it clear that the finding meant that other formulas, which would probably mean less water for farmers, would have to be studied as well. Westlands officials were furious.

“We were sold a bill of goods once again by the federal government,” said Westland’s president, Jean Sagouspe. In an interview, he said the scientific process had been “politicized,” and he went so far as to call Mr. Hayes a “liar.”

Mr. Sagouspe predicted that the loss of Westlands financial support, which has covered more than a third of the planning costs so far, would doom the project. “Nothing will get built if we’re out,” he said.

In an interview, Mr. Hayes played down the district’s move. “I would turn my attention not to talking to them but to continuing the work we’re doing,” he said, adding that the other major water users are “still at the table.”

New actions and announcements from both state and federal officials are possible at any moment.

By agreement and by state law, Westlands had been sharing the cost of the plans with the Kern County Water Agency, which represents wealthy farmers and investors and growing communities to the west of the southern Sierra Nevada, and with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. These two agencies might now

have to bear future costs with only the help of whatever money can come from the financially squeezed state and federal agencies.

So far the planning costs are expected to exceed $226 million, however, and more than half of that has already been spent.

“The costs go up significantly if major parties are dropping out,” said Jeff Kightlinger, the chief executive of the Southern California district. “While we have not been necessarily as vocal as Westlands, we share the same frustrations.”

If the planning process falls apart, Mr. Kightlinger said, the water users might “limp along without a big grand fix but a number of patches.”

Environmentalists warn that inaction on the delta ecosystem could imperil aquatic life. At the same time, many acknowledge the need for a solution that also adequately addresses the needs of farms and cities.

“The theatrics of people leaving the negotiating table is just that, it’s theatric,” said Jon Rosenfield, a biologist with the nonprofit Bay Institute and a member of the restoration plan’s steering committee.

“There has to be a conservation and restoration plan for the delta,” Mr. Rosenfield said, “that improves the status of the species and provides better water supply reliability for the water users.”

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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Wine

Gifts for Wine & Cocktail Lovers

By ERIC ASIMOV

N

OBODY is easier to please at the holidays than wine lovers. Spirits and cocktail fans, too. Just don’t try to get too creative with your gifts.

Trouble starts when you feel you must forsake the same old, same old.

That’s when the silliness begins, and recipients must contain their irritation with strained smiles of feigned delight.

So, please, save your boxers with the intricate cork design, your batterypowered aerators that promise to age a wine 10 years in 30 seconds, your genuine personalized oak wine barrels. Bottles are what’s wanted. Good bottles. Books can’t hurt, either, nor can top-quality, fundamental tools for opening, preparing and serving. These are the real treasures that will earn genuine gratitude and perhaps even a chance to share in the booty.

For example, you may think, Oh, Champagne, what a boring gift. No. Unless the object of your largesse is seriously misanthropic, Champagne is always — I repeat, always — welcome, especially if it’s an uncommonly good bottle. For nonvintage brut, I recommend Charles

Heidsieck Brut Réserve for about $35, always a great value. The Camille Savès Carte Blanche is slightly more expensive, at $47, but every year it is one of my favorite nonvintage bruts.

For true Champagne lovers, how about a couple of superb bottles from two rising stars? Ulysse Collin Extra Brut blanc de blancs is pure, clear, chalky and delicious for about $70, while Cédric Bouchard’s deep, complex Inflorescence blanc de noirs can be found for about $50 to $70 a bottle. Finally, a prestige bottle is a great treat. Among the big houses, Taittinger is perennially underrated. Its excellent Comtes de Champagne blanc de blancs is about $150.

Most drinks aficionados probably already have a cocktail shaker. Sadly, most of them are awful. The edges are too sharp, the parts don’t fit together. The thing is aimed at achieving a shiny Art Deco stylishness rather than a welcome functionality. My suggestion is the Oxo stainless-steel 16-ounce shaker, for about $30. It’s insulated so it won’t freeze your hands as you shake, the cap serves as a handy jigger measure, and all the parts fit easily.

While amateur bartenders are partial to the showy three-piece shaker,

many professionals prefer the two-piece Boston shaker. Schott Zwiesel makes two elegant versions, either a stainless-steeland-glass set, for about $30, or an all stainless-steel, about $40. If you do opt for a Boston shaker, you’ll need a strainer, too. Oxo makes a good hawthorn strainer, equipped with prongs and a spring around the rim to fit inside the shaker, for about $12.

Tools are nothing without the raw equipment, so how about a few more bottles? If your target loves classic manhattans and old-fashioneds, but is used to the bourbon kind, how about a bottle of good rye for an entirely different experience?

Sazerac’s six-year-old is great for blending or sipping. It’s about $30. The subordinate ingredients in cocktails, like the complexity of a good vermouth in a manhattan, make a world of difference, too. Carpano Antica ($35) is one of the best.

For me, this was the year of mezcal, the smokier, spicier cousin of tequila. Del Maguey, the best producer, has brought out Vida, an excellent introductory mezcal, for about $40, half the price of its more complex single-village mezcals.

Speaking of smoke, I do love Islay single malts, the smokiest, peatiest of the bunch, and of those, Lagavulin ($80) may be the sternest of all. Adding a touch of water opens the lock to pleasure. For an entirely different sort of sipping experience, Irish whiskey can be like a sweet meadow in the mouth, pure and uplifting.

Redbreast, for about $50, is a classic.

Maybe you’d like to surprise a wine lover with something out of the ordinary?

May I suggest some of the deliciously in-

triguing wines coming out of Sicily, particularly those from Arianna Occhipinti?

Her 2008 frappato ($35) is lively, lightbodied and surprisingly complex, while the SP68 ($25) is fresh, juicy and joyous.

Even more off the well-trodden path is one of the greatest sweet wines in the world, Tokaji aszu, from Hungary. These wines are measured on the puttonyos scale of sweetness, from three up to six.

A five puttonyos Tokaji aszu from a good producer like Royal or Disznoko ($40 to $60) can be a thrilling balancing act of sweetness and refreshment.

Stalwart Napa cabernet lovers must not be ignored. Frog’s Leap always makes wines that show a rare combination of depth and drinkability. The 2007 is about $40. I love some of the classic Napa producers, which are often overlooked. You can find excellent older vintages of Heitz Cellars Trailside Vineyard, like 1999 and 2001, for about $90. And when I can find bottles of Mayacamas cabernet, I’m tempted to snap them up.

The 2004 is about $65.

Finally, if you really want to make a grand statement, consider magnums, twice the size of a normal bottle and immeasurably cooler for their ability to age and to satisfy a crowd. A magnum of grand cru Chablis from William Fèvre, from the superb 2008 vintage, is about $150. A wonderfully balanced spätlese riesling, the 2008 Schäfer-Fröhlich Bockenauer Felseneck, is about $86, while a magnum of the 2008 barbera Cascina Francia from Giacomo Conterno is about $110. By the way, if you’re shopping for me, that was Giacomo Conterno.

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The San Juan Weekly

Haitians in U.S. Brace for Deportations

By KIRK SEMPLE

T

he Obama administration has been quietly moving to resume deportations of Haitians for the first time since the earthquake last January. But in New York’s Haitian diaspora, the reaction has been far from muted, including frustration and fear among immigrants and anger from their advocates, who say that an influx of deportees will only add to the country’s woes.

Haiti is racked today by a cholera epidemic and political turmoil, as well as the tortuously slow reconstruction.

“I don’t think Haiti can handle more challenges than what it has right now,” said Mathieu Eugene, a Haitian-American member of the New York City Council.

“The earthquake, the cholera, the election — everything’s upside down in Haiti.”

Federal officials suspended deportations to Haiti immediately after the Jan. 12 earthquake. In addition, a special immigration status, sometimes granted to foreigners who are unable to return safely to their home countries because of armed conflict or natural disasters, was extended to Haitians in the United States, allowing them to remain temporarily and work. Many Haitians, including some with criminal convictions, were also released from detention centers across the country.

But in recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, has begun

rounding up Haitian immigrants again, including some who had been released earlier this year, immigration lawyers said. On Dec. 10, the agency disclosed, in response to questions from The Associated Press, that it would resume deportations by mid-January.

Immigration officials said they would deport only Haitians who had been convicted of crimes and had finished serving their sentences.

Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement last week that the agency was deciding whom to deport in a manner “consistent with our domestic immigration enforcement priorities,” but did not elaborate. The Obama administration has said it is focusing immigration enforcement efforts on catching and deporting immigrants who have been convicted of the most serious crimes or who pose a threat to national security.

Haitians who have been granted the special immigration status, known as temporary protected status, will continue to be shielded from deportation, officials said.

The protection was granted for 18 months and is set to expire in mid-July; Haitians who have committed felonies or at least two misdemeanors were not eligible for the program.

Immigration officials did not say how many people they planned to send back to Haiti when deportations resume next month, but they revealed last week that 351 Haitians were in detention.

Mr. Eugene and other Haitian community leaders in New York said that despite the limits of the government’s plan, the city’s Haitians were bracing for a resumption of wider deportations.

“The people in the community are worried because they don’t know what the next target population is going to be,” Mr. Eugene said.

Ricot Dupuy, the manager of Radio Soleil, a Creole-language station in Flatbush, Brooklyn, said he had been “flooded with calls” about the plans for deportations.

Immigration officials would not say when they planned to resume deportations of noncriminals. The Haitian government has apparently not commented on Washington’s decision to resume deportations. The consul general in New York did not respond to phone messages, and the Haitian Embassy did not respond to calls and e-mails.

Nearly a year after the quake, an estimated 1.3 million Haitians are still displaced from their homes. The cholera outbreak has killed more than 2,500 people and hospitalized 58,000 more, according to the Haitian government. And disputes over the preliminary results of the presidential election last month have escalated into violence.

Advocacy groups have been lobbying the Obama administration to postpone the deportations. The Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York, wrote President Obama to say that their resumption would

endanger the deportees’ lives. The Haitian government often detains criminals deported from abroad, the organization said; because cholera is quickly spreading through that country’s detention system, the policy “would end up being a death sentence for many,” it said.

An official of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the State Department had been working with Haitian officials “to ensure that the resumption of removals is conducted in a safe, humane manner with minimal disruption to ongoing rebuilding efforts.”

Among those who have been rounded up in the past several weeks is a 42-year-old odd-jobs man who was detained last week by immigration officials in Manhattan and was being held on Friday in a jail in Hudson County, N.J., said his lawyer, Rachel Salazar, who asked that her client’s name be withheld because she did not want to jeopardize his case.

The man, who immigrated to the United States as a legal permanent resident in 1990 and has a 5-year-old child, was last detained in February because of three past felony convictions, including for assault, petty larceny and attempted robbery, for which he had served time. But he was released in May, during the moratorium on deportations, Ms. Salazar said.

The detainee said he was being held with about 40 other Haitians, the lawyer said, and he had not been told when the government planned to deport him.

Beneath Dead Sea Scientists Drill for Natural History

By ISABEL KERSHNER

F

ive miles out, nearly to the center of the Dead Sea, an international team of scientists has been drilling beneath the seabed to extract a record of climate change and earthquake history stretching back half a million years.

The preliminary evidence and clues found halfway through the 40-day project are more than the team could have hoped for. The scientists did not expect to pull up a wood fragment that was roughly 400,000 years old. Nor did they expect to come across a layer of gravel from a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. That finding would seem to indicate that what is now the middle of the Dead Sea — which is really a big salt lake — was once a shore, and that the water level had managed to recover naturally.

“We knew the lake went through high levels and lower levels,” said Prof. Zvi BenAvraham, a leading Dead Sea expert and the driving force behind the project, “but we did not know it got so low.” Professor Ben-Avraham, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and chief of the Minerva Dead Sea Research Center at Tel Aviv University, had been pushing for such a drilling operation for 10 years.

The idea was to bore under the sea

and extract a continuous geological core that, once analyzed, could supply information of global importance on natural processes and environmental changes.

The Dead Sea sits in the largest and deepest basin in the world. The scientists chose to drill at its center because they assumed that the sediment that had accumulated there had always been under water, the better preserved for having never been exposed to the atmosphere.

The special composition of the Dead Sea waters also affords unique opportunities for research. A special mineral found in the lake can be used for dating much further back in time than the more common radiocarbon method allows, giving the scientists an unprecedented insight into the history of natural forces in the region.

Finally, the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, which is based in Germany and is the only organization in the world capable of conducting such an operation, agreed to take on the $2.5 million project as a co-sponsor, together with the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The Israeli-led enterprise involves 40 scientists from Israel, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Japan and the United States.

Professor Ben-Avraham and his project manager, Michael Lazar, a marine geophysicist

at the University of Haifa, emphasized that they were working with scientists from Jordan and the Palestinian Authority because Israel, Jordan and the West Bank all border the Dead Sea. With its surface now almost 1,400 feet below sea level and its waters reaching a depth of 1,240 feet, the Dead Sea offers a unique environment for research that may also contribute to the world’s knowledge of human cultural evolution.

The first borehole, completed earlier this month, reached almost 1,500 feet below the seabed until the drill head gave out. The experts will log data from it before starting on a second hole.

The first hole produced scores of plastic tubes filled with continuous segments of sediment.

Uli Harms, executive secretary of the drilling program, said the hole had penetrated the sediment from four ice ages.

The project presented a logistical challenge. Scientists have been working on the platform around the clock in 12-hour shifts, taken there and back at sunrise and sunset in a small boat, the only one on the lake. Because of the high concentration of salt in the unusually buoyant water, the vessel needs constant maintenance.

“We are making history here,” said

Gideon Amit.

Mr. Lazar said the wildly varying layers of salt and mud represented dry periods and wet ones, respectively. A tiny fragment of wood, which Mr. Lazar said he was guarding like gold, was found stuck in some mud, indicating that it was probably from a tree carried here by a flood.

The gravel, similar to that found on shores of the Sinai Peninsula, mean the waters in this basin had sunk much lower in the past than had been thought. In light of concern over the drop in the Dead Sea’s waters, due to human intervention, scientists found room for hope, because the lake had reached even lower levels in history and managed to bounce back.

There was a hint of mystery at dawn on a recent Friday, when the scientists on the drilling platform announced they had just registered a temperature of 104 degrees inside pipes 1,300 feet down, a finding much higher than expected.

The reading gave rise to thoughts of volcanic activity, right in the area where Sodom and Gomorrah — biblical cities in Genesis as having been destroyed by God with fire and brimstone because of residents’ sins — were believed to have stood.

A later reading showed a lower temperature, within the range anticipated.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

45

To Conquer Wind Power, China Writes the Rules

By KEITH BRADSHER

J

udging by the din at its factory here one recent day, the Spanish company Gamesa may seem to be a thriving player in the Chinese wind energy industry it helped create.

But Gamesa has learned the hard way, as other foreign manufacturers have, that competing for China’s lucrative business means playing by strict house rules that are often stacked in Beijing’s favor.

Nearly all the components that Gamesa assembles into million-dollar turbines here, for example, are made by local suppliers — companies Gamesa trained to meet onerous local content requirements. And these same suppliers undermine Gamesa by selling parts to its Chinese competitors — wind turbine makers that barely existed in 2005, when Gamesa controlled more than a third of the Chinese market.

But in the five years since, the upstarts have grabbed more than 85 percent of the wind turbine market, aided by low-interest loans and cheap land from the government, as well as preferential contracts from the state-owned power companies that are the main buyers of the equipment. Gamesa’s market share now is only 3 percent.

With their government-bestowed blessings, Chinese companies have flourished and now control almost

half of the $45 billion global market for wind turbines.

The biggest of those players are now taking aim at foreign markets, particularly the United States, where General Electric has long been the leader.

The story of Gamesa in China follows an industrial arc traced in other businesses, like desktop computers and solar panels. Chinese companies acquire the latest Western technology by various means and then take advantage of government policies to become the world’s dominant, low-cost suppliers.

It is a pattern that many economists say could be repeated in other fields, like high-speed trains and nuclear reactors, unless China changes the way it plays the technology development game — or is forced to by its global trading partners.

Companies like Gamesa have been so eager to enter the Chinese market that they not only bow to Beijing’s dictates but have declined to complain to their own governments, even when they see China violating international trade agreements.

Even now, Gamesa is not crying foul — for reasons that are also part of the China story. Although the company’s market share in China has atrophied, the country’s wind turbine market has grown so big, so fast that Gamesa now sells more than twice as many turbines in China as it did when it was the market leader five years ago.

So as Gamesa executives see it, they made the right bet by coming to China. And they insist that they have no regrets about having trained more than 500 Chinese machinery companies as a cost of playing by Beijing’s rules — even if those rules have sometimes flouted international trade law. It is simply the table stakes of playing in the biggest game going.

“If we would not have done it, someone else would have done it,” said Jorge Calvet, Gamesa’s chairman and chief executive.

Gamesa, an old-line machinery company that entered the wind turbine business in 1994, is a modern Spanish success story.

Its factories in Pamplona and elsewhere in Spain have produced wind turbines installed around the world. With sales of $4.4 billion last year, Gamesa is the world’s third-largest turbine maker, after Vestas of Denmark, the longtime global leader, and G.E. With its relatively low Spanish labor costs, Gamesa became an early favorite a decade ago when China began buying significant numbers of imported wind turbines, as Beijing started moving toward clean energy. Gamesa also moved early and aggressively to beef up sales and maintenance organizations within China, amassing 35 percent of the market by 2005.

But Chinese officials had begun to slip new provisions into the bidding requirements for some state-run wind farms, requiring more and more of the content of turbines to be equipment produced within China — not imported.

Those piecemeal requirements soon led to a blanket requirement. On July 4, 2005, China’s top economic policy agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, declared that wind farms had to buy equipment in which at least 70 percent of the value was domestically manufactured.

“Wind farms not meeting the requirement of equipment localization rate shall not be allowed to be built,” stated the directive, known as Notice 1204.

Trade lawyers say that setting any local content requirement — let alone one stipulating such a high domestic share — was a violation of the rules of the World Trade Organization, the international body that China had joined just four years earlier. Joanna I. Lewis, a Georgetown University professor who is a longtime adviser to Chinese policy makers on wind energy, said she and others had repeatedly warned Beijing that the local-content policy risked provoking a W.T.O. challenge by other countries.

But the Chinese government bet correctly that Gamesa, as well as G.E. and other multinationals, would not dare risk losing a piece of China’s booming wind farm business by complaining to trade officials in their home countries.

Rather than fight, Gamesa and the other leading multinational wind turbine makers all opted to open factories in China and train local suppliers to meet the 70 percent threshold.

Mr. Calvet said Gamesa would have opened factories in China at some stage, regardless of the content policy.

“If you plan to go into a country,” Mr. Calvet said, “you really need to commit to a country.”

Ditlev Engel, the chief executive of Vestas, said in an interview, “We strongly believed that for us to be competitive in China, it was very important for us to develop an Asia supplier base.”

Continues on page 46

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Comes from page 45 A top executive at a rival of Gamesa and Vestas, who insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Beijing, said that multinationals had another reason for going along with China’s dictates: “Everybody was too scared.”

Local Production There is a difference between setting up an assembly plant in a host company — as many European wind turbine companies, including Gamesa, have done in the United States, for example — and ceding the production of crucial parts to companies in the host country.

In the United States, where there are no localcontent requirements, the wind turbine industry uses an average of 50 percent American-made parts. For its American operations, Gamesa relies somewhat more than that on American suppliers, but it still imports some parts from Spain, including crucial gearboxes.

Within weeks after Beijing’s issuance of Notice 1204, Gamesa sent dozens of Spanish engineers to Tianjin. The engineers did not just oversee the construction of the assembly plant, but fanned out to local Chinese companies and began teaching them how to make a multitude of steel forgings and castings, and a range of complex electronic controls.

One Chinese supplier here became so adept at making a 10-ton steel frame that keeps a wind turbine’s gearbox and generator aligned even under gale-force conditions, and making it so cheaply, that the Spanish company now ships the Chinese frame halfway around the world for turbines that Gamesa assembles at its American plant in Fairless Hills, Pa. Mr. Calvet said the American manufacturing sector had been so weakened in recent decades that for some components there were no American machinery companies readily available.

It was not until the summer of 2009, when senior Obama administration officials started looking at barriers to American clean energy exports, that the United States pressed China hard about Notice 1204. The Chinese government revoked it two months later.

But by then, the policy was no longer needed.

Some Gamesa wind turbines exceeded 95 percent local content.

“The objectives of the local content requirement were achieved, and probably more achieved than anyone expected,” said Steve Sawyer, the secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, a trade group based in Brussels that represents wind energy companies from around the world, including China.

A Battle Takes Shape China agreed to abide by the W.T.O.’s trade rules when it joined the organization in 2001. And Chinese officials, when willing to comment on such matters at all, typically defend their actions as being within the bounds of fair play.

Li Junfeng, an official at the National Development and Reform Commission who oversees renewable energy policy, defended the local content policy.

“It was localization support,” Mr. Li said in an interview. China is a developing country, he said, and developing countries need to do what they can to foster industrial development.

But the Obama administration takes a different view. It included the local content rule in the investigation it announced on Oct. 15, an inquiry into whether China’s clean energy policies had violated W.T.O. rules.

The investigation was spurred by the United Steelworkers union, which has no qualms about taking on Beijing because it has no sales contracts at risk in China.

Zhang Guobao, the director of China’s National Energy Administration, said at an Oct. 17 press confe-

rence that the United States was wrong to cite the local content rule in its investigation — because China had already abolished it. Mr. Zhang did have a point: the W.T.O.’s main redress for a local content protection is to push the offending country to revoke it.

But the United States investigation of China goes beyond local content, and the W.T.O. has other weapons at its disposal.

The trade organization, for example, has authority to order the repayment of subsidies a government gives to its export industries to the detriment of foreign competitors. The steelworkers’ petition cites various forms of subsidies and support that China has given to its industries in potential violation of international trade rules. That includes low-interest loans from state-owned banks and grants of cheap or free land, as well as other perks not available to foreign companies operating in China.

As for the state-owned wind farms that are the main buyers of wind energy equipment, China has many policies to preserve their dominance, while limiting market opportunities for foreign companies that might try to develop wind farms.

Those policies — all potential W.T.O. violations, according to some experts — are an open secret.

Earlier this autumn the Chinese wind turbine maker Ming Yang Wind Power Group made an initial public offering of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, as prelude to entering the American wind energy market. The financial disclosures in the company’s prospectus acknowledged that “we obtained land and other policy incentives from local governments,” as well as deals requiring that the municipal governments’ wind farms buy turbines only from Ming Yang.

China Looks Abroad Gamesa, among other multinational turbine makers, so far has benefited from the growing market in China, despite policies that have increasingly relegated those companies to fighting over ever-thinner slices of the pie.

But that dynamic could be changing. The Chinese government is now slowing the approval of new wind farms at home. The pause, whose duration is unclear, is meant to give the national electricity system time to absorb thousands of new turbines that have already been erected and not yet connected to the grid.

Gamesa had an ample order book lined up before the government applied the brakes. But the government policy means that the Chinese turbine makers, having become giants on the backs of companies like Gamesa, must now look beyond their captive national market for further growth.

Sinovel, China’s biggest wind turbine maker, has said it wants to become the world’s largest by 2015. The

company’s chairman and president, Han Junliang, said in October at the annual China Wind Power industry conference in Beijing that his goal was to sell as many turbines overseas as within China.

Sinovel is among the Chinese companies now opening sales offices across the United States in preparation for a big export push next year. They are backed by more than $13 billion in low-interest loans issued this past summer by Chinese government-owned banks; billions more are being raised in initial public offerings led mainly by Morgan Stanley this autumn in New York and Hong Kong.

Multinationals are alarmed. Vestas, for example, is closing four factories in Denmark and one in Sweden, and laying off one-eighth of its 24,000-person labor force this autumn, in an effort to push its costs down closer to Asian levels, its chief, Mr. Engel, said.

The Chinese push, clouded by the Obama administration’s investigation of the steelworkers’ complaint, could complicate the climate change debate in the West. Wind farm developers in the West are worried that Western governments may be less enthusiastic about encouraging renewable energy requirements if these programs are perceived as creating jobs in China instead of at home.

The provincial government of Ontario in Canada now wants to take a page from China’s playbook by trying to require 25 percent local content for wind energy projects and 50 percent for solar power projects in the province. The Japanese government responded by filing a W.T.O. complaint against Canada in September, asserting that Ontario was violating the W.T.O. prohibition on local content requirements. By contrast, Japan has never filed a W.T.O. complaint on any issue against China, for fear of harming diplomatic relations with its large neighbor.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is intent on turning its wind energy industry into the global leader, helping manufacturers coordinate export strategies and providing various sorts of technical assistance.

Mr. Li, the overseer of the Chinese renewable energy industry, publicly exhorted the leaders of the nation’s biggest wind turbine makers at the China Wind Power conference, a three-day event that drew hundreds of executives from around the world.

“You cannot be called a winner if you are the leader for three or five years,” Mr. Li told the Chinese executives. “You can only stand on the top line if you are the leader for 100 or 200 years.”

The Chinese presidents sat quietly and respectfully, chins down. Senior executives from the foreign manufacturers — including Vestas, G.E. and Gamesa — sat alongside them, staring straight ahead in stony silence.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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Three King’s Day in Juana Díaz H

istorians can’t agree on who Juana Díaz was and why this municipality adopted her name. One tradition with clear origins, however, is the celebration of the Epiphany, or Three Kings’ Day on January 6th.

Although all of Puerto Rico celebrates this day, Juana Díaz has been cited as the standard-bearer, the “City of the Three Kings” that serves as Puerto Rico’s own Bethlehem. The town began celebrating this feast in 1884, and there is even a museum dedicated to its history.

Like many of its neighboring coastal towns to the south, Juana Díaz boasted large sugar plantations during the 19th and early 20th centuries. That

crop has been substituted mostly by fruits such as avocados and mangoes. However, the town is famous for the fermented drink of the taínos called mabí, made from the tree of the same name.

The statue at the famous “Plazita” honors one of Puerto Rico’s most vocal advocates for independence, Juana Díaz’s own Luis Lloréns Torres (1876-1944).

He was both a modernist writer as well as a politician who lived to see his island pass from Spanish rule to United States control. This plaza is not to be confused with the town square, the more spacious Plaza Román Baldorioty de Castro.

Juana Díaz is often called the City of Poets, as it inspired many

of its citizens to take up the pen.

Llórens Torres’s beloved part of town was the ward of Collores, represented in his most famous poem, in which he gives voice to a jíbaro who describes its beauty while sadly bidding the town goodbye.

This ward is also the site of the Salto de Collores Waterfall.

Other natural wonders include the Guayabal Lake and Dam, where fishing is permitted. A

group of independent-minded, active citizens from this municipality are seeking to open up a recreational park and natural reserve at the site of two natural landmarks, the Rocky Forest (Bosque Rocoso) and Caves Hill.

The proposed area would include a visitor center, a restaurant, and walking paths, among other amenities. It might also help spawn the next generation of poets.

48 December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

J

uana Díaz is a municipality of Puerto Rico located in the southern coast of the island, south of Jayuya, Ciales, Orocovis and Villalba; east of Ponce; and west of Coamo and Santa Isabel and the Caribbean Sea to the south. Juana Díaz is spread over 12 wards and Juana Diaz Pueblo (The downtown area and the administrative center of the city). It is part of the Ponce Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Juana Diaz is known as “La Ciudad del Mabí” (Mabí City) - Mabí (see Mauby) is a fermented Taíno beverage made out from the bark of the mabi tree Colubrina elliptica (L’Her.) Brongn.

History Juana Díaz was founded in 1798.

The civil government of this territory was established on April 25, 1798.

Note to people unfamiliar with Puerto Rico’s political subdivisions: “Juana Díaz” refers here to what is officially called Municipality of Juana Díaz.

All wards listed here are what constitute the municipality itself. “Juana Díaz pueblo” (above) is the downtown area and the administrative center of the municipality - although all inhabitants within the municipality are “juanadinos” (name

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given to people of the Municipality of Juana Díaz).

Geo/Topography Several rivers run through the Juana Díaz territory, among them, Río Inabón and the Río Jacaguas, from which Juana Díaz takes its nickname: “Ciudad del Jacaguas”. The Guayabal dam between Juana Díaz and Villalba is located in this river. Among its main tributaries are Río Toa Vaca in Villalba, also dammed. Both Guayabal and Toa Vaca lakes are visible in the map. Lake Toa Vaca is also the main source of drinking water for Juana Díaz, Ponce and other towns. rums are now produced from raw materials imported from other countries. Juana Díaz now produces planAgriculture Juana Díaz produced sugar cane tains, bananas, mangoes, and other but with the urban and industrial crops that are consumed in the local development the sugar industry has markets and also exported to other disappeared from Puerto Rico. Local countries. Cattle and pigs are also raised in local farms.

Industry Beige marble—one of the finest marbles in the world.

Tourism • Efraín Daleccio Caves • Lucero Caves • Guayabal Lagoon • Holy Kings monument • Three Kings Museum

Festivals and events • Three Kings Festival - January Página Oficial de los Reyes Magos de Juana Díaz This religious and cultural event began in 1884. It celebrates the visit of the Three Kings (Three Wisemen) to baby Jesus. Every year on January 6 people of all ages come to town to celebrate Three Kings Day. The main event is a parade down Comercio Street to the town’s plaza where a big altar is set-up for the ce-

lebration of the Holy Eucharist. The Eucharist begins with an act of the Prophets announcing the coming of a messiah. The prophesies are followed by the sighting of three kings by the shepherds. The holy mass follows and at the end the Three Kings find and adore baby Jesus. This is a must see activity if you are visiting Puerto Rico in January, and is an activity for all ages.

If you can, come dressed as shepherds and be part of the celebration.

• Mabí Festival - March • Bull Frog Festival - April • Good Friday - Juana Díaz celebrates many activities during Holy Week each year. The most notable is the Good Friday procession that transists through many of the urban communities with representations of the Stations of the Cross. Thousands of juanadinos and people from other towns visit Juana Díaz on Good Friday.

• Llorensiana Week - May • Patron Saint Festivities of San Ramón Nonato - August; San Ramón Nonato’s celebration is August 31.

Both religious and cultural events are celebrated at the end of August and early September in honor of San Ramón Nonato, the patron saint.

• Puerto Rican Festivities - December

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December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

49

A Swiss Secret, Tucked Away in the Alps

By KIMBERLY BRADLEY

I

MAGINE a mountain landscape speckled with rustic villages whose residents speak an ancient, isolated language. Centuries-old stone dwellings with mysterious renderings of wild men and mountain goats are etched into white facades.

Panoramic views are so clear and stunning you have to rub your eyes to make sure you’re not in a Hollywood epic.

This isn’t Middle Earth. It’s Switzerland’s Lower Engadine, a remote, rugged, near-forgotten valley in the country’s easternmost corner.

Here, in the central Alps, the En river (which becomes the Inn in Austria) cuts a deep crevasse into the landscape. It’s also an extension of the much better-known Upper Engadine, where St. Moritz’s luxury culture has long attracted skiers and celebrities — but, in some ways, it couldn’t feel farther away.

My travel companion and I were here to ski on the last of the spring snow and hike along the still-muddy Via Engiadina trail. Our holiday ren-

tal house sat 5,500 feet above sea level, and I expected new cultural experiences — this is, after all, one of the last areas in which Romansh, a language described to me as “street Latin,” is predominantly spoken.

But mixed in among the natural bounty was something even more surprising: high culture. During our

visit, we found top-notch contemporary art galleries, hotels hosting concerts and art happenings, a sculpture park, and even a microbrewery. Most of these venues have appeared in the last five years or so.

The artistic tradition in the Lower Engadine (or Engiadina Bassa in Romansh), however, didn’t emerge out of nothing. “You can feel the energy of all the creative people who’ve come for centuries,” said the St. Moritz-based architect Hans-Jörg Ruch, who has, for the last 20 years, updated historic buildings in the Upper and Lower Engadine and beyond, converting them into private homes and art galleries.

“Philosophers, authors, artists always came here, but it was usually to the upper valley,” said Ladina Florineth, owner of Villa Flor, a charming seven-room hotel that opened last summer in a renovated patrician

house in the town of S-chanf. “Now people are discovering the lower part, which is becoming more important for those who want something authentic,” she said.

While St. Moritz has hosted famous art world names like Beuys, Warhol and Schnabel, the Lower Engadine has started to attract its share. Two years ago, Eva Presenhuber, a Zurich-based blue-chip gallerist, built a sculptural holiday house in Vnà. The Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor was apparently so taken with Tschlin, a tiny village on the Lower Engadine’s eastern edge, that he designed a hotel for it.

The hotel didn’t come to fruition, but the Swiss curator and art-world star Hans Ulrich Obrist plans to establish an archive and artist’s residency in the same town.

Continues on page 50

50

Comes from page 49 And the enigmatic, peripatetic artist Not Vital (pronounced “note vee-TAL”), a native of the region, owns several properties that display his own sculptures and works by other artists. On the western edge of Sent, where he was born, he spearheaded a hilly outdoor sculpture garden called Parkin Not dal Mot. In nearby Ardez, he runs a foundation that displays art and makes a mission of collecting and archiving books and publications written in Romansh.

Despite all this, the Lower Engadine has so far escaped overdevelopment largely because of its inaccessibility. Old traditions abound. There are those intriguing inscriptions, called sgraffiti, etched into the thick-walled buildings, a decorative custom imported from nearby Italy in the 16th century. There are even farmers who still share their houses with livestock.

And then there’s the landscape. “This valley’s rugged beauty, its shifts from

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

warm to cold, dark to light, attracts creative people looking for contemplation,” said Hans Schmid, a local hotelier.

Mr. Schmid would know: he gave up a job as culture director of the Swiss canton of St. Gallen to run Hotel Piz Linard, which opened in a historic building in 2007. Standing pink and pretty on the village square of Lavin, it has become a cultural draw for both locals and visitors, hosting a mix of weekend concerts, film screenings and exhibitions.

Other hotels also cater to culture vultures yearning for both quality and authenticity: In Vnà, a village of 70 residents, a few entrepreneurial locals established a foundation in 2004 to renovate the town’s cultural center, a building that had fallen into disuse.

In 2008 the center became Hotel Piz Tschütta, which now hosts recitals and offers a charming restaurant and guest rooms. Beyond the building, more rooms are dispersed throughout the village.

Then there’s the glamorous Hotel Castell — a fortress atop a mountain overlooking Zuoz. Built in 1912, it reopened in 2004, with the art collector Ruedi Bechtler as a primary shareholder, and the Swiss art dealer couple Iwan and Manuela Wirth as additional partners.

Now packed with works by some of today’s biggest artists, Castell is like a contemporary art center with an Alpine backdrop. Highlights include James Turrell’s “Skyspace Piz Uter,” from 2006, a cylindrical, chapel-like space on the hotel grounds.

And at the curved red bar designed

by Pipilotti Rist, bottle labels display the Swiss artist’s video projections.

Castell is also a site for a late-summer event called St. Moritz Art Masters, in its third year, which now spills into the Lower Engadine with a series of art walks, talks and exhibitions.

In Tschlin, Markus Miessen, a Berlin-based architect, is collaborating with Mr. Obrist on yet another new art venue. “We researched the whole area, driving around, and these villages are really birds’ nests,” he said, explaining a plan to use the town’s vacant school building and a farmhouse to house Mr. Obrist’s vast archive and create the artist’s residency. “We wanted to find a place that was difficult to reach, so the fellows wouldn’t just be passing through,” Mr. Miessen said. (Located on a frighteningly steep road at more than 5,000 feet above sea level, Tschlin is a town that few just pass through.)

Ms. Presenhuber, the Zurich-based gallery owner, made a somewhat unlikely comparison. “The area is like Montauk in the 1970s,” she said.

“First artists and people without so much money settled there. Now, 30 or 40 years later, it’s hyped. I think the Lower Engadine will be the same way in 10 or 20 years.”

HOW TO GET THERE The closest major airport is Zurich. Continental and American fly nonstop from Newark and Kennedy, respectively, with fares starting at about $630 for travel in May, according to a recent online search. The Rhaetian Railway train travels to Scuol, the Lower Engadine’s capital, and allows car transport on portions of the route. (Once you’re there, it’s easiest to explore the area by car.)

WHERE TO STAY For killer views, excellent contemporary art, hiking, fine dining and a soothing, huge hammam, there’s Hotel Castell (Via Castell; 41-81-851-52-53; hotelcastell.ch) in Zuoz. Rooms start at 230 Swiss francs, or $208 at 1.07 Swiss francs to the dollar.

Piz Linard (Plazza Gronda; 41-81-862-26-26; pizlinard.ch) overlooks the village square in Lavin.

Individually designed by various artist teams, its 15 guest rooms include unusual features like a freestanding wooden bathtub. Rooms from 240 francs, including breakfast and a fourcourse dinner.

The seven rooms at Villa Flor (Somvih 19, S-chanf; 41-81-851-22-30; villaflor.ch) are carefully curated mini-suites. Artworks from the owner’s collection are scattered throughout the private and public spaces. Rooms start at 190 francs.

In Vnà, Piz Tschütta (Bügl Grond; 41-81-860-12-12; hotelvna.ch) offers nine spacious rooms in its cultural center and five additional rooms scattered throughout the village. The restaurant serves tasty international and local dishes. Rooms start at 85 francs.

In Scuol, the year-old, 36-room GuardaVal (Vi 383; 41-81-861-09-09; guardaval-scuol.ch) offers free access to the town’s thermal baths. Rooms from 115 francs per person per night (summer season).

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

San Juan Weekly

51

modern love

So Much for Reinventing Ourselves Online

By JENNA WORTHAM

G

REETINGS, Your Highness,” the message began. “I had the pleasure of dining in your kingdom last night.”

Before writing an article about a dating Web site, I’d signed up for it in order to vet its service. Once I was done writing about it, I left my profile up.

(Newly single, I figured it couldn’t hurt to see what kind of excitement might turn up.)

Then, a slightly creepy note sailed into my in-box.

“Funny how two discrete online identities can so easily intersect by happenstance,” it read.

My digital admirer said he’d recognized me from a different site, Foursquare, the mobile social network that lets users broadcast their whereabouts to friends. It awards virtual mayorships to the most frequent patrons of bars and restaurants; I’d claimed the crown at a sushi restaurant. When my admirer checked into the joint with Foursquare, a notification declaring my status as mayor popped up, along with my photo and name.

Being contacted by a stranger didn’t alarm me; that’s part of the beauty of sites like Twitter and Facebook, which can help shape new relationships around common interests and friends.

But the unexpected addition of romance threw me for a loop. I wasn’t sure how to proceed. Should I meet the man for a drink? I polled my friends.

“NO!” came one shrieking response via text; another friend shrugged, wondering why I was troubled about being unmasked. After all, I live online with few qualms. Facebook and Twitter, plus Foursquare, Tumblr and Instagram, are just the tip of the iceberg. Still, I wasn’t expecting fragments of my online persona to collide in such a jarring way.

I’d left out specifics about myself, first to observe that dating site undetected, then to reinvent myself as an eligible bachelorette.

In the end, I didn’t go on the date.

I wanted to introduce myself to a handsome stranger at my own pace, rather than be exposed in one fell swoop. I couldn’t reconcile the tectonic imbalance in power and information that came with the note: He knew so much about me, and I knew nothing about him.

But the experience raised a question I haven’t been able to shake. As digital identities become increasingly per-

“

sistent across the Web, is it still possible to reinvent oneself online?

“We are all going through the uncomfortable experience of discovering just how much information about ourselves that we put out there,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, who studies online expression and the digital world. “As we casually go about our business, we are leaking all kinds of data that someone can piece back together.”

Such discomforting clashes between the lives we lead online and those we lead away from the keyboard are likely to grow in frequency. But there could be bigger issues here than wanting to keep a dating profile discreet, Mr. Zuckerman said, like struggling to protect the identity of a political whistleblower or a victim of abuse. Retaining anonymity becomes more challenging as the Web populace becomes more interconnected.

“Staying under the radar is very hard to do while using the full features of the Web,” he said. The challenge, he said, is to understand how technology can coax users into sharing more than they might otherwise.

Companies that do business online increasingly tailor their sites to individual users. Netflix, Amazon and Pandora all note your preferences to make their services more useful. The same goes for Facebook and Google, which digest clicking and browsing behavior to customize links and information you see, based on the information you share.

“The future of the Web is to personalize,” said Amit Kapur, the chief executive of Gravity, a start-up in Santa Monica, Calif. “It’s driving a paradigm shift that will change the Web from theirs to ours to yours.”

Gravity, a tool that “mines your interests from Facebook and Twitter to present things from around the Web to you,” is tweaking its software, he said, with the aim of performing functions like delivering improved restaurant recommendations and powering personalized news readers. Such services help companies customize advertising for Web consumers.

That may be fine for businesses, but what do we lose when we can’t mutate and molt through online personas?

There’s something deliciously freeing about shedding one’s self to don a shiny new identity. It’s why vast multiuser online games like World of Warcraft have flourished and why the anonymous video-chatting site Chatroulette catapulted in popularity.

The most common case against anonymity is that it gives rise to bad behavior online, allowing a docile Web denizen to slip from a Dr. Jekyll into a Mr. Hyde. And while this is a real problem, some advocates of Web anonymity, like Christopher Poole, the founder of an online community called 4chan, say people should be able to separate their online and offline identities.

“There is always a need,” he said, “to be able to enter into a conversation and have your contribution judged for its merit and not who you are.”

Mr. Poole and some other entrepreneurs are trying to build some layers of anonymity back into the Web. He says he’s doing that with a new company, Canvas Networks, that will experiment with an online community that will allow some identity concealment. Others are creating tools and carving out areas on the Web to preserve discretion. For example, a tool called Disconnect disables third-party tracking while Web surfing. And a search engine called DuckDuckGo does not collect browsing history or any personal identifiable information, its creators say.

B. J. Fogg, a psychologist at Stanford, suggests that in the future, people will not move about the Web undetected or swap identities as easily as a Halloween costume.

“People are not going to go back from disclosing everything and living out their lives online,” he said, adding that an evolutionary shift toward greater online openness is under way.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” he said.

Maybe Mr. Fogg is right, and the demands of a digital lifestyle have set a larger cultural transition into motion.

But there is something of a covert resistance afoot, the fringes of which I can see on the Facebook page of my 13-year-old niece. She and her friends use only cute screen names to identify themselves, and the only profile pictures they post are rendered nearly unrecognizable by cartoon hearts and sparkles. Maybe it’s a start.

EDUCATION 52

The San Juan Weeekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The Real Estate Collapse? It’ll Be in the Final

By JULIE SATOW

I

n 2008, when most Americans were fleeing the real estate market, David Mann was charging toward it. After selling a clothing manufacturing company in Manhattan that he had helped run, Mr. Mann, 32, decided to pursue a master’s degree in real estate development.

Last May he graduated from the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University and after an eightand-a-half-month search, he finally landed a job.

“It took months of looking every day and applying to 300 positions, but I have finally found my dream job,” said Mr. Mann, who will be the project manager of a condominium development in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

In recent years, the real estate industry’s reputation has faltered as it shoulders much of the blame for causing the deepest recession in decades. Despite this drubbing, and the fact that jobs are still hard to come by, students like Mr. Mann are flocking to master’s programs in real estate, where the recession is seen as a teaching tool and a rich source of case studies.

Mr. Mann chose real estate at the suggestion of several childhood friends who worked in the industry.

“It seemed like a smart move,” he said. And despite the subsequent long job search, he added, “it couldn’t have been a more interesting time to be in school. Every day the professors were trying to understand this new reality and share their insights with us. We were completely green and ignorant, and in some respects, so were they.”

For students considering a master’s in real estate, there are programs like the Schack Institute, mostly run out of schools of continuing education, where many students work full time and complete their coursework over a number of years. Several universities also offer intensive, full-time programs that vary in length from one to two years.

Though relatively new, the master’s degree in real estate is seen by employers as a viable alternative to an M.B.A., said James D. Kuhn, president of the real estate service company Newmark Knight Frank and the chairman of the advisory board at the Schack Institute. “It used to be that the only alternative was getting an

M.B.A.,” Mr. Kuhn said, “but around 1995, with the advent of real estate investment trusts and debt securitizations, academic institutions began taking real estate more seriously.”

In a recession, many graduate schools report an uptick in applications as professionals who have lost jobs look to polish their résumés while they wait a return to the work force.

That trend is especially true in real estate, because of the industry’s boom and bust nature. “Students are very aware that real estate is a cyclical industry,” said David Funk, the director of the Program in Real Estate at Cornell University. “If they get the degree now and bolster their skills, they will graduate just in time to take advantage of a rebounding market.”

That was the strategy behind Chaeri Kim’s decision to enter the Schack Institute. “By the time I graduate in the spring, the market will be ready to start hiring,” said Ms. Kim, who is 28 and a native of South Korea. She was pursuing a degree in architecture before deciding she would have a better chance finding work as a developer.

One indication of rising interest among students is an increase in acceptance yields — the percentage of applicants accepted into a program who choose to enroll. At the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia, which offers a master’s degree in real estate development, this year was a record applicant-yield pool, said Vishaan Chakrabarti, the director of the real estate development program. In fact, the one-year program has begun accepting fewer students in expectation that a greater percentage of accepted students will choose to attend.

“It is extremely competitive,” said Mr. Chakrabarti, who left his position as an executive vice president of design and planning at the Related Companies 18 months ago to lead the Columbia program. Of the 94 students who graduated in May, 87 percent are now employed, he said.

Mindful of the real world, professors are integrating the recent market crash into curriculums. Christian L. Redfearn, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and the director of the graduate programs in real estate there, said there was a renewed emphasis on fundamentals.

“In the middle of the bubble, students kept wondering why they had to do all this research when it was so simple to flip a property for a profit,” Professor Redfearn said. “Now, it is much more fun to teach because not only are there all these great case studies to learn from, but the students are far more interested in understanding the basics.”

Hugh Kelly, a clinical associate professor of real estate at the Schack Institute, agreed with that assessment.

“In easier times,” he said, “students were satisfied with just learning the techniques — what math or which software programs do they need to impress an employer?” Now, he said, they want to learn how to make good judgments.

At Cornell, Mr. Funk said, “we don’t want our curriculum swinging rapidly to cover the issues du jour, so we are offering short intensives that focus on contemporary trends,” adding that classes that teach asset allocations are also popular.

And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which established its Center for Real Estate in 1983, is placing a greater emphasis on “the role of systemic phenomena, things that reach beyond any one industry or asset class and put the whole system on an unsustainable path,” said David Geltner, director of M.I.T.’s master’s program in real estate development and the director of research at the Center for Real Estate. In other words, teaching what can go wrong.

The students now in graduate real estate courses have more experience and higher test scores than their predecessors, several institutions have found.

At the University of Southern California program, the average work experience of students has jumped to

6.6 years in 2010, compared with five years in 2003. In the last seven years, its acceptance yield has topped 70 percent from just 55 percent, while in the same period the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, test scores now average 652 compared with 630.

“In the last two years, the quality of our students has been the highest we have ever had,” Professor Redfearn said. “A lot of people who were entering real estate to make a quick buck have left, and those who remain in the field are deeply committed.”

A number of universities are following N.Y.U.’s lead and have begun offering real estate degrees at their schools for continuing education.

Georgetown University began offering a master’s of professional studies in real estate as part of its School of Continuing Studies in 2008. “I’d say graduate degrees may be one of the fastest-growing areas of the real estate market right now,” said Charles Schilke, the associate dean for the program.

But not every program has escaped the downturn unscathed. At M.I.T., class size has dropped precipitously. Before 2009, classes were generally 35 students a year, but last year it plummeted to just 14 students.

This year, that figure is back up to the mid-20s, Professor Geltner said. Reasons for that drop-off, he said, included the high cost of tuition, a lack of financial aid and the inability of many students to take time off from work in such uncertain economic times. While the cost, at $58,780 for the 2010-11 academic year, is roughly in line with the other private degree programs, “alas, I believe we don’t have nearly as much financial aid available” to help defray the cost, Professor Geltner said.

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December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

53

Advertising

The Impulse to Buy Can Start Anywhere

By STUART ELLIOTT

W

ITH Christmas just days away, Madison Avenue is working hard to influence what consumers buy. But efforts aimed at turning browsers into spenders, known as shopper marketing or retail marketing, are becoming increasingly important the other 51 weeks of the year.

Shopper marketing once mostly took place in stores; tactics included placing coupon dispensers on shelves, designing eye-catching end-aisle displays and giving away product samples.

Now, the battle to land on shopping lists or in shopping carts is waged long before consumers set foot in stores as they spend more time researching potential purchases online or asking friends on Facebook what to buy.

In another sign of the growing role for shopper marketing, units of two agencies owned by WPP — JWT and Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide — have formed a joint venture in North America to help marketers and retailers guide consumers on the so-called path to purchase. The joint venture, called JWT/OgilvyAction, is the brainchild of the Malone Advertising unit of JWT, which is being renamed JWT Action, and the OgilvyAction unit of Ogilvy.

JWT Action and OgilvyAction continue as autonomous agencies

as they work together as JWT/ OgilvyAction. The joint venture is handling tasks for clients that include American Express, John Deere, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, SC Johnson, Nestlé, Sara Lee and Unilever.

The goal is to “help us transform someone from a consumer to a buyer,” said Deborah Hannah, integrated marketing planning director at the Neenah, Wis., office of Kimberly-Clark, which is working with JWT/OgilvyAction on brands like Cottonelle, Huggies, Kleenex and Kotex.

Retail marketing can influence a shopper “as she goes from watching a TV ad on the couch to writing a list to going to Walgreens or Kroger,” Ms. Hannah said, “and then, once she is in the store, help us close the deal with her.”

The aspects of shopper marketing that are focused on consumers outside stores are assuming more significance, she added, with “the explosion of e-commerce and social commerce.” The latter refers to the combination of shopping online and networking on Web sites like Facebook and Twitter.

“Now that shopper marketing is no longer just in the store, there are so many opportunities,” Ms. Hannah said, offering an example of “shopper apps for the iPhone.”

“We need someone to help us navigate who is our target and how

she decides to buy,” she added.

JWT/Ogilvy Action has 3,400 full-time and part-time employees in offices and field offices in cities like Akron, Ohio; Bentonville, Ark.; Chicago; Cincinnati; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; and New York. The joint venture is being led by Fred Bidwell, executive chairman, who continues as president and chief executive of JWT Action, and Sheila Hartnett, chief executive, who remains chief executive for the North American operations of OgilvyAction.

“There’s a major sea change going on in this space, which requires a different kind of agency,” Mr. Bidwell said. “We needed to bring a broader array of tools to the party.”

As a result, “we approached OgilvyAction and said, ‘Let’s go in this together, in a strategic partnership,’ ” he added.

He and Ms. Hartnett decided that a cooperative effort would “need to be a true business unit of WPP,” Mr. Bidwell said, “so we approached WPP with the idea of creating a joint venture.”

The joint venture is “having some early success,” he said, and it recently added a couple of marketer clients. Although they declined to be identified, Mr. Bidwell said, he was able to describe one as “a significant over-the-counter pharmaceutical company” and the other as “a significant food

company.”

Asked for examples of crosspollination — clients of one agency or the other that are working with the joint venture — Mr. Bidwell listed John Deere, “a Malone client, for which we’re bringing in thinking from OgilvyAction,” and SC Johnson, “an OgilvyAction legacy client, which people on the JWT side are deeply involved in helping.” Ms. Hannah said Kimberly-Clark, a longtime client of Malone, was obtaining from the joint venture services that are specialties of OgilvyAction, like product sampling.

Chip Martella, managing director for the New York office of JWT/OgilvyAction, singled out Kimberly-Clark, along with Procter & Gamble, as among the marketers that are “accelerating the growth of shopper marketing.”

“They’re telling their agencies: ‘Don’t come to us with a campaign idea that starts with TV or print ads and then show us how it works in the store. Start with the store,’ ” said Mr. Martella, who is also executive director of strategy for the North American operation of OgilvyAction.

The store can be virtual as well as real, he added, citing research that shows “over 50 percent of those shopping Wal-Mart stop at walmart.com first.”

Another indication of the increasing role being played by shopper marketing came last week, when a former executive of Procter — the world’s largest advertiser — was hired as the new leader of Saatchi & Saatchi X, the shopper marketing unit of Saatchi & Saatchi, part of the Publicis Groupe.

Dina Howell, who had been vice president for global media and brand operations at Procter, joined Saatchi & Saatchi X as worldwide chief executive. She succeeds Andy Murray, the founder of Saatchi & Saatchi X, who becomes chairman, a new post.

WPP is known for reorganizing and reconfiguring its agencies to better serve clients. For instance, in 2006 WPP formed a joint venture named Team Detroit by combining five agencies that worked for the Ford Motor Company in North America.

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December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly

Weighing Costs, Companies Favor Temporary Help

By MOTOKO RICH

T

emporary workers are starting to look, well, not so temporary.

Despite a surge this year in short-term hiring, many American businesses are still skittish about making those jobs permanent, raising concerns among workers and some labor experts that temporary employees will become a larger, more entrenched part of the work force.

This is bad news for the nation’s workers, who are already facing one of the bleakest labor markets in recent history. Temporary employees generally receive fewer benefits or none at all, and have virtually no job security. It is harder for them to save. And it is much more difficult for them to develop a career arc while hopping from boss to boss.

“We’re in a period where uncertainty seems to be going on forever,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So this period of temporary employment seems to be going on forever.”

This year, companies have hired temporary workers in significant numbers. In November, they accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private sector employers, according to the Labor Department. Since the beginning of the year, employers have added a net 307,000 temporary workers, more than a quarter of the 1.17 million private sector jobs added in total.

One worker who has been forced to accept temporary jobs is Jeffrey Rodeo, 43, who was laid off 14 months ago from his job as an accounting manager at a produce company in Sacramento. He has applied for nearly 700 full-time positions since then, but has yet to receive an offer. Meanwhile, to stay afloat and keep his skills fresh, he has worked on short-term stints at four different employers.

Mr. Rodeo figures his peripatetic work life will last at least another year. “Companies are being more careful,” he said. “It just may take longer to secure a permanent position.”

To the more than 15 million people who are still out of work, those with temporary jobs are lucky. With concerns mounting that the long-term unemployed are becoming increasingly unemployable, those in temporary jobs are at least maintaining ties to the working world.

The competition for them can often be as fierce as for permanent openings, and there are still far too few of them

to go around. Indeed, the relative strength in temporary hiring has done little to dent the stubbornly high unemployment rate, which rose to 9.8 percent in November.

“With business confidence, particularly in the small business sector, extremely low,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist at the High Frequency Economics research firm, “it’s not surprising that permanent hiring is lagging behind.”

The landscape two or three years from now might look quite different, of course. Many economists and executives at temporary agencies say there are signs that more robust permanent hiring is coming in the new year. Business confidence is up, and temporary agencies report that the percentage of interim workers who have been offered full-time jobs is also up from last year.

Nevertheless, there are signs that this time around, the economy could be moving toward a higher reliance on temporary workers over the long term.

This year, 26.2 percent of all jobs added by private sector employers were temporary positions. In the comparable period after the recession of the early 1990s, only 10.9 percent of the private sector jobs added were temporary, and after the downturn earlier this decade, just 7.1 percent were temporary.

Temporary employees still make up a small fraction of total employees, but that segment has been rising steeply over the past year. “It hints at a structural change,” said Allen L. Sinai, chief global economist at the consulting firm Decision Economics. Temp workers “are becoming an ever more important part of what is going on,” he said.

Several factors could be contributing to the trend.

Many businesses now tend to organize around short- to medium-term projects that can be doled out to temporary or contract workers.

Donald Lane, chief executive of Makino, a manufacturer of machine tools near Cincinnati, said his company would increasingly outsource projects to contract firms that pull together temporary teams. When installing a large machine, for example, Mr. Lane said the company could appoint one full-time supervisor to oversee a number of less skilled short-term workers.

Mr. Lane said he hoped to raise Makino’s share of temporary employees from 10 to 15 percent now to about 25 percent in the future.

Flexibility is another factor. Corporate executives, stung by the depth of the recent downturn, are looking to make it easier to hire and fire workers. And with the cost of health and retirement benefits running high, many companies are looking to reduce that burden. In some cases, companies wrongly classify regular employees as temporary or contract workers in order to save on benefit costs and taxes.

Certainly, Americans who have never held anything but a full-time job have sought out temporary posts because they were the only jobs available. And even before the recession, workers were learning that lifelong employment was disappearing along with phone booths and Filofax organizers.

But people still tend to prefer jobs with some sense of permanence, and with full health benefits and some form of retirement contribution.

According to a survey by Staffing Industry Analysts, a Mountain View, Calif., research firm, 68 percent of all temporary workers are seeking permanent employment.

But the whole notion of what constitutes a permanent job may simply be changing. Workers “need to expect that their lives and jobs will change much more often than they have in the past,” said Jonas Prising, president of the Americas at Manpower.

Some people have discovered they prefer the freelance life. Antonia Musto lost her job as a staff accountant for a newspaper in Wilkes Barre, Pa., more than two years ago.

She signed on with oDesk, a company that matches contract workers with employers online.

She has since worked for several different businesses and even turned down a full-time offer last November. “I just think I’ve gotten very accustomed to working very fast and working with many different people,” Ms. Musto, 38, said. She said she had fully replaced the income she was making at the newspaper and buys private health insurance.

Of course, businesses that can now hire talented workers for temporary jobs may find that when demand picks up, they will need to offer full-time positions with perks and benefits. But it could take a long time to reach that point.

That indefinite stretch worries workers who fear that future employers will look askance at a résumé filled with short-term engagements. Others worry that they will lose valuable years of saving for the future.

Mr. Rodeo, the Sacramento accounting manager, said he made anywhere from 10 to 50 percent less while working in temporary jobs than he did at the produce company. He has also been without health insurance all year. None of the interim employers or temporary agencies have contributed to a 401(k) plan, nor has he been able to save much on his own.

“That’s the scariest part,” said Mr. Rodeo.

He is confident he will eventually land a permanent post, but until then, he knows he is losing ground in planning for retirement. “Of course, for my generation, you can’t plan on Social Security,” he said. “Most likely, I will have to work longer.”

Others are starting to face the prospect that they could move among temporary assignments for the rest of their careers.

Jose Marin, 50, known as J. D., lost his technology job in Miami in February and moved to North Carolina to live with his sister. After months of looking for a permanent job, he signed on with Modis, a unit of Adecco, and in August began a temporary assignment for a financial services company in Cary, a town west of Raleigh.

While grateful for the job, he longs for a permanent position. “I’m still old-fashioned and I still want to work for a company where I make a difference and I’m going to be there to retire,” said Mr. Marin. “I know that’s wishful thinking.”

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Billionaire Backs a Gas-Electric Hybrid Car to Be Built in Russia

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

M

ikhail D. Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire who owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team, rolled out another pet project: Russia’s first gas-electric hybrid car.

It is called the Yo, for the Russian letter “ë,” and it can use either gasoline or natural gas to generate its electric power.

Proponents say the Yo makes use of Russian engineering innovations but can be priced for mass consumption because of its bare-bones approach to hybrid automotive technology.

While two electric motors propel the Yo, a small petroleum engine that can burn either gasoline or natural gas will run nearly continuously to generate the electricity they consume. Instead of charging a battery, as in the hybrid Toyota Prius, the generator in the Yo either powers the motors directly or fills a bank of capacitors that can hold only a small charge.

The designers say that at about 67 miles per gallon, the Yo will achieve better fuel economy than the Toyota Prius (about 51 miles per gallon), in part because it is lighter. Like other gas-electric hybrids, it will also have a total range far beyond that of a pure plug-in electric car like the newly introduced Nissan Leaf.

The Yo, which is expected to go on sale in Russia in mid-2012 and cost about $14,500, will have a top speed of 80 miles

per hour and a range of 680 miles — if both its natural gas and gasoline tanks are filled.

Mr. Prokhorov, who made his fortune in Siberian mining, promised that the car would defy Russia’s stereotype for dismal quality in the auto industry — a poor image he said was at odds with Russian achievements in other engineering realms.

“Don’t forget that in Russia we were the first to put man in space,” Mr. Prokhorov said at a media event to unveil three Yo prototypes: a coupe, a hatchback and a delivery truck. “Unfortunately, in the last 50 years, we are playing from behind a little bit.”

Mr. Prokhorov is the sole backer of the hybrid car effort. He intends to make an initial investment of about 150 million euros, or about $200 million, in a new Russian company called e-Auto, which will also manufacture the Yo. A team of about 40 engineers developed the car.

“Russian scientists are good in ideas,” Mr. Prokhorov said. “This idea is really great.”

The Russian designers said the electrical generator approach of the Yo was sometimes used in city buses but not in cars.

The advantage, they say, is in the small petroleum engine’s operating at its most efficient rate at all times, while the electrical capacitors absorb or discharge energy to accommodate start-and-stop city driving.

The designers say that the Yo’s fuel

economy will be better than that of the Prius partly because the vehicle is lighter than the Prius and it has a lower top speed and only modest horsepower.

The fuel economy, the designers say, also owes to its unusual engine, a Sovietlegacy design where the pistons move in a circular motion. This approach to internal combustion, called a rotary vane engine, had some use in Germany in the 1930s but was largely abandoned later except in the Soviet Union, according to Andrei G. Ginzberg, chief engineer for the Yo. Scientists honed it at a secretive laboratory in the Siberian city Novosibirsk, he said, but never commercialized the design.

The Yo is intended for domestic sale in Russia, where it will compete in an au-

tomotive market bouncing back after the recession. Because financing is costly, most families buy cars with at least half the money down, confining the middle-class car market to vehicles priced close to $10,000.

Few foreign hybrids are sold here now.

And while the car is snug, Mr. Prokhorov gleefully demonstrated that even his 6-foot-8 frame could be folded into both the front and the rear seats — a demonstration that also highlighted Mr. Prokhrov’s litheness as a lifelong basketball player.

Mr. Prokhorov is considered one of Russia’s richest men, with a fortune made through his ownership of the Norilsk Nickel mine in Siberia, which produces about 20 percent of the world’s nickel, with precious metals like platinum and palladium.

Because he sold shares in Norilsk just before their value collapsed in the financial crisis, earning at least $4.5 billion along with a stake in another mining company, Mr. Prokhorov entered the global recession awash in cash.

In May, he completed a deal that made him the principal owner of the New Jersey Nets and the first foreign proprietor of a National Basketball Association team. He is also 45 percent owner of Barclays Center, the team’s new arena, which is being built near downtown Brooklyn.

Back in Russia, the country’s leaders have been pressuring Mr. Prokhorov and other wealthy businessmen to help Russia diversify its economy away from oil, by investing in high technology, a priority of President Dmitri A. Medvedev that Mr. Prokhorov has said he shares.

“For the time being, Russia lacks value-added goods,” Mr. Prokhorov said.

“That is why cars are very important. This project for us is very important, to give the world a value-added product made in Russia.”

He noted, though, that he would steer clear of existing Russian carmakers like Lada.

The 6-foot-8 Russian businessman Mikhail D. Prokhorov, on left in the Yo car, shows how he gets into the vehicle. With him in the car is Andrei Birokov, general director of the project.

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The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

In Germany, a Water Tower to Call Home

By TOBY AXELROD

O

n a bike ride almost a decade ago, Richard Hurding, a product designer, spied what would later become an unlikely home — a derelict water tower, perched on a hill surrounded by trees.

It was 2002 and Mr. Hurding, now 48, was exploring the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve, a Unesco nature park, here in the state of Brandenburg in northeast Germany.

At the time, he and his wife, Sarah Phillips, 47, also an industrial designer, had been working in Hong Kong and London — he is Scottish and she is English — and were looking for a new place to live.

They had looked in Lisbon, Berlin and Barcelona, Spain, and explored Australia and Shanghai, before choosing Germany in December 2002.

After years of designing for other people, they had been seeking “a challenge without corporate boundaries,” and “something with environmental value and more meaning to society,” Ms. Phillips said. Besides, they liked the idea of creating a living space in an unused, industrial building, something they had done before in London.

The former East German water tower, a historic landmark with a mustard-yellow brick facade, a row

of windows marching around the top and wide views across a forested landscape, spoke to them.

“It seemed abandoned, but in good condition,” Mr. Hurding said.

“It had a kind of military appearance.”

Ms. Philips saw its potential, too. “It was a shut-down, boardedup, overgrown ruin,” she said, but “the idea of living in a tower was also very appealing.”

When Mr. Hurding suggested they try to live there, “it seemed like such a crazy idea, but I went along with it,” she said.

Before they could make their dream a reality, the couple had to apply to the building council of Barnim County for permission to convert the structure into a residen-

ce. To make their application more attractive, they sweetened the deal with a proposal to turn the tower into a tourist attraction.

They offered to build a viewing platform atop the 69-foot high tower, from where visitors could view the reserve, with its mixedgrowth forests, lakes, rare birds and amphibians.

“We realized we had something very special, and that it could be a re

Continues on page 57

The San Juan Weekly

Comes from page 56 gional highlight,” Ms. Phillips said.

“We didn’t see it as living in a tourist attraction; it was more to do with creating something special within the Unesco-protected area.”

In 2003, permission was granted, and the couple paid 75,000 euros ($100,000 at $1.30 to the euro) for about three acres of land surrounding the tower. Because the tower is designated a historic landmark, the town decided not to sell it, but rather to grant them a 99-year lease for 500 euros (about $670) a year.

(They can sell it at any point within that period.)

That same year, they hired Frank Meilchen, an architect based in Berlin, to help them with the conversion. “I think it is one of these childhood dreams of living like a knight,” he said of the project. “It had a romantic association.”

For Mr. Meilchen, the biggest challenge was removing the huge concrete water tank inside the tower. Workers cut it apart using a diamond saw, and a crane operator drew each segment out the window, lowering it to the ground. The operation took a month. “It was a completely modern ballet,” he said.

Mr. Meilchen then constructed another, weight-bearing tower within the original that holds up the new floors where Ms. Phillips and Mr. Hurding live now. He also built

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

another tower alongside the original one, windowed in red glass panels, to house the elevator that brings visitors to the viewing platform.

The renovation cost about 600,000 euros ($800,000) and took about eight months to complete.

The European Union contributed 270,000 euros ($360,000) toward the elevator, to make the site handicapped-accessible.

57

In 2006, Ms. Phillips and Mr. Hurding moved into the tower, now a 1,500-square-foot apartment with six levels. Ms. Phillips’s office is on the ground floor, and Mr. Hurding’s is above it; then comes their bedroom, and the master bathroom, which is suspended over it. The fourth level has the home’s second entrance, plus a guest toilet and storage room; the fifth floor is dedicated to the kitchen and dining area; and the living room is on the top floor.

The couple dubbed the tower Biorama, combining the name of

ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR

the nature preserve with the word panorama.

The home is decorated with whimsical sculptures by Mr. Hurding, and experimental objects made of a new hemp-based material called Zelfo that Mr. Hurding is experimenting with in several of his furniture and household projects.

The uppermost floor offers a 360-degree view. Ms. Phillips said she likes to see “light bouncing off the Grimnitzsee lake, or the sulphurous yellow skies” of a storm.

“Every day is different.”

58 December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

The San Juan Weekly

Ziggi

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

59

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 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Relaxation and a meditative approach will serve up some answers in this festive week.

Empty your mind of expectations and the rest will follow. Be careful not to over- react to circumstances that are apparently forced upon you. Accept responsibility for what you can and be philosophical.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Love and romance look interesting. You have everything to play for, so use your imagination. Remember you are special and be full of self- respect as you make your New Year resolutions. Be realistic about what you can achieve and be practical. The heavens are supporting you. Let us celebrate!

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Go after what you want and build on your best options, but only once the Mercury Retrograde phase is over. Do not even think about pushing things before time. Love ties do not have to bind. In the nicest possible way claim your freedom and enjoy expressions of independence. Things will brighten up.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Access the ‘get happy’ groove for this interim week. New Year beckons but there is still Christmas fun to be had. You deserve some further light relief. Take positive steps towards a rosy future. Flow with things as they unfold. This does not mean you have to lose sight of reality. The time is now.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Do try edging sideways around anything tricky. Work may feel like a millstone around your neck. Try to be a bit Zen about it and do everything with reasonable grace.

Rise to a challenge; they certainly come thick and fast at this time of year. Be circumspect about pressing issues. Think deeply.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Follow the path that makes sense. You may be on a ‘go slow’ for the moment, but be patient with circumstances and all will be well.

Tap into the good luck that is there for you.

Achieve the objectives you have set out to and do what you can. Remember you are only human. Be patient.

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Choose a good moment to have your say, but be tactful about it. You may do well to hold your silence, but if you cannot possibly do so, well then choose your words carefully. In love matters, push on through. There is no competition when you are on a roll! Be careful re finances. Caution pays.

Keep loved ones on your side, so that even your strangest ideas will find support and come about. Honesty will clinch a deal. Please yourself as you head into a new chapter in your life. Carefully consider the positive changes you can make. Avoid being stuck in any kind of moment. It is time.

Leo

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)

(July 24-Aug 23)

Pave the way for developments on the love front. The tail end of Mercury retrograde urges you to be careful re clumsiness and travel plans. Make extra effort when you state your case. Talk plainly and do not be nervous regarding the love stuff. Enjoy a buoyant feeling as it descends from the heavens.

Do take things at an even, level pace. Hook up with someone you have not had a chance to communicate with lately. A new understanding is on the horizon- if you choose to recognise the fact. Assume responsibility for something that went pear shaped. Try a new angle with old problems.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Blessings are abundant if only you could see them. Open your eyes and appreciate what is around you. A fresh outlook offered enables a turnaround. There is really no need to feel stuck. Stay away from controversy and tap into the good vibes of the season. Not as you expect, but good nonetheless.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Watch that stubborn streak and accept someone’s declaration. The truth is stranger than fiction; so believe. Profound change should be fully embraced and therein is your protection. Step out socially and enjoy a bit of creative chaos! With Mercury retrograde it has to be the way of it for now.

The San Juan Weekly

Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 59

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

61

Sports

Coaching Carousel Already in Full Spin

By JUDY BATTISTA

I

t’s the most wonderful time of the year, unless you’re an N.F.L. head coach with a struggling team. Want a taste of the high-wire act of a coach’s life? The Giants’ shocking collapse against the Philadelphia Eagles reignited talk that Tom Coughlin’s job could be on the line — even though the Giants can clinch a wild-card spot in the playoffs next week with a victory over Green Bay. The team owner John Mara was quick to dismiss any speculation that Coughlin’s job was in jeopardy and that the former Steelers coach Bill Cowher was waiting in the wings. “Ridiculous” was how he put it to The Daily News.

But even if Coughlin is entirely safe, the final two weeks of the regular season will be an exercise in coaches scrambling to hold on to their generous paychecks. This season has taken an odd toll — three coaches were fired during the season, unusual in a league that plays 16 games and in which the conventional wisdom is that there is little time for a midseason turnaround.

But the success of the interim coaches Jason Garrett of the Cowboys and Leslie Frazier of the Vikings might make the ground beneath struggling coaches even shakier next season. Neither the Cowboys nor the Vikings are going to the playoffs — this isn’t baseball, where firings at the All-Star break still leave 81 games to play with — but the interim coaches have breathed life into their teams and proven that a midseason shake-up, if nothing else, gets players’ attention.

The Dallas Cowboys are 4-2 under Garrett, with two road games to close out the season. Garrett has beaten two of the Cowboys’ division rivals — the Giants, in his first game as head coach, and the Redskins on Sunday — and he will have a chance for a long-shot sweep when the Cowboys play the Eagles in the season finale.

Entering Monday night’s game against the Bears, Frazier was 2-1 as the Vikings’ head coach. His season has been marred by unimaginable problems: the home stadium is unusable and so is Brett Favre.

Garrett and Frazier are almost certain to retain their jobs — Jerry Jones said the Cowboys were happy with Garrett even before the Redskins game.

That still leaves plenty of potential job openings to come. Denver, a mess after firing Josh McDaniels less than two years into his tenure, is likely to conduct a full search.

The Broncos’ interim coach, Eric Studesville, is 0-2 since he took over. In Carolina, John Fox’s fate was determined last season when he did not get a contract extension. Mike Singletary could be out in San Francisco even though, incredibly, the Niners are just one game back in the N.F.C. West.

The A.F.C. North could lose Marvin Lewis (Cincinnati) and Eric Mangini (Cleveland).

But the wild cards come in the A.F.C. South, where the Titans’ owner, Bud Adams, will have to sift through the power struggle of his own creation between quarterback Vince Young and Coach Jeff Fisher. Adams loves Young, and could side with him despite his repeated shows of immaturity. If Fisher, the longest-tenured active head coach, goes, he will be in immediate demand elsewhere.

That’s a lot of choices for coaching candidates, but none of those teams are likely to pay the top dollar that Jones would have for his head coach. That most likely means that Cowher and Jon Gruden, the two biggest names on the market, will stick with their television jobs for at least one more year, while another wave of coordinators seeking their first head jobs — think candidates in the mold of Mike Smith, Mike Tomlin and Raheem Morris, to name the most successful of the last wave — will flood the N.F.L.

next season.

It was the Titans’ 31-17 victory over the Houston Texans that had the greatest potential to change the equation. The Texans appeared on the upswing after starting the season 4-2, but they have collapsed under the weight of a jaw-droppingly bad defense. The Texans fell behind by 21 points in the first quarter Sunday, and they have lost seven of eight games to waste a season in which the weakened Colts could have been supplanted as the division’s best team.

Coach Gary Kubiak appeared dumbfounded by how poorly his team had played, and he said his players looked slow moving around. That sounded like code words for the Texans not playing hard, and that gets an owner’s attention, as it did it Dallas.

Bob McNair, the Houston owner, said last week that he thought the Texans were on the right track and that other owners had told him they were impressed with his team.

“We’ll review everything at the end of the year, and, will we make some changes? I’m sure we will make some,” McNair said last week, according to the team’s Web site.

“But we’re very, very close to having the kind of team I think that we can all be proud of.”

That doesn’t sound like a coach preparing to dismantle his franchise, and McNair is not the impetuous type to react to a growing clamor among his fans. That’s lucky for Kubiak. But for coaches in exile, it’s bad news. McNair, like his Dallas counterpart, is the most likely owner to dig deep into his pockets to pay a new coach.

A New Game in Overtime When team owners voted to change the overtime rules for playoff games — both teams get a possession if the team that has possession first does not score a touchdown — the move irked coaches. They wanted a uniform rule for the regular season and the postseason.

Now we know why. Coaches would have had plenty of opportunities to analyze strategy for the new overtime rules this season. When the Lions needed overtime to beat the Buccaneers on Sunday, it was the 18th overtime game of the season. There has been at least one overtime game in 14 of the 15 weeks of the 2010 season, the first time that has happened since overtime was instituted in 1984. The N.F.L. is on a pace to have 21 overtime games this season, which would tie for third most. (The most was 25 in 2002.)

That’s 21 games of results coaches could have scrutinized when deciding how they would handle overtime.

Instead, playoff teams have to shift gears on their overtime thinking — when will they settle for a field goal on the first drive, or would a team defer the opening kickoff to rely on its defense, as Jets Coach Rex Ryan suggested he might do?

In the summer, Patriots Coach Bill Belichick, a meticulous studier of strategy, said he and his coaches had done some preparation for the new rule during the off-

season. With the Patriots having clinched a playoff spot, Belichick is undoubtedly considering how he will approach overtime.

“We have talked about it in very general terms,” Belichick said. “It’s a really hard situation. You have to reeducate your team to the new rule and maybe change your overtime philosophy and get your whole team to understand it.”

The Education of Tim Tebow The Broncos started Tim Tebow on Sunday, but he will not last long out there if he runs so much. That’s how Tebow became a college football phenomenon, and it has been the fear about him since then, too. Even a quarterback built like a linebacker cannot take the repeated pounding that comes with 78 yards rushing. Tebow’s throwing mechanics are still not completely made over, but the next Broncos coaches will have their work cut out for them crafting a full-time starter out of Tebow. That will be a challenge for Tebow, too. The coach who selected him is gone and he may have to learn a new system in his second season, although he is far from mastering this one.

Redskins Back to Square One Is all forgiven in Washington? Not quite. Rex Grossman showed why Mike Shanahan — and Kyle, too — wanted him in the lineup over Donovan McNabb, throwing four touchdown passes in the Redskins’ 33-30 loss to the Cowboys. The offense had a rhythm it never did with McNabb on the field. But then Good Rex transformed into Bad Rex again, when Grossmen threw an interception just outside of field goal range to end the Redskins’ final drive.

Now what? Grossman’s presence energized the offense, and Shanahan repeatedly made the point in his postgame comments that Grossman ran the system — a none-too-subtle indication of what he thought McNabb’s problem was. The bigger issue now is that when McNabb departs, as he inevitably will, the Redskins will still not have a franchise quarterback and they will not have the second-round draft pick they traded for him, either. They are starting over, again, after Shanahan’s botched personnel decision wasted a season.

Reverse Reward Out West With the entire N.F.C. West losing last weekend, the 5-9 Niners remain in playoff contention. If they sweep, and if Seattle does not, the Niners could win the division at 7-9 and host a first-round playoff game. If that happens, the Atlanta president Rick McKay’s desire to get a new rule demanding playoff seeding based on record — not on division champions — would gain traction among owners.

In the past, the proposal has garnered no more than 18 of the 24 votes necessary for passage, and the Giants owner John Mara said he was not optimistic much would change. But the prospect of a 12-win wild-card team, like the Saints, going on the road to face a team with five fewer regular-season victories seems to dilute the importance of the regular season.

Rookies Struggling Under Center Why do the Jon Kitnas and Mark Brunells of the world still have N.F.L. jobs long past their prime? Take a look at last weekend. Six rookie quarterbacks started games (just one — St. Louis’s Sam Bradford — began the season as the starter), and the results were predictable. Heading into Monday night’s game, in which the backup Joe Webb was to start for the Vikings, only one rookie — Carolina’s Jimmy Clausen — won his game. And Carolina’s victory over the rookie-led Cardinals (John Skelton) had little to do with Clausen anyway. He completed 13 of 19 passes, and threw one touchdown pass, but he was also sacked twice in a game in which the Panthers ran for 177 yards.

Sports

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The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

On the East Coast, a Three-City Rivalry Transformed

By MIKE TANIER

W

hen Cliff Lee signed with the Phillies, the transformation was complete. Philadelphia officially became New York.

To be precise, the Lee signing signified the end of a joint Philadelphia-Boston program to divide New York City between them.

Philly annexed baseball, the N.F.C. and telecommunications. Boston got the A.F.C., the N.B.A. and sports history. Boston and Philadelphia even established a demarcation line through Central Park at 97th Street. It will be called the Russell-Chamberlain Line, and it will be guarded by the 20-foot-high WhineBoo Wall.

The transformation started when Philadelphia ceased to be the City of Brotherly Love and became the People’s Republic of Comcastistan. The acquisition of NBC Universal by Comcast upset the natural balance, like a tide-pond guppy swallowing a beluga whale. Soon, Cablevision went to war with Fox, and Philadelphians got to enjoy highdefinition playoff baseball coverage while New Yorkers huddled under blankets with transistor radios and shouted score updates between tenement windows.

While Comcast wrapped coaxial tentacles around the East Coast, Rex Ryan tempered Jets fans for the Philly-Boston takeover.

Ryan is the son of Buddy, Philly’s most ineffectual yet beloved coaching instigator, and he immediately stoked a blood feud with the New England Patriots, who responded by

sweeping the Jets away like crumbs from a picnic table. The Jets now play the Minnesota Twins to the Patriots’ Yankees, snarling like feisty Pomeranians until the garden gate swings open.

Even Sal Alosi’s tripping a player along the Jets’ sideline fits the Philly playbook, and not just because Buddy Ryan offered $10 lube-shop coupons to any defender who hospitalized a kicker. Phillies Manager Gene Mauch once punched Mets catcher Jerry Grote for chasing a foul ball into the dugout, and Mauch was one of the city’s more cerebral coaches. Alosi’s trip is just part of the assimilation process. Do not fight it.

Boston’s encroachment from the north has been more subtle than Philly’s clamoring advance. With their win over the Knicks on Wednesday, the Celtics conquered the N.B.A., though Boston fans now demonize the Miami Heat as surrogate Yankees. The Knicks hope to acquire Carmelo Anthony to challenge the Celtics. If they recall Allen Iverson from Turkey instead, you will know the fix is in.

Even if the Celtics do not win the N.B.A. championship, in a few years, you may swear that they did. Ken Burns’s Ministry of Beantown Truth now controls our memories, and he is applying his Eternal Sunshine of the Documentarian’s Mind techniques to all the team sports. The Celtics have won the last 45 N.B.A. titles, and if you don’t believe it, Burns will pan across sepiatinted images of Kevin McHale under a John Chancellor narration until you do.

The revisionist history is having an effect. Lee chose the Phillies in part because of the city’s — get this — reputable fan behavior. Yes, Philly sports fans are unfairly maligned, and only a few vomit like turkey vultures as an antiarrest mechanism, and Lee’s wife, Kristen, witnessed some ugly misbehavior from Yankees fans. Still, this is an amazing example of turn-on-a-dime image rehabilitation. Had Brian Cashman given Kristen Lee’s e-mail address to Wilma McNabb, he might have turned the tide of negotiations.

The Lee signing sent the Yankees scrambling to market like forgetful husbands who procrastinated about Christmas shopping until Dec. 24. Slapping a bow on Mark Prior is not quite as bad as handing your wife an unwrapped jug of off-brand perfume, but it is sad to see the Yankees mopping up flop sweat while the Phillies coin cute nicknames for their platinum-plated pitching staff. (R2C2, which sounds like a helpful robot, was chosen over H2OL, which sounds like either a programming language or an energy-drink-and-vodka cocktail that causes blindness.)

The Red Sox sensed weakness and took a swipe at the 41-year-old closer Mariano Rivera, but the Yankees managed to hold on to him for $30 million. It is all horribly backward: the Yankees nervously hoarding their chips while the Phillies and Red Sox up the ante.

The Giants were New York’s last, best hope to stop the Philly-Boston incursion before they went off the grid. Sometime between their snowbound exile in a Kansas City

airport and their upstaging at the hand of a sideline-bound Brett Favre in a barely televised win against the Vikings, the Giants became the Jacksonville Jaguars, contenders on the side of the milk carton. Between Favre and Alosi’s battalion, the Giants cannot even wrest attention from inactive players, let alone the very active Michael Vick, who caused ripples last week by announcing that he wanted a new dog. (Fair enough. Just don’t let him have two dogs.)

The confluence of Lee’s return and Vick’s heroics have made Philly sports fans as happy they ever are, which means they are incrementally less miserable than usual.

Philly talk-radio stations took on a pep-rallylike giddiness on Tuesday before one venerable sports columnist warned fans that the team did little to improve its bullpen. By Wednesday, fans were back to carping about the 76ers, fretting about the Phillies’ weakness at sixth base and expressing concern — far too late — that their city was turning into New York.

So if Philly is now New York and Boston is New Yahhhk, what about old New York herself? The sideline thuggery and sudden inferiority complex suggests that New York has become Philadelphia or Boston, but it is not that simple.

The Flyers are in first place, but the Rangers are keeping things competitive, and hockey can give the city a much-needed sports identity.

Congratulations, New York City, you are now Vancouver.

A Baseball Fan Among Baseball Fans

By MALCOLM MORAN

T

he back seat of Bob Feller’s car had suddenly become uncomfortable, because for six days I was still trying to ask the question I had to ask. I had followed Feller and his wife, Anne, across a continent in an adventure that extended from a Tuesday night at the Bomber Bowl in Richland, Wash., to a Sunday morning at a small shop in Cooperstown, N.Y., down the street from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I had spent a night in a guest room in their home at Gates Mills, Ohio, outside Cleveland, where Feller had built one of the most overpoweringly successful pitching careers in the history of the game in his Hall of Fame career with the Indians. Anne had retrieved dusty posters and forgotten mementos from closets, took them to a do-it-yourself frame store and created a minimuseum.

From the back seat, I had experienced a drive through a late-night rainstorm and early-morning departures on the way to the next appearance. I had shared in their search for places far from interstate highways, where unscheduled inspections of rusted old farm equipment were conducted in the hope that he just might discover a gem to

buy and take home. “But what would you do with it?” Anne said one day with alarm in her voice.

I had listened to the give-and-take with fans old enough to remember his battles with Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio and young enough to wonder if this aging gentleman seated behind a table had actually been as good as Dwight Gooden.

Bob Feller, who died Wednesday at 92, was still pitching after all these years. He was approaching his 67th birthday. Forty-nine years had passed since his major league debut, and 29 since his final game. Yet he continued to head from one ballpark to the next, where he would walk to a mound in a No. 19 Indians uniform and pitch to anyone willing to step into a batter’s box.

Now it was Sunday afternoon, and we were headed west after his appearance in Cooperstown, and I was still trying to find a diplomatic way to ask: Why are you doing this?

In the days before ballparks pumped up the volume, Feller’s entrance was understated, sometimes without a word, like the one on a crisp, cloudy evening at Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Mass., where a small crowd spotted No. 19 and began to applaud, on and on and

on, a tribute far more respectful than cheers.

Finally, the public-address announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, in case you don’t already know. ...”

Feller’s appearances gave him the chance to talk about the commitment to his country, his enlistment in the Navy immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and his reminder that the true war heroes were the ones who did not survive. In his briefcase, a piece of paper held calculations in the event that his lost seasons could have been restored. The total of 266 career victories became 357. The 2,581 strikeouts became 3,516. The 44 shutouts became 65. The 279 complete games became 378.

At the top of the page, a premise was written in red felt-tip pen: As he spoke to fans on that Sunday in Cooperstown, the questions had to do with a 46-year-old standard that had just been surpassed. In 1939, at the age of 20 years 10 months 5 days, Feller became the youngest major league pitcher to win 20 games. In that summer of 1985, Gooden’s 20th victory with the Mets had come at the age of 20 years 9 months 9 days.

“He’ll never complete 36 games in a season,” Feller said. “They don’t pitch him enough.

He gets four days’ rest between starts. I only got three.”

When Gooden’s entrance to Cooperstown appeared to be a matter of time, the assessment sounded harsh enough for the fan to appear surprised. “He’s a heck of a good pitcher,” Feller said, and smiled. “I’m only kidding you, son.”

He was kidding to a point. “He’s got a great arm,” Feller said of Gooden afterward.

“But what should they do, put him in the Hall of Fame tomorrow? Are you kidding?”

The car was heading west. The time was running out. Why is he doing this?

“I’m a promoter,” Feller said without taking his eyes off the highway. “People say, ‘Well, you’re out promoting Bob Feller.’ Well, who else would I be promoting?

“I could be in the insurance business, or I could be in the hotel business. I could probably do a lot of other things. Be on the circuit like all these defeated politicians. I’m doing what I want to do. If I want to go out and work on my tractor, plow the ground, put in some alfalfa or beans or fiddle around at home, I’ll do that. I can afford to do it.”

For all those summers, he chose the ballpark. By reminding us that baseball is as much about diamonds tucked into small towns as it is about big-city stadiums, Bob Feller celebrated his game, on his terms.

The San Juan Weekly

December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

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Sports

Andrés Iniesta: Barcelona’s Once-in-a-Lifetime Guy

By ROB HUGHES

I

f ever we doubt that sporting values still hold in the mercenary modern era, then the last weekend before Christmas was gold dust.

Before the Catalan derby match on Saturday between Espanyol and FC Barcelona at the new Cornellà-El Prat stadium, it was a player from the visiting team who received the applause of the 40,000 men, women and children in the audience.

And then, five minutes before the end, with Espanyol suffering a 5-1 home defeat, its supporters stood to applaud the same Barcelona player in that same spine-tingling manner.

This, trust me, is a once in a lifetime thing.

Andrés Iniesta is a once in a lifetime kind of guy. He gets a warm reception everywhere he goes, in every Spanish stadium no matter how hostile the atmosphere.

It is recognition for the little man who came in off his wing to volley the game-winning goal in the Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg last July, giving Spain the World Cup for the first time.

But the Cornellà is something different. It is the stadium of Espanyol, the other club of Barcelona. We should never say the second club, but of course it is smaller, less rich, and I dare say has a lesser team than the all-star line up of El Barça.

The philosophy is different, the means are different, but the rivalry is eternal and strong.

However, even the most partisan followers of Real Club Deportivo Español make an exception for “San” Andrés. And this goes deeper than gratitude for bringing home the Cup. Cast your mind back to that South Africa night last summer. You might recall Iniesta’s first impulse after he scored that goal. He ran toward the crowd, tearing off his shirt and revealing an undershirt with the inscription: “Dani Jarque siempre con nosotros.”

It translates to “Dani Jarque, always with us.”

The words were in memory of a friend. Iniesta, and for that matter Cesc Fàbregas and others who shared that national triumph, had been raised with Jarque.

The personal friendship between Iniesta and Jarque deepened as they grew up together in the Spanish youth teams.

They represented the country at every level from 16 years to 21. Spain, better than any other nation, nurtures its young by identifying talent in adolescence and bringing it through as a group to manhood.

Barcelona is a mighty part of that, because seven players on its current team lined up in the World Cup final. Iniesta, though not born a Catalan, is a product of Barça’s La Masia academy.

Dani Jarque came up through the cross-town Espanyol apprenticeship.

Their bond was stronger than

any division between the two clubs of the same city.

“I felt it on the field,” Iniesta said before he departed the stadium on Saturday. “This is the biggest thing.

People sent me messages. People are more important than rivalries.”

Unless I am mistaken, Iniesta will very soon start cleaning up awards as the world’s outstanding player of 2010.

Also vying for those awards are two Barcelona teammates, Lionel Messi and Xavi Hernandez.

And while the match Saturday reiterated that there is no player on earth more special than Messi, and none more influential to Barcelona than Xavi, Iniesta ’s strike in the 116th minute of a World Cup final will probably seal him those awards.

Even his club coach, Pep Guardiola, felt there was something exceptional about Espanyol’s affection towards Iniesta.

Exceptional, too, was the Barça team spirit. If there is one place where all its secrets are known, it is inside Espanyol. The clubs are so close that Espanyol hires former youth players from its neighbor — including five on its current squad.

Yet once they cross the city, cross the line, they become the fiercest of rivals. Up to Saturday, Espanyol had played seven La Liga matches in its own stadium and won seven. It had conceded a mere two goals.

Its coach, the Argentine Mauricio Pochettino, made threats that his men would be just as aggressive as

he was. Pochettino earned more red cards as a player than any other man in an Espanyol shirt.

He had captained Espanyol, just as Jarque, a big, strong central defender, was chosen to do a few years after Pochettino retired.

Alas, poor Dani Jarque. He collapsed and died of a heart attack while at preseason camp with Espanyol in Florence. He was 26, and he simply stopped breathing while talking on the telephone with his girlfriend, who was seven months pregnant.

That was why Jarque was uppermost in the mind of Iniesta last July in Johannesburg.

That was why Iniesta, though he intended to keep the undershirt, felt it belonged with Espanyol. He donated it to the club a month ago.

And that, surely, was why everyone applauded Iniesta on Saturday.

Unfortunately, the English referee at the World Cup final ruined the moment in Johannesburg by showing Iniesta a yellow card for removing his shirt.

It is in the FIFA rule book, so referee Howard Webb did as the rule dictates.

He showed Iniesta the same color card that he had flashed at Nigel De Jong after the Dutchman’s kung fu kick into the chest of Xabi Alonso during the final.

If FIFA has a conscience, it will revise that rule. It could do it in memory of Jarque, or in plain common decency.

But Barcelona is more than a club, more than a city, more than an act of sentimentality.

Guardiola’s team, three quarters of it grown at La Masia, proved again that it is among the finest ever to play soccer. Maybe the Real Madrid of the 1950s, possibly the AC Milan of the 1990s, were as great, but this Barça is still growing.

Guardiola is still learning to coach it. The display Saturday, with two goals from Pedro, two from David Villa, one from Xavi and more breathtaking creativity from Messi, was against a good, tough opponent.

Espanyol chased, kicked, and scored the first goal anyone has scored against Barcelona in seven matches. For Barcelona, which has won 10 consecutive matches, five goals a game is becoming a norm. An exceptional team, to be sure, with a saint on the wing. Iniesta doesn’t say a lot about his own talents, but Pablo Picasso, a former resident of this city, once wrote: “It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.”

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December 30 - Jan. 5, 2010

The San Juan Weekly