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The A Sad and Shameful Way to Begin the 112th Congress

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January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

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The San Juan Weekly

JJanuary Ja nu y 13 - 19,, 2011

A Sad and Shameful Way to Begin the 112th Congress

By Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi

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n Wednesday, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives approved its rules package for the 112th Congress. I opposed the package for several reasons, but above all because it sends a message of exclusion and indifference to my constituents, the nearly four million U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico.

Under a rule adopted by the last three Democrat-controlled Congresses, the representatives from the five U.S. territories and the District of Columbia were given a single, extremely-narrow privilege on the House floor. We were permitted to vote on amendments when

the House resolved into the Committee of the Whole, a parliamentary device designed to allow greater participation by members in debate. Notably, the rule provided for an automatic revote to be held on the exceedingly rare occasion where our votes affected the outcome. The constitutionality of this rule was confirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in a 1994 decision. And the rule did not impede the work or impair the efficiency of this House in any way.

Nevertheless, in a move that is difficult to describe as anything other than callous and petty, the Republican rules package deprives my fellow delegates and myself of this small but — to us and those we represent — meaningful privilege.

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Exquisite Cuisine in an Oppulent Setting The Republicans’ action does damage, in both the moral and practical sense, to the House and to this country.

The moral harm is clear. As the Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico, I represent nearly four million U.S. citizens, far more than any other member of this chamber. Together, the delegates from the other U.S. territories and the District of Columbia represent over one million people. Our constituents are an integral part of the American family. They pledge allegiance to the same flag as their fellow Americans in the 50 states. They fight — and many of them have died — in defense of our nation. Poignantly, as Republicans were approving their rules package, the Department of Defense was preparing to announce the names of the first two American soldiers killed in Iraq in 2011, both of whom were members of the Puerto Rico National Guard. What does it say about the Republican leadership that it is perfectly willing to allow men and women from Puerto Rico to defend our nation in uniform, but absolutely unwilling

to give their duly-elected representatives any voice on the House floor?

The Republicans’ action has adverse practical consequences as well. Our limited vote promoted responsible and transparent government — and the decision to eliminate it undermines these values.

By compelling us to take public stands on important issues, our vote enabled our constituents to better evaluate both our governing philosophy and the quality of our representation. I believe that Republicans, like Democrats, genuinely seek to make government more open and more accountable to the people. That is why I am hard-pressed to understand why they have taken a step that does precisely the opposite.

The Republican rules package dishonors and demeans Americans living in the territories and the District of Columbia. It says to them: your voice does not matter. You are not important. And you do not count.

What a sad and shameful way to begin the 112th Congress.

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January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Puerto Rico Confronts Serious Mental Health Issues O

n January 1, 2011 a new decade commenced. 2010 closed a difficult series of years filled with crime, war and economic crises. An environment filled with pressures driving the most normal person insane. On our island two out of three persons need psycological attention at some point in their lives reflecting the confusing agitated environment we live in.

Mental Health is an essential component for human life. It is so important that it has been declared by the United Nations as one of the inalienable rights of human beings. There is personal or individual mental health, and there is also collective mental health, or community, nationality, social group. No people can be mentally healthy if the social level is “sick” and vice versa.

Is mental illness inherited or developed from traumatic experiences. Families with high incidences of mental disorders experience the anguish of transmitting to future generations. Also much emphasis is put on the need for education and prevention work to help eliminate factors that influence the development of traumatic experiences: domestic violence, drug addiction, child abuse, sex crimes and other situations.

In Puerto Rico there are serious mental health problems. Several surveys indicate that our quality of life is severely affected. In Puerto Rico there are many people who are not happy despite the government having covered many basic needs, but what is worse, many people do not even consider being happy as a right or fundamental to mental health. Some students of behavior indicate that two of every three people in Puerto Rico needed, or would have to seek, counseling. The island has on average: 100,000 addicts, 200,000 people with alcohol problems, 100,000 with some degree of mental

retardation, 500,000 adults with symptoms such as anxiety or depression, 500,000 children and adolescents with symptoms and problems of development, 500,000 people with personality disorders, behavioral problems, marital problems, criminals and others, 200,000 seniors with difficulties in emotional adjustment. This is more than 50% of our population. The data indicates that two in three people in Puerto Rico need some psychological help to cope and handle serious mental health problems.

What most people often pose as mental disorders are bipolar conditions, that is, those that affect mood leading them to two extremes of reaction: sadness or depression on one side and aggressiveness, extreme irritability elsewhere. However, judging by the list of crimes it could be inferred that the slope is dangerously aggressive. We see that although there is a history of depression prior to commiting aggressive and violent crimes, aggression is the same final action used to solve problems of various kinds.

Some factors that cause mental instability in Puerto Rico are: (a) crime, (b) unemployment, (c) costs of living, (d) lack of space for family, (e) access problems to housing & (f) deficiency in health services. No one denies that social environment affects the mood of people and this island paradise is filled with daily obstacles and challenges.

There are a number of values, norms, customs and socio-cultural roles that impact on social pressures, to create a state of distress or danger to the population. These include values such as machismo (domestic violence), consumerism (debt per capita average of Puerto Ricans is above their economic performance capabilities), and wanting money, comfort and instant results.

We have the idea that handsome & arro-

gant, is superior to the traditional “humble”, “honest” and “friendly.” Global and local influences appear to encourage the cultivation of materialist styles rather than to be “educated and civilized. “ As 2011 unfolds we are experiencing high levels of unemployment, crime, addiction, poverty, etc. Our families are being desimated as our young adults seek employment on the mainland and our children dropout to have children as teenagers. Families are losing their homes to unjust foreclosures. Our aged lose millions in lifesavings as their bank stocks and real estate plummet. The strongest most vibrant father crawls to hide in bed as he sees his ability to support his family vanish.

Puerto Rico’s mental health crisis is a normal reflection of the unfortunate environment confronting our society. Lets pray 2011 will bring changes and quickly. We cannot take it anymore.

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

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January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Justice Department Forces Hairstyling School to Admit HIV-Positive Student

By Michael W. Chapman

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hairstyling school in Puerto Rico has been forced by the Department of Justice to offer enrollment to an HIV-positive applicant, pay that person $8,000 in damages, and also pay a $5,000 penalty to the United States as part of the settlement reached in the case.

The case concerns a complaint filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) against the Modern Hairstyling Institute, Inc., in Bayamon, Puerto Rico by a female applicant to the school. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States in the Caribbean Sea. The Justice Department, in a press release, said the Modern Hairstyling Institute “discriminated against an HIV-positive applicant by denying her enrollment.”

“It is critical that we continue to work to eradicate discriminatory and stigmatizing treatment towards individuals with HIV based on unfounded fears and stereotypes,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, in the Dec. 20 press release.

“The ADA clearly protects individuals with HIV and other disabilities from this kind of exclusion or marginalization,” said Perez.

As part of the legal settlement, the Modern Hairstyling Institute made an offer of enrollment to the complainant, will no longer request information about HIV/ AIDS status from future hairstylist applicants, and “will provide training to all employees about discrimination on the basis of disability,” said the Justice Department.

Under the Americans with Disabi-

lities Act, public businesses, such as the Modern Hairstyling Institute, cannot exclude people who are HIV-positive from enjoying the services or goods provided by those businesses, said the Justice Department.

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

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January 13 - 19, 2011

US-Cuba Ties Set To Suffer

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nder President Barack Obama, US policy towards Cuba has been liberalized somewhat, with travel and remittance restrictions in particular being loosened. However, we caution that, without much more far-reaching economic and political reform in Cuba, there will be no significant shift in the US government’s stance, particularly given the Republican Party’s success in November’s midterm.

The US has imposed a strict embargo on Cuba since the early 1960s and has consistently refused to remove it without moves by Cuba to improve democracy and human rights, despite criticism from the UN and the large majority of foreign nations.

As the Democrats are traditionally much more supportive of removing the embargo, many of Cuba’s critics were hopeful that President Barack Obama’s election would presage significant liberalisation of US policy on Cuba.

Indeed, the Obama administration has made some modest moves towards easing the longstanding embargo, most notably lifting travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans visiting the island and removing the ban on remittances. A more considerable shift in the government’s stance on Cuba, however, remains contingent on President Raul Castro initiating significant changes to the country’s communist model, with the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act stating that sanctions will be maintained as long as Cuba refuses to move towards ‘ democratisation and greater respect for human rights’.

Castro has recently exhibited some signs of relaxing the government’s vice-like grip on the island’s institutions, such as allowing private sector activity in a number of new industries and releasing a number of political prisoners. However, we have long maintained that such changes have their roots in economic necessity, rather than any fundamental reorientation of the regime away from communism, and we do not expect the progress to be maintained once the economic drivers of reform have abated.

Republican Election Gains To Prevent Further Rapprochement A 2009 poll conducted by US polling agency Rasmussen Reports indicated that, while 35% of all Americans oppose lifting the embargo, among Republican voters opposition was much stronger, with 58% against removing the embargo compared with only 38% of Democrat supporters. These divides tend to be reflected in the voting behaviour of politicians and, as a result, we

believe that the success of the Republicans in November’s midterms will put an end to the recent thawing of US-Cuba relations for the time being.

As the majority party in the house of representatives, the Republicans are able to determine the order of debate of bills and can easily vote down any legislation they oppose, making it very unlikely that any anti-sanctions propositions will be successful in congress, in our view. Another barrier to changes to US policy on Cuba comes in the form of Floridian Representative Ileana RosLehtinen, one of the government’s most vocal anti-Castro members who, as the ranking Republican, is in line to head the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Thus, going forward, we do not expect any significant recasting of US-Cuba relations, due both to Republican influence in Washington and a lack of significant liberalisation in Cuba. This is bad news for US investors hoping for greater access to the increasing number of investment opportunities in Cuba, particularly its nascent offshore oil drilling industry, which has huge growth potential.

The San Juan Weekly

US-Cuba Relations Thawing?

Recent Trends In US-Cuba Foreign Policy

RELATIONS IMPROVING Obama promised a ‘new beginning’ for US policy on Cuba when he took office in 2009 Obama administration has lifted travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans visiting family in Cuba Government considering loosening travel restrictions for academic, religious and cultural groups Remittances from Cuban-Americans now permitted to be sent back to Cuba Discusssions have been started on possibly direct mail services between Cuba and the US Bilateral talks on migration between the two have been resumed US telecoms firms allowed to provide mobile services in Cuba American drilling companies seeking permission from the US government to participate in Cuba’s offshore oil industry Amount of humanitarian items Americans can donate to Cuba has been increased

RELATIONS DETERIORATING Obama has stated that he will not lift the trade embargo until there are more economic and political changes inCuba Republicans’ success in the midterm elections likely to prevent any further relaxation of Cuba restrictions Midterm results put one of the most anti-Castro politicians, Florida’s lleana Ros-Lehtinen, in line to the House Foreign Affairs Committee The UN voted 187-2 on October 26 in favour of the US lifting the embargo (only the US and Israel voted against the motion) Cuba is refusing to release US citizen Alan Gross, who is being held on charges of espionage

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

9 Mainland

For Arkansas Blackbirds, the New Year Never Came dison, Wis. Keith Stephens, a spokesman for the commission, said he was not aware of a case this large. “About nine years ago we had some ducks,” he said, “but that was only a couple of dozen.”

The town contacted an environmental cleanup firm, which by Monday afternoon had picked up nearly all the birds, some of which were bagged and left at the end of driveways by residents.

“It just looked as if it had rained birds,” said Tracy Lightfoot, a member of the City Council, declining to speculate on the reason. “There’s lots of theories running around. I have no idea. I just don’t have a clue.”

State scientists believe one thing to be

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

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imes Square had the ball drop, and Brasstown, N.C., had its descending possum. But no place had a New Year’s Eve as unusual, or freakishly disturbing, as Beebe, Ark. Around 11 that night, thousands of red-winged blackbirds began falling out of the sky over this small city about 35 miles northeast of Little Rock. They landed on roofs, roads, front lawns and backyards, turning the ground nearly black and terrifying anyone who happened to be outside.

“One of them almost hit my best friend in the head,” said Christy Stephens, who was standing outside among the smoking crowd at a party. “We went inside after that.”

The cause is still being determined, but preliminary lab results from the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission revealed “acute physical trauma” in samples of the dead birds. There were no indications

of disease, though tests were still being done for the presence of toxic chemicals.

Karen Rowe, the bird conservation program coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, said the prevailing theory was that the birds had been startled by New Year’s Eve fireworks and suddenly dispersed, flying low enough to run into chimneys, houses and trees. Pyrotechnics are used to scatter blackbirds for bird control, though only during the day, given the birds’ poor vision.

Beebe (pronounced BE-be) is a congregating spot for blackbirds, and one witness told Ms. Rowe that he saw the birds roosting earlier in the day and heard them again at night just after the fireworks started.

“It was the right mix of things happening in a perfect time sequence,” Ms. Rowe said.

At most recent count, up to 5,000 birds fell on the city. Sixty five samples were sent to labs, one of which is at the Livestock and Poultry Commission and the other in Ma-

almost certain: that the bird deaths were not related to the roughly 85,000 fish that died a few days before near Ozark, in the western part of the state, the biggest fish kill in Arkansas that anyone can remember. They were spotted by anglers along the Arkansas River last week and reported to the Game and Fish Commission, which spent New Year’s Eve measuring and counting dead fish that had spread out for nearly 20 miles.

In that case, the victims were almost all drum, and almost all younger ones. That suggests the culprit was disease, said Mark Oliver, the chief of fisheries for the commission. He said fish kills were not uncommon, especially in winter when the fish are packed more closely, but he did not recall one of this size.

Meanwhile roughly 500 dead birds were found on Monday outside New Roads, La. Those birds were much more varied, with starlings and grackle in addition to blackbirds, and a few samples picked up by James LaCour, a wildlife veterinarian with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, did not show any signs of trauma, he said.

Fed’s Worries About Deflation Ease

By SEWELL CHAN

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majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Reserve have concluded that concerns about falling prices have eased and that inflation will gradually rise, though it will remain below the central bank’s desired level of about 2 percent for some time.

In minutes from their Dec. 14 meeting, released on Tuesday after the customary delay, Fed officials expressed confidence that the recent rise in government bond yields was a consequence of greater optimism about the economy, and would not undermine the Fed’s efforts to stimulate the recovery by keeping long-term interest rates low.

The new consensus on inflation is significant because the Fed was preoccupied for most of 2010 with concerns about whether inflation was so low that the economy threatened to tip into a deflationary cycle of the kind that has hobbled Japan intermittently for about two decades.

That fear of deflation was one of the main justifications the Fed’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, advanced for the decision in November to pump $600 billion into the banking system, the resumption of a strategy, known as quantitative easing, that involves buying government bonds to keep down long-term interest rates.

The new minutes, released Tuesday, showed that Fed officials had put off for now any decision about the future of the as-

set purchase program, which is scheduled to last through June.

“While the economic outlook was seen as improving, members generally felt that the change in the outlook was not sufficient to warrant any adjustments to the asset-purchase program,” the minutes said, “and some noted that more time was needed to accumulate information on the economy before considering any adjustment.”

Yet the minutes seemed to support the belief held by many private sector economists that the Fed will carry out the $600 billion in bond purchases but then stop, without going further.

“Members emphasized that the pace and overall size of the purchase program would be contingent on economic and fi-

nancial developments; however, some indicated that they had a fairly high threshold for making changes to the program,” the minutes said.

In the minutes, the Fed officials noted that “economic activity has continued to strengthen and that the deterioration in the labor market is abating.”

Still, a weak labor market, a struggling housing market and tight credit continued to limit household spending, the minutes note.

“The pace of economic recovery is likely to be moderate for a time,” the minutes said, adding that the committee anticipated “a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability.”

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The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

More Schools Embracing iPad as Learning Tool

By WINNIE HU

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s students returned to class this week, some were carrying brandnew Apple iPads in their backpacks, given not by their parents but by their schools.

A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation of complex problems.

As part of a pilot program, Roslyn High School on Long Island handed out 47 iPads on Dec. 20 to the students and teachers in two humanities classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.

The iPads cost $750 apiece, and they are to be used in class and at home during the school year to replace textbooks; allow students to correspond with teachers, file papers and homework assignments; and preserve a record of student work in digital portfolios.

“It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls,” said Larry Reiff, an English teacher at Roslyn who now posts all his course materials online.

More practically, he said, it also takes away students’ excuses for not doing their work.

“It moves beyond the traditional scope of homework: go home, read, write,” he said, referring to its video and multimedia elements. “I’m expecting a higher rate of homework completion.”

Technological fads have come and gone in schools, and other experiments meant to rev up the educational experience for children raised on video games and YouTube have had mixed results. Educators, for instance, are still divided over whether initiatives to give every student a laptop have made a difference academically.

At a time when school districts are trying to get their budgets approved so they do not have to lay off teachers or cut programs, spending money on tablet computers may seem like an extravagance.

And some parents and scholars have raised concerns that schools are rushing to invest in them before their educational value has been proved by research.

“There is very little evidence that kids learn more, faster or better by using these machines,” said Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, who believes that the money would be better spent to recruit, train and retain teachers. “IPads are marvelous tools to engage kids, but then the novelty wears off, and you get into hard-core issues of teaching and learning.”

But school leaders say the iPad is not just a cool new toy but rather a powerful

and versatile tool with a multitude of applications, including thousands with educational uses.

“If there isn’t an app that does something I need, there will be sooner or later,” said Mr. Reiff, who said he now used an application that includes all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Educators also laud the iPad’s physical attributes, including its large touch screen (about 9.7 inches) and flat design, which allows students to maintain eye contact with their teachers. And students like its light weight, which offers a relief from the heavy books that weigh down their backpacks.

Roslyn administrators also said their adoption of the iPad, for which the district paid $56,250 for the initial 75 (32-gigabyte, with case and stylus), is advancing its effort to go paperless and cut spending. Some of the tablets are being used for special education students.

In Millburn, N.J., students at the South Mountain Elementary School have used two iPads purchased by the parentteacher organization to play math games, study world maps and read “Winnie the Pooh.” Scott Wolfe, the principal, said he hoped to secure 20 more iPads next school year to run apps that, for instance, simulate a piano keyboard on a screen or display constellations based on a viewer’s location.

“I think this could very well be the biggest thing to hit school technology since the overhead projector,” Mr. Wolfe said.

The New York City public schools have ordered more than 2,000 iPads, at $1.3 million; 300 went to Kingsbridge International High School in the Bronx, or enough for all 23 teachers and half the students to use at the same time.

More than 200 Chicago public schools applied for 23 district-financed iPad grants totaling $450,000; the winners each received 32 iPads, on average — for a total of 745 — as well as iTunes credit to purchase applications. The district is now applying

for a $3 million state grant to provide iPads to low-performing schools next year.

The Virginia Department of Education is overseeing a $150,000 iPad initiative that has replaced history and advancedplacement biology textbooks at 11 schools.

In California, six middle schools in four cities (San Francisco, Long Beach, Fresno and Riverside) are teaching the first iPad-only algebra course developed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Even kindergartners are getting their hands on iPads. Pinnacle Peak School in Scottsdale, Ariz., converted an empty classroom into a lab with 36 iPads — named the “iMaginarium” — that has become the centerpiece of the school because, as the principal put it, “of all the devices out there, the iPad has the most star power with kids.”

But technology advocates like Elliot Soloway, an engineering professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Cathie Norris, a technology professor at the University of North Texas, question whether school officials have become so enamored with iPads that they have overlooked less costly options, like smartphones that offer similar benefits at a fraction of the iPad’s base cost of about $500.

Indeed, many of the districts are paying for their iPads through federal and other grants, including money from the federal Race to the Top competitive grant program, which Durham, N.C., administrators are using to provide an iPad to every teacher and student at two low-performing schools.

“You can do everything that the iPad can with existing off-the-shelf technology and hardware for probably $300 to $400 less per device,” Professor Soloway said.

Apple reported that it had sold more than 7.5 million iPads since April, but did not say how many went to schools.

Apple has been developing a school market for the iPad by working with textbook publishers on instructional programs and sponsoring iPad workshops for admi-

nistrators and teachers. It does not, however, appear to have marketed the tablet as aggressively to schools as it did with its early desktop computers, some of which were heavily discounted for schools and helped establish a generation of Apple users. School officials say that Apple has been offering only a standard educational discount of about 10 percent on the iPad. The company’s app store shows that 5,400 educational applications are available specifically for the iPad, of which nearly 1,000 can be downloaded free.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which developed the iPad algebra program in California, said it planned to compare the test scores of students using a textbook in digital and traditional book formats. The iPad version offers video of the author solving equations, and individualized assessments and practice problems.

In Virginia, Pearson, an educational publisher, added iPad-specific features to existing American and world history programs, including an application for “Jeopardy”-like games and functions that enable students to take on-screen notes in the margins, bookmark pages and zoom in for close-ups.

Pearson will develop iPad versions for all of its new instructional programs for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and begin offering iPad versions for 30 top-selling math, reading, literature, social studies and science programs in April.

Many school officials say they have been waiting for a technology like the iPad. “It has brought individual technology into the classroom without changing the classroom atmosphere,” said Alex Curtis, headmaster of the private MorristownBeard School in New Jersey, which bought 60 iPads this school year for $36,000 and is considering providing iPads to all students next fall.

Dr. Curtis recently used a $1.99 application, ColorSplash, which removes or adds color to pictures, to demonstrate the importance of color in a Caravaggio painting in his seminar on Baroque art. “Traditionally, so much of art history is slides on a screen,” he said. “When they were able to manipulate the image themselves, it came alive.”

Daniel Brenner, the Roslyn superintendent, said the iPads would also save money in the long run by reducing printing and textbook costs; the estimated savings in the two iPad classes alone are $7,200 a year.

The district has begun replacing math textbooks with digital versions and expects to be able to download about 60 percent of the high school’s literature reading list from iBooks free.

“It’s not about a cool application,” Dr. Brenner said. “We are talking about changing the way we do business in the classroom.”

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

Strained States Turning to Laws to Curb Labor Unions

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

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aced with growing budget deficits and restive taxpayers, elected officials from Maine to Alabama, Ohio to Arizona, are pushing new legislation to limit the power of labor unions, particularly those representing government workers, in collective bargaining and politics.

State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees, which typically make up a significant percentage of state budgets. On Wednesday, for example, New York’s new Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, is expected to call for a one-year salary freeze for state workers, a move that would save $200 million to $400 million and challenge labor’s traditional clout in Albany.

But in some cases — mostly in states with Republican governors and Republican statehouse majorities — officials are seeking more far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power and political influence of unions, including private sector ones.

For example, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, Maine, Missouri and seven other states plan to introduce legislation that would bar private sector unions from forcing workers they represent to pay dues or fees, reducing the flow of funds into union treasuries. In Ohio, the new Republican governor, following the precedent of many other states, wants to ban strikes by public school teachers.

Some new governors, most notably Scott Walker of Wisconsin, are even threatening to take away government workers’ right to form unions and bargain contracts.

“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers.”

Many of the proposals may never become law. But those that do are likely to reduce union influence in election campaigns, with reverberations for both parties.

In the 2010 elections, Republicans emerged with seven more governor’s mansions and won control of the legislature in 26 states, up from 14. That swing has put unions more on the defensive than they have been in decades.

But it is not only Republicans who are seeking to rein in unions. In addition to Mr. Cuomo, California’s new Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, is promising to review the benefits received by government workers in his state, which faces a more than $20 billion budget shortfall over the next 18 months.

“We will also have to look at our system of pensions and how to ensure that they are transparent and actuarially sound and fair — fair to the workers and fair to the taxpayers,” Mr. Brown said in his inaugural speech on Monday.

Many of the state officials pushing for union-related changes say they want to restore some balance, arguing that unions have become too powerful, skewing political campaigns with their large war chests and throwing state budgets off kilter with their expensive pension plans.

But labor leaders view these efforts as political retaliation by Republicans upset that unions recently spent more than $200 million to defeat Republican candidates.

“I see this as payback for the role we played in the 2010 elections,” said Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the main union of state employees.

Mr. McEntee said in October that his union was spending more than $90 million on the campaign, largely to help Democrats.

“Now there’s a bull’s-eye on our back, and they’re out to inflict pain,” he said.

In an internal memorandum, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. warned that in 16 states, Republican lawmakers would seek to starve public sector unions of money by requiring each government worker to “opt in” before that person’s dues money could be used for political activities.

“In the long run, if these measures deprive unions of resources, it will cut them off at their knees.

They’ll melt away,” said Charles E. Wilson, a law professor at Ohio Sta-

te University.

Of all the new governors, John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, appears to be planning the most comprehensive assault against unions. He is proposing to take away the right of 14,000 state-financed child care and home care workers to unionize. He also wants to ban strikes by teachers, much the way some states bar strikes by the police and firefighters.

“If they want to strike, they should be fired,” Mr. Kasich said in a speech. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?”

Mr. Kasich also wants to eliminate a requirement that the state pay union-scale wages to construction workers on public contracts, even if the contractors are nonunion. In addition, he would like to ban the use of binding arbitration to settle disputes between the state and unions representing government employees.

Labor leaders, who argue that government employees are not overpaid, worry that many of these measures have a much better chance of enactment than in previous years because of Republican electoral gains and recession-ravaged taxpayers’ reduced sympathy toward government workers.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s internal memo warned labor leaders, “With the enormous losses in state legislatures around the country, we will face not only more attacks on working families and their unions — we will face more serious attacks, particularly in the formerly blue or purple states that are now controlled by a Republican trifecta.”

It pointed in particular to six states, including several former union strongholds, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature: Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Naomi Walker, the A.F.L.C.I.O.’s director of state government relations, said many voters would oppose the antiunion efforts. “I think folks in these states are going to ask whether this is the right time to weaken unions when corporations are amassing more power than ever,” she said. “We’ve been fighting against privatizing Social Security

and sending jobs offshore and to get the best deal for the unemployed. It would be a lot easier for Republicans if unions weren’t there to throw up these roadblocks.”

Union leaders particularly dread the spread of right-to-work laws, which prevail in 22 states, almost all in the South or West. Under such laws, unions and employers cannot require workers to join a union or pay any dues or fees to unions to represent them.

Unions complain that such laws allow workers in unionized workplaces to reap the benefits of collective bargaining without paying for it. Pointing to lower wages in rightto-work states, unions say the laws lead to worse wages and benefits by weakening unions.

But lawmakers who are pushing right-to-work laws argue that they help attract investment. “The folks who work day-to-day in economic development tell us that the No. 1 thing we can do to make Indiana more attractive to business is to make Indiana a right-to-work state,” said Jerry Torr, an Indiana state representative who backs such legislation.

Some union leaders say that proposals like right-to-work laws, which have little effect on state budgets, show that Republicans are using budget woes as a pretext to undercut unions.

“They’re throwing the kitchen sink at us,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We’re seeing people use the budget crisis to make every attempt to roll back workers’ voices and any ability of workers to join collectively in any way whatsoever.”

A group composed of Republican state lawmakers and corporate executives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is quietly spreading these proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts as well as suggested legislative language.

Michael Hough, director of the council’s commerce task force, said the aim of these measures was not political, but to reduce labor’s swollen power. “Government budgets have grown and grown because of the cost of employees’ pensions and salaries,” he said. “Now we have to deal with that.”

The San Juan Weekly

13 Mainland

January 13 - 19, 2011

G.O.P. Sets Up Huge Target for Budget Ax

By JACKIE CALMES

T

he incoming Republican majority in the House is moving to make good on its promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending this year, a goal eagerly backed by conservatives but one carrying substantial political and economic risks.

House Republican leaders are so far not specifying which programs would bear the brunt of budget cutting, only what would escape it: spending for the military, domestic security and veterans.

The reductions that would be required in the remaining federal programs, including education and transportation, would be so deep — roughly 20 percent on average — that Senate Republicans have not joined the $100 billion pledge that House Republicans, led by the incoming speaker, Representative John A. Boehner, made to voters before November’s midterm elections.

Even if adopted by the House, the Republicans’ budget is unlikely to be enacted in anything like the scale they envision, since Democrats retain a majority in the Senate and President Obama could veto annual appropriations bills making the reductions.

But the effort is more than symbolic: in particular it could give House Republicans increased leverage in budget negotiations with the White House this winter and spring, when the administration must get Congress to raise the federal debt limit or risk a government financing crisis.

The budget-cutting exercise is perhaps the biggest test facing the House Republicans as they seek to remain united and to keep faith with Tea Party members, many of whom remain suspicious of the party’s willingness to vote for deep spending cuts.

But if Republicans vote for the size and range of required cuts in education, law enforcement, medical and scientific research, transportation and much more, it would give Democrats political ammunition to use against them in swing districts.

Such reductions are sure to draw protests from governors and local officials, including Republicans, who are counting on federal money to help balance their budgets. Many business and farm groups likewise would oppose cuts in their subsidies. And many economists would argue that immediate federal spending cuts of this size, especially on top of cuts and layoffs in the cities and states, would threaten the economy’s recovery and offset any stimulus from the tax cut deal Republicans and Mr. Obama reached just weeks ago.

Yet conservative analysts say even more spending cuts are desirable. Brian

Riedl of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, has outlined a plan for $343 billion in reductions, including cuts from corporate tax breaks and entitlement programs that are not in the portion of the federal budget that House Republicans are focusing on, the so-called nonsecurity discretionary spending.

“The difficulty for Republicans is that they’re concentrating their cuts in a small sliver of the budget,” Mr. Riedl said.

“They should also be addressing large entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security, which are the main source of our budget problems. Cutting $100 billion from these other programs isn’t just a matter of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. It will involve real cuts in real programs.”

Other Republicans are skeptical, as well.

“I just don’t know how, when you get down to it, they’re going to get agreement on that,” said G. William Hoagland, who for many years was the Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.

The promise to cut $100 billion this fiscal year — in effect, taking government operations to 2008 levels — would mean cuts of more than 20 percent across the board from the $477 billion that Congress allocated for such programs in the 2010 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.

Such across-the-board cuts “would have very damaging implications for the long-term growth of the economy and the long-term future of our work force,” said Jacob J. Lew, Mr. Obama’s budget director.

He is preparing the administration’s budget for the 2012 fiscal year, which would continue a three-year freeze of the same domestic spending at 2010 levels.

“If you look in areas like education, if it was applied across the board it would mean eight million students would have their Pell grants reduced by an average of $700,” Mr. Lew said. “You obviously could make policy not to do that, but then you’d have to save a lot of money somewhere else.”

A 20-percent cut also would mean 40,000 fewer teachers and school aides, he said, and big reductions in basic research, law enforcement and small business programs, among many others.

If the Republicans apply their promise literally, some programs would have to be scaled back even more because the government is already well into its fiscal year, so the cuts would have to be concentrated in a shorter period. The reductions would be about 30.6 percent.

“That would require very large layoffs or furloughs of federal employees,” Mr. Horney said, “as well as big reductions in grants to state and local governments and government purchases of goods and services — all of which would offset a

good portion of the stimulus achieved in the tax compromise and threaten the recovery.”

In new rules, Republicans will empower the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee, to limit various categories of domestic spending that are decided in Appropriations Committee.

That is more power than ever invested in a Budget Committee chief and a significant diminution in the appropriation panel’s traditional sway.

Initially, that would allow House Republicans to suggest what areas the $100

billion would come from without identifying specific cuts.

“The reality of governing is different than the reality of campaigning, and it’s easier to throw out a number than it is to support it,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior strategist.

Looming over the budget fight is the battle over the debt limit. An increase in the debt limit is essential for the government to borrow to meet its obligations, but it is adamantly opposed by the Tea Party movement and other small-government conservatives.

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Mainland 14

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

To Beat Back Poverty,

PAY THE POOR

By TINA ROSENBERG

T

he city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world.

Today, however, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.

Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent of earners. (see

this great series in Slate by Timothy Noah on American inequality) Productivity among low and middleincome American workers increased, but their incomes did not. If current trends continue, the United States may soon be more unequal than Brazil.

Several factors contribute to Brazil’s astounding feat. But a major part of Brazil’s achievement is due to a single social program that is now transforming how countries all over the world help their poor.

The program, called Bolsa Familia (Family Grant) in Brazil, goes by different names in different places. In Mexico, where it first began on a national scale and has been equally successful at reducing poverty, it is Oportunidades. The generic term for the program is conditional cash transfers. The idea is to give regular payments to poor families, in the form of cash or electronic transfers into their bank accounts, if they meet certain requirements. The requirements vary, but many countries employ those used

by Mexico: families must keep their

children in school and go for regular medical checkups, and mom must attend workshops on subjects like nutrition or disease prevention.

The payments almost always go to women, as they are the most likely to spend the money on their families. The elegant idea behind conditional cash transfers is to combat poverty today while breaking the cycle of poverty for tomorrow.

Most of our Fixes columns so far have been about successful-butsmall ideas. They face a common challenge: how to make them work on a bigger scale. This one is different. Brazil is employing a version of an idea now in use in some 40 countries around the globe, one already successful on a staggeringly enormous scale. This is likely the most important government antipoverty program the world has ever seen. It is worth looking at how it works, and why it has been able to help so many people.

In Mexico, Oportunidades today covers 5.8 million families, about 30 percent of the population.

An Oportunidades family with a

child in primary school and a child in middle school that meets all its responsibilities can get a total of about $123 a month in grants. Students can also get money for school supplies, and children who finish high school in a timely fashion get a one-time payment of $330.

A family living in extreme poverty in Brazil doubles its income when it gets the basic benefit.

Bolsa Familia, which has similar requirements, is even bigger.

Brazil’s conditional cash transfer programs were begun before the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but he consolidated various programs and expanded it.

It now covers about 50 million Brazilians, about a quarter of the country. It pays a monthly stipend of about $13 to poor families for each child 15 or younger who is attending school, up to three children. Families can get additional payments of $19 a month for each child of 16 or 17 still in school, up to two children.

Families that live in extreme poverty get a basic benefit of about $40, with no conditions.

Do these sums seem heartbreakingly small? They are. But a family living in extreme poverty in Brazil doubles its income when it gets the basic benefit. It has long been clear that Bolsa Familia has reduced poverty in Brazil. But research has only recently revealed its role in enabling Brazil to reduce economic inequality.

The World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank are working with individual governments to spread these programs around the globe, providing technical help and loans. Conditional cash transfer programs are now found in 14 countries in Latin America and some 26 other countries, according to the World Bank. (One of the programs was in New York City — a small, privately-financed pilot program called Opportunity NYC. A preliminary evaluation showed mixed success, but it is too soon to draw conclusions.) Each program is tailored to local conditions. Some in Latin America, for example, emphasize nutrition. One in Tanzania is experimenting with conditioning payments on an entire community’s behavior.

The program fights poverty in two ways. One is straightforward: it gives money to the poor. This works. And no, the money tends not to be stolen or diverted to the better-off. Brazil and Mexico have

The San Juan Weekly been very successful at including only the poor. In both countries it has reduced poverty, especially extreme poverty, and has begun to close the inequality gap.

The idea’s other purpose — to give children more education and better health — is longer term and harder to measure. But measured it is — Oportunidades is probably the most-studied social program on the planet. The program has an evaluation unit and publishes all data. There have also been hundreds of studies by independent academics. The research indicates that conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil do keep people healthier, and keep kids in school.

In Mexico today, malnutrition, anemia and stunting have dropped, as have incidences of childhood and adult illnesses. Maternal and infant deaths have been reduced. Contraceptive use in rural areas has risen and teen pregnancy has declined. But the most dramatic effects are visible in education.

January 13 - 19, 2011

Children in Oportunidades repeat fewer grades and stay in school longer. Child labor has dropped. In

rural areas, the percentage of children entering middle school has risen 42 percent. High school inscription in rural areas has risen by a whopping 85 percent. The strongest effects on education are found in families where the mothers have the lowest schooling levels. Indigenous Mexicans have particularly benefited, staying in school longer.

Bolsa Familia is having a similar impact in Brazil. One recent study found that it increases school attendance and advancement — particularly in the northeast, the region of Brazil where school attendance is lowest, and particularly for older girls, who are at greatest risk of dropping out. The study also found that Bolsa has improved child weight, vaccination rates and use of pre-natal care.

When I traveled in Mexico in 2008 to report on Oportunidades, I met family after family with a distinct before and after story. Parents whose work consisted of using a machete to cut grass had children who, thanks to Oportunidades, had finished high school and were now studying accounting or nursing. Some families had older children who were malnourished as youngsters, but younger children who had always been healthy because Oportunidades had arrived in time to help them eat better. In the city of Venustiano Carranza, in Mexico’s Puebla state, I met Hortensia Alvarez Montes, a 54-yearold widow whose only income came from taking in laundry. Her

15 Mainland

education stopped in sixth grade, as did that of her first three children. But then came Oportunidades, which kept her two youngest children in school. They were both finishing high school when I visited her. One of them told me she planned to attend college.

Outside of Brazil and Mexico, conditional cash transfer programs are newer and smaller. Nevertheless, there is ample research showing that they, too, increase consumption, lower poverty, and increase school enrollment and use of health services.

If conditional cash transfer programs are to work properly, many more schools and health clinics are needed. But governments can’t always keep up with the demand — and sometimes they can only keep up by drastically reducing quality. If this is a problem for medium-income countries like Brazil and Mexico, imagine the challenge in Honduras or Tanzania.

For skeptics who believe that social programs never work in poor countries and that most of what’s spent on them gets stolen, conditional cash transfer programs offer a convincing rebuttal. Here are programs that help the people who most need help, and do so with very little waste, corruption or political interference. Even tiny, one-village programs that succeed this well are cause for celebration.

To do this on the scale that Mexico and Brazil have achieved is astounding.

Wine & Beer 16

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

Dunkel, a Brew Ideal for Long Debates

By ERIC ASIMOV

D

UNKEL-STYLE beers are perhaps not the easiest to market to the American public. Even as American beer drinkers have learned to navigate a range of stylistic terms — stout, pilsner, hefeweizen, India pale ale and the rest — dunkel mystifies. What’s a dunkel? We might as well be talking about doughnuts.

Simply, dunkel is a German term for dark. It refers specifically to dark lagers from Bavaria in southern Germany, especially around Munich.

That’s easy enough, right?

Not so fast. Germany, and Austria, too, have more than a few dark lagers. Some are better known than dunkel, like bock, for example, which is more assertive, higher in alcohol, fuller bodied and more broadly malty than dunkel.

Dunkels might just as easily be confused with Vienna-style lagers, or with Märzen, a German beer often consumed at Oktoberfests. These, too, are dark lagers but generally more reddish than dunkels, with the aroma of hops a little more apparent. Let’s not forget schwarzbiers, German lagers that are slightly darker than dunkels, but offer a similar easy drinkability. Then we have dunkelweizens, dark wheat beers, a completely different category.

Poring over German beer designations can be great fun for the beer aficionado. But it can be perplexing or even maddening for ordinary consumers.

Count the beer panel among both groups. Our recent efforts to gather 20 lagers made in the dunkel style collided repeatedly with strict taxonomic authorities who insisted that one beer or another was more schwarzbier than dunkel, or perhaps too Viennese.

In the end, Bernard Kirsch, our ace hunter and gatherer, politely took in the well-meaning advice, weighed the options and decided. Regardless of whether our beers foamed over the confines of a strict definition, we found some delicious examples. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery, which does not make a dunkel-style beer and thus had no mug in the pageant, and Hayley Jensen, the beer sommelier at DBGB. Like most lager beers, dunkels are not intended to impress with their

complexity. They are straightforward and direct, made to refresh. The best are lively and energetic, with malty flavors of coffee, toffee and chocolate that entice you back to the glass. They’re just right when, as the old Schaefer commercial put it, you’re having more than one.

“Dunkel is a style designed for drinking,” Garrett said. “You go out, and you drink it all night.”

“Sessionable,” Hayley said, using the beer-geek term for brews that can sustain a long session of imbibing. “I don’t sell a lot of this style,” she added, “but when I can get someone to try it, they tend to like it.”

Florence pointed out that many Americans imagine that dark beers will be rich, thick and heavy, even though good stouts, porters and dunkels belie that assumption. In a sense, the dunkel style is in an uncomfortable position.

The ignorant avoid it because they believe it’s too heavy, while the cognoscenti ignore it because they find it too simple.

Personally, I love complex, contemplative ales. But having explored many genres of beer in the last 30 years, I’ve found myself gravitating toward simpler, easier styles (sessionable, indeed) like dunkels, as well as pilsners, porters and pale and brown ales. These are by no means bland.

Simplicity should never be mistaken for lack of character or distinction, especially when the beers are as vibrant and alive as our favorite dunkels.

Garrett, who took on the role of our strict stylistic constructionist, suggested that we had in our tasting some good examples of the Vienna lager style, which were a little lighter in color than what he regarded as ideal.

Paradoxically, our favorite, the Gösser Dark, was brewed in Austria, but was the best example of the dunkel style.

It had an aroma of dark coffee, a soft, almost delicate texture, and a subtle energy and depth to it that lingered long after the sip was gone.

Our No. 2 beer, the Lakefront Eastside Dark from Milwaukee, also fit the style: dark without being too dark, with malty coffee and hazelnut aromas and a fresh, lively flavor. By contrast, the Saranac Black Forest from Utica, N.Y., at No. 3, might have been a bit too dark. It had a slightly floral aroma along with the requisite maltiness, a combination that was nonetheless refreshing.

Among our 20 bottles, 11 were from Germany, 7 from the United States, and 1 each from Austria and Mexico. Mexico? That would be Negra Modelo, a beer I ordinarily like, but which did not make our cut.

Six German beers made our top 10, beginning with the Ettaler Kloster dunkel, at No. 4, which nicely balanced sweet malt flavors with an undercurrent of hop bitterness. The Ayinger Altbairisch dunkel, at No. 5, was the right color with the right aromas and flavors. We might have rated it higher, but it lacked a bit of energy, possibly because it seemed not to be fresh.

That’s perennially a problem with imported beers, especially with the more esoteric genres like dunkels.

If they are transported or stored improperly, and then don’t sell quickly, they can lose their freshness, which is crucial.

This suggests that domestic beers would do well against their imported siblings. Indeed, two of our top three dunkels were American. But the truth is, we did not find many domestic brews in the dunkel genre. American craft brewers have spent more time exploring ale styles than lagers. Perhaps this is because the ales are more alluring, considering how long Americans were deprived of them. Or possibly because, as Garrett pointed out, lagers are harder to brew, demanding more precision and leaving less room for error.

Either way, few really met the dunkel definition. We perhaps stretched it a bit to include the Sly Fox dunkel lager, which was really more Vienna lager. But it was so delicious we decided not to be fussy.

Tasting Report Gösser Dark, $2.90, ✩✩✩ ½ Austria, 11.2 ounces Toasty, malty aromas; delicate texture with gentle yet energetic flavors that linger. (Raven Import, Brooklyn) Lakefront Eastside Dark, $2.45, ✩✩✩ Milwaukee, 12 ounces Smooth, fresh and lively with aromas of coffee and hazelnuts.

Saranac Black Forest, $1.50, ✩✩ ½ Utica, N.Y., 12 ounces Light-bodied, refreshing with pleasing aromas of coffee and flowers.

Ettaler Kloster Dunkel, $4.75, ✩✩ ½ Germany, 16 ounces Aromas of toffee and chocolate; nice balance of sweet and bitter. (B. United International, Redding, Conn.)

Ayinger Altbairisch Dunkel, $5.50, ✩✩ ½ Germany, 16 ounces Earthy, toasty flavors of malt, coffee and nuts. (Merchant du Vin, Tukwila, Wash.)

Weissenohe Monk’s Christmas, $7.25, ✩✩ ½ Germany, 16.9 ounces Full, persistent, earthy flavors of malt and chocolate with a touch of bitterness from hops. (Shelton Brothers, Belchertown, Mass.)

Spaten München Dunkel, $2.50, ✩✩ ½ Germany, 12 ounces A little pale in color but lively and well balanced. (Spaten North America, Little Neck, N.Y.) Warsteiner Dunkel, $2.75, ✩✩ Germany, 11.2 ounces Crisp and toasty with bright malt flavors. (Warsteiner Importers Agency, Cincinnati) Sly Fox Dunkel Lager, $2.50, ✩✩ Royersford, Pa., 12 ounces A bit light for the style, but fresh and pleasing with straightforward malt flavors.

Pinkus Organic Jubilate, $4, ✩✩ Germany, 16.9 ounces Fresh and light with earthy, malty flavors. (Merchant du Vin)

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

17

PAINTER

Eluard Dobal Sanquirico

E

luard Dobal Sanquirico was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico on January 6th, 1948. Son of Don Narciso Dobal, Eluard grew up surrounded

by ďŹ ne art and paintings, subjects which he studied in the University of Puerto Rico, Miami, The School of Fine Arts and the League of Arts.

However, Eluard Dobal did

lopment as an artist. He decided

not follow the inner strengths

to set his own path to artistic in-

that could inuenced his deve-

dependence.

Although his paintings have only been presented in a collective exhibition in the League of Arts, and an individual exhibition at the Carnegie Library, his work has disseminated very rapidly especially among art connosieurs which has led ELuard to participate in two Latin American and Puerto Rican Art Auctions.

PAINTER

18

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

Cause in Turbulent Paintings

O

ne of the great challenges of art criticism is not to get carried away by the bourgeois prejucio we’re used to in the great works of art of art history. Criticism should be genuine and adapted to the times in which the techniques, methods and tastes have sometimes been adapted. Not only should be subject to the gaze, without any direct relationship than the analysis between the tastes and

the piece we have in front. But it is just that, is the permanent look that is sometimes contaminated by the religious theories, ideological, economic, society, aesthetics and culture in which we live. That is the reason that when a critic observes a work of art, beauty receives, reacts and thinks, but you shudder, think and analyze. And in that sincere enjoyment that can admire without prejudice and then discover

a “new creation” as Jean Bazaine would say, that’s how I recently discovered paintings Dobal Sanquirco Eluard, Puerto Rico 1948.

A critical reading of paintings puts us in touch with the creative hands of this artist, who forged a thrilling visual language, which causes and which vibrates the canvas. Own formulas appropriates abstract expressionism W.

De Kooning and the colorful poetry.

Dobal commitment to the joy in his work, which articulates a dynamism to the human body in its ultimate expression. The artist does not go to the sublime, rather than the entertaining dance is sexual, with separate strokes of knife-shaped, wide and sometimes without definition

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

19

New York Times Editorial A Clear Danger to Free Speech

By GEOFFREY R. STONE

T

HE so-called Shield bill, which was recently introduced in both houses of Congress in response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, would amend the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it a crime for any person knowingly and willfully to disseminate, “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States,” any classified information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States.”

Although this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or circulate information after it leaked. The act must be limited to the spread of classified information poses a clear and imminent danger of grave harm to the nation.

The clear and present danger standard has been a central element of our First Amendment jurisprudence ever since Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s 1919 opinion.

In the 90 years since, the meaning of “clear and present danger” evolved, but the principle was stated brilliantly by Justice Louis D. Brandeis in his 1927 concurring opinion in Whitney v. California. The founders “did not exalt order at the cost of liberty,” they understood “only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. Such ... is the command of the Constitution. It is, open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing there was no emergency justifying it.”

The First Amendment cedes to the government considerable authority to restrict the speech of its own employees. What it does not do, is allow the government to suppress free speech of others when it has failed to keep its own secrets.

Like attorney-client privilege, If a lawyer reveals client’s confidences, he can be punished for violating privilege — the newspaper cannot be punished for publishing.

Information might “prejudice interests of the United States” does not mean that that harm outweighs the benefit of publication

it may be valuable to public understanding.

Consider, classified information about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The reasons officials want secrecy range from truly compelling to patently illegitimate. It is often very tempting for government officials to overstate their need for secrecy, especially in times of national anxiety. A strict clear and present danger standard — rather than an unwieldy and unpredictable case-by-case balancing of harm against benefit — establishes a high bar to protect us against this danger.

A central principle of the First Amendment is that the suppression of free speech must be the government’s last rather than its first resort in addressing a problem. The most obvious way for the government to prevent the danger posed by the circulation of classified material is by ensuring that information that must be kept secret is not leaked in the first place.

Indeed, the Supreme Court made this point quite clearly in its 2001 decision in Bartnicki v. Vopper, which held that when an individual receives information “from a

source who obtained it unlawfully,” that individual may not be punished for disseminating “absent a need of the highest order.”

The court explained that if the sanctions now attached to the underlying criminal act “do not provide sufficient deterrence,” then perhaps they should be “made more severe” — but “it would be quite remarkable to hold” that an individual can constitutionally be punished merely for publishing information because the government failed to “deter conduct by a nonlaw-abiding third party.” This is a sound solution.

If we grant the government too much power to punish those who disseminate information, then we risk too great a sacrifice of public deliberation; if we grant the government too little power to control confidentiality at the source, then we risk too great a sacrifice of secrecy. The answer is thus to reconcile the irreconcilable values of secrecy and accountability by guaranteeing both a strong authority of the government to prohibit leaks and an expansive right of others to disseminate information to the public.

Deep Hole Economics

By PAUL KRUGMAN

T

hough we have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole.

I’ve noticed people overreacting to good economic news. What concerns me is the risk of self-denying optimism, I worry policy makers will look at a few favorable economic indicators, decide they no longer need to promote recovery, and take steps that send us sliding right back to the bottom.

So, about that good news: various economic indicators, ranging from relatively good holiday sales to new claims for unemployment insurance (which have finally fallen below 400,000 a week), suggest that the great postbubble retrenchment may finally be ending.

We’re not talking Morning in America

here. Construction shows no sign of returning to bubble-era levels, nor are there any indications that debt-burdened families are going back to their old habits of spending all they earned. But all we needed for a modest economic rebound was for construction to stop falling and saving to stop rising — and that seems to be happening. Forecasters have been marking up their predictions; growth as high as 4 percent this year now looks possible.

Hooray! But then again, not so much.

Jobs, not G.D.P. numbers, are what matter to American families. And when you start from an unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, the arithmetic of job creation — the amount of growth you need to get back to a tolerable jobs picture — is daunting.

First of all, we have to grow around 2.5 percent a year just to keep up with ri-

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sing productivity and population, and hence keep unemployment from rising. That’s why the past year and a half was technically a recovery but felt like a recession: G.D.P. was growing, but not fast enough to bring unemployment down.

Growth at a rate above 2.5 percent will bring unemployment down over time. But the gains aren’t one for one: for a variety of reasons, it has historically taken about two extra points of growth over the course of a year to shave one point off the unemployment rate.

Now do the math. Suppose that the U.S. economy were to grow at 4 percent a year, starting now and continuing for the next several years. Most people would regard this as excellent performance, even as an economic boom; it’s certainly higher than almost all the forecasts I’ve seen.

Yet the math says that even with that kind of growth the unemployment rate would be close to 9 percent at the end of this year, and still above 8 percent at the end of 2012. We wouldn’t get to anything resembling full employment until late in Sarah Palin’s first presidential term.

Seriously, what we’re looking at over the next few years, even with pretty good growth, are unemployment rates that not long ago would have been considered catastrophic — because they are. Behind those dry statistics lies a vast landscape of suffering and broken dreams. And the arithmetic says that the suffering will continue as far as the eye can see.

So what can be done to accelerate this all-too-slow process of healing? A rational political system would long since have crea-

ted a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration — we’d be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure. In the political system we have, however, Senator-elect Kelly Ayotte, delivering the Republican weekly address on New Year’s Day, declared that “Job one is to stop wasteful Washington spending.”

Realistically, the best we can hope for from fiscal policy is that Washington doesn’t actively undermine the recovery.

Beware, in particular, the Ides of March: by then, the federal government will probably have hit its debt limit and the G.O.P. will try to force President Obama into economically harmful spending cuts.

I’m also worried about monetary policy. Two months ago, the Federal Reserve announced a new plan to promote job growth by buying long-term bonds observers believed the initial $600 billion purchase was only the beginning now it looks like the end, partly because Republicans are trying to bully the Fed into pulling back, but also because a run of slightly better economic news provides an excuse to do nothing.

There’s even a significant chance that the Fed will raise interest rates later this year — or at least that’s what the futures market seems to think. Doing so in the face of high unemployment and minimal inflation would be crazy, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

So back to my original point: whatever the recent economic news, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole.

20 January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weeekly

LETTERS The Incompetent & the Useless

The Canaries Must Pay for the Catfood?

To Gov. Fortuño: The various instances of income-tax relief you procured for the season were nice.

But wasn’t that a bit hasty, I mean, with the University needing money and all? Considering that we don’t pay the Fed, but that you get plenty from Washington anyway, I’d say taxation here is outrageous, particularly with the IVU now. Yes, the $800. Everybody tells me waste by bureaucrats at La Yupi is shameless.

Might you not best fire some half of them?

To Res. Com. Pierluisi: With a smug grin you remarked in passing that everything’s getting more expensive and that UPR kids are going to have to foot the $800 and that’s that. I beg to differ.

The instant you walk onto the UPR campus you can breathe the waste and mismanagement, the so many obdurate paper pushers, so arrogant, so spiteful, so quick to dress you down, even while they’re usually wrong in their nonsense.

So not only is it undeserved injury for students to have to pick up the tab for such reckless squandering, it’s an insult. Your moocher’s errand in Washington has become second nature, but we’re only the middle class and we’re hurting.

Guillaumette Tyler, Puerta de Tierra

To Nurture the Tree of Liberty Higher education ought hardly be a prerogative available only to the privileged. Learning goes beyond economics, it’s a human right. Should Luis Fortuño be empowered to take Cervantes, Dickens, Bach, Micheangelo and Galileo away from our children and grandchildren? Just like during the Dark Ages and Herbert Hoover. If he does, it’s your fault.

Next time the students show up at Capitolio to get beaten by the police, you be there too.

If there’s enough of us, the shoe will be on the other foot. Happened at Concord and Lexington and most dramatically in Paris on July 14, 1789.

Juan Pérez, Altamira

Foolishness Is Its Own Shame The Governor’s been squawking that it’s a minority of leftists who want to hurt the University of Puerto Rico by closing it down. So he’s protecting the various campuses with a police army of occupation. Río Piedras campus is open, strikers are not permitted to keep anybody out. Yet I’m here right now. Lazaro Library, always packed on Saturdays, is deserted. The bureaucrats, who’ll grab onto any chance to shirk their duties, are leaving early or not showing up, and they’re not even on strike. There aren’t classes, there aren’t professors, there aren’t students. Everybody’s honoring the strike. Except for a handful, me included, who for one reason or another cannot afford to stay away. Bottom line is Fortuño’s wrong. The students do support the strike.

Adamantly.

Juan Pérez, Altamira

Caramelo Rodríguez, Old San Juan

Make Lemonade With the University empty of students but full of cops, teach the latter some, make use of profs, classrooms and libraries there. Appropriate themes would be anger management, Constitutional rights, dealing with the public, correct Spanish, English as a second language, defensive operation of pepper spray and tasers, how to control a crowd without beating people and responsible use of firearms. The politicians might file in and get taught civics and ethics.

Let’s get something out of the sorry quagmire our leadership have contrived in college education here.

Ding Ocho, Hato Rey

Pay the $800 Last night Titanic was on the tube again.

Funny how the mind transposes imagery. There were the UPR students in steerage obstreperously demanding the gates be opened to get out.

Couldn’t they get it through their thick skulls there weren’t enough lifeboats?

On deck in the ballroom Fortuño, Pierluisi, McClintock and Milla de Oro gentry were enjoying the finer things of life, that they’ve earned by outwitting the lumpen, who patently wouldn’t rise above their vices and indolence anyway. It’s a winner’s world, nature screams out.

Crisálida Martínez, San Juan

We Should Be in the Guiness When a riot squader with a weight-lifter build pins down a hapless UPR kid, who looks like a shrimp under him, with his knee pressing on his captive’s chest and pushing his nightstick against his chin with both arms, then torments him with electrical shocks or kicks him over and over again into the groin, can anybody say that’s not torture?

And I think Puerto Rico is the only country in the history of the world where the police have tortured people live on television. Not even Saddam Hussein or Pol Pot. Ayla Bond, Miramar

Police Cull Overpopulation To Supt. Figueroa Sancha:

Botched History & Sloppy Thinking To Robert McCarroll: If you were Puerto Rican, you’d know American history. Patrick Henry was the one who uttered, “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” Not “I am sorry that I have but one life to live.” And the accurate quote is,” I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” and that was Nathan Hale, who did “wear a mask,” he was hanged by the British for spying.

Students cover their faces not to commit crimes but to not get expelled. The UPR Code of Conduct says that when you’re accused you don’t have the right to confront witnesses against you, nor to even know who they are. It’s called the “Confidentiality Clause.” Just what you’d expect from antidemocratic penepeístas.

Piero Andujar , San Juan

Cheers! How many of those 83,000 did your men actually dispatch? Or how many left the island so they wouldn’t? But are you what Thoman Malthus had in mind?

Ana Badillo, Hato Rey

E = mc2?

Either I’m missing something or physicists on TV aren’t that clever. On Universe it was pointed out that as you approach light-speed, your mass increases to infinity, so you can’t in fact get beyond conventional speeds.

But hey! You have to balance the equation. So as mass bloats infinitely, so must energy, meaning there should be no problem. Note, however, this also shows you can blow up the earth with a simple firecracker, provided it’s moving fast enough.

Agustín Manzano , San Juan

The San Juan Weeekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

21

LETTERS Police Extra-Constitutionality The police lieutenant who kicked a student his men were holding down into the groin again and again, live on TV, retired last week. Police Supt. Figueroa Sancha announced it wasn’t because of what he’d done. The Puerto Rico Police, after all, disregard the Bill of Rights of our Constitution and of the Constitution of the United States, specifically where it says citizens have the right to be secure in their persons and that any punishment may only happen after due process of law, meaning a court, not enraged guardias.

Ana Montes, Las Lomas

Standing Army

and slothful bureaucrats. But when it comes to a fight all the money in the world is there.

Stop stepping on those kids. Forget the $800. Crushing the middle class will only mean an inferno of crime and unrest. The rich won’t get the chance to enjoy their booty. We won’t return to the 19th century.

Lisa Bay, Caparra Heights

To Mr. Aragón: You’ve been hitting on UPR students since last April. You even said violence against them is okay. Were you ever a college student?

I’d guess not, as per all the nonsense and bile you spew never-endingly. It looks like you’re just a mean old man.

Samaria Salcedo, Caparra Hts.

Flip Side of a Happening Past

Guerre 1939-1945. Paris sous l’occupation.

Défilé allemand sur les Champs-Elysées.

Today the cops were horseback riding through the empty UPR-Río Piedras campus.

They were having the time of their lives. What happens to a person when a horse kicks them in the head? And have you seen that pic of German troops marching under the Arch of Triumph in Paris circa 1940?

Loud morons infest every generation. History tells us the Vietnam War was wrong, and that 59K GIs and 2M Vietnamese perished in it. Died for nothihg. We the young protested, and threw rocks even. Here we burned down the ROTC and in the States we took over Columbia Univerwsity even and four of us were murdered at Kent State and Antonia Martínez here. Yet Johnson and Nixon rattled we were nothing but long-haired bearded scruffy hippies who just wanted to make trouble and we ought to be put in our place. Thousands of brainless voices parroted the line all over, particularly on our more-popish-that-the-pope colonial island polity.

The UPR student strike fells all déjà vu.

Though it’s not lives at stake and ideology is out of the equation. Yet one hears the irresponsible self-righteous oldsters ranting. If they’d stop to think, they’d realize they’re siding with the bad guys, hurting Puerto Rico, fouling up our future.

Agustín Manzano, San Juan

Danilo Alvarez, Hato Rey

Religion: “Magi (from Old Persian): a title for Zoroastrian priests.” The Catholic Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion: “magi, a Persian priestly class...the Magi identified themselves with Zoroaster and his doctrines”. Immediately any speculation about kings of Ethiopia or Arabia, to whose confines Zoroastrianism never spread, being a national, and non-proseletizing religion, would hardly serve as a source of Magi. No, it couldn’t be simpler: The Magi came from Persia, the only land of Zoroastrianism. They were not kings, but high priests. The Magi were following, not Biblical references to a Jewish Messiah, but rather their own Holy Text, the Zend Avesta, where Zoroaster promised that when His religion ultimately waned in Persia, a star would appear in the heavens; they were to follow that star to find Him, Returned. There’s your motivation for their veneration, and for undertaking such an arduous journey to a foreign culture practicing a foreign religion. Spanish-speakers are even more confused, since there is no word to distinguish Magus from magician, and the term “reyes magos” is terribly misleading.

Tommy Kavelin, Condado

Tonsils, Physicians & Outrage Indeed it’s the job of tonsils to get infected, like it’s a soldier’s to get shot at, all so you’ll be safe. When I was a young child a doctor figured he’d best get to charge for what my tonsils were doing for free. He told my mother tonsils were a useless vestige, that all they were was a nuisance and were best pulled out. And parents trust physicians, don’t they? Years of throat infections followed and finally asthma, undefended lungs attempting to fortress themselves through inflamation. Yes, doctors made a pretty penny off us, I’m still paying.

And the politicians continue in the shirt pockets of the fiends in white. It’s the shame of the United States---and of penepeísta Puerto Rico---that our very bodies are allowed to be used to hurt us and rob from us.

Joaquín Serrano, Condado

Can Afford War, But Not Peace

The Simple Truth about the Three Wise Men

What about the $1.5M UPR paid Capitol Security? Who couldn’t do the job and then Ana Guadapupe called in the police, after vehemently promising she wouldn’t. And the cost of all those cops and the National Guard and the missed classes and the legal expenses?

All because the UPR is broke because they squander every penny on useless paperwork

Regarding your December 30, 2010 article “Did Three Wise-Men Really Visit Infant Jesus?”, why all the hand-wringing about their identity and place of origin?

I quote from wordreference.com: magus (plural magi): a member of a priestly class of ancient Persia. Harper Collins Dictionary of

Ahead to the Past What’ll penepeísta Puerto Rico be like a generation hence? No middle class to speak of, public higher education a forlorn memory, hand-to-mouth labor and a pampered gentry making believe it’s the 19th century all over again. Would Uncle Sam then want us as a state? I should hope not.

Bob Harris, Condado

Kitchen

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January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Deflating All Doubts About the Soufflé

By MARK BITTMAN

A

SAVORY soufflé is a welcome and unusual main course, but the very idea of it strikes fear in the hearts of even some accomplished home cooks.

And while much of the anxiety surrounding this dish is unwarranted, it’s undeniably fussy and intimidating. However, soufflés will always rise when prepared correctly. And they do eventually fall — they’re supposed to.

Traditional savory soufflés rely on a béchamel sauce, itself enough to guarantee you’re never going to make one on a weeknight.

Enter the mock soufflé, filled with shortcuts that make this dish far less intimidating. This approach eliminates that sauce, using just eggs and cheese for the custard.

To keep the soufflé as light as possible, the zucchini is grated (the food processor makes short work of this), and then cooked with onion

and garlic until it’s really soft, almost melting. (If there’s liquid in the pan when you’re done, drain it to further lighten the mixture.)

From this point, the process is like making a cake: you whisk the egg yolks and cheese together in one bowl and the whites in another.

The whites should be light, fluffy and foamy, and they should hold soft peaks — you’ll know them when you see them. (Don’t let any of the yolk get into the whites or else none of this will happen.)

At this point, everything is combined, with the whites added gradually and gently so that they’re deflated as little as possible, and then baked.

I like to do the soufflés individually, but you can make one big one.

In any case, they’ll become golden and puffy. They’ll begin to deflate in a couple of minutes, but if you get them to the table immediately, the drama will take place there, not in the kitchen.

Zucchini Soufflé Time: 1 hour 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 cup olive oil 1 large onion, chopped 1 teaspoon minced garlic 2 to 3 medium zucchini, grated Salt and freshly ground black pepper 6 eggs, separated 8 ounces Gruyère cheese, grated 1/4 cup parsley, chopped.

1. Butter four 1 1/2 -cup ramekins or one 6-cup soufflé dish. Heat the oven to 325 degrees. Put the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; when it’s hot, add the onion and garlic and cook until soft, 5 to 8 minutes. Add the zucchini, season with salt and pepper, and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until very tender, another 10 to 12 minutes.

If you prefer, substitute a 10-ounce bag of spinach, chopped and cooked the same way.

Drain the vegetables if there is excess liquid, and let cool.

2. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks and cheese with some salt and pepper. Add the vegetables and parsley and stir. In a clean, dry bowl, beat the egg whites until they are light and fluffy and just hold soft peaks; stir about a third of the whites into the yolk mixture to lighten it, then gently fold in the remaining whites, trying not to deflate them much.

3. Pour the soufflé mixture into the ramekins or dish. Bake until golden and puffy, 30 to 35 minutes and serve immediately.

Yield: 4 servings.

January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

23

Kitchen

For Seafood on a Budget, Just Add Pasta

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

W

hile researching the cooking of Sicily some years ago, I spent an afternoon with a chef who had a small restaurant in Palermo, where I watched him take a single piece of tuna and turn it into a pasta sauce that fed four of us. Mediterranean cooks have a knack for making meals from small amounts of animal protein. Italians often accomplish this by combining pasta and seafood.

Health experts keep telling us to eat more fish, but fish can be pricey. If

you love seafood and you’re trying to eat more of it, this week’s pasta dishes provide a solution. The amount you’ll need is about half what you’d buy if you were serving seafood on its own. Even better, most of these dishes also incorporate vegetables, making for perfect one-dish meals.

And they’re easy: usually the fish accompaniment takes no more time to make than it takes to boil the pasta water. Most of this week’s recipes call for fresh fish and shellfish, but you can also use canned varieties high in omega-3 fats, like sardines, smoked trout and smoked herring.

Penne With Arugula and Clams

T

his is an adaptation of another recipe that I learned from Clifford A. Wright. In Apulia, part of southeastern Italy, arugula is cooked like a green as well as eaten raw in salads.

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 2 large garlic cloves, minced 1/2 pound arugula, coarsely chopped if the leaves are large, rinsed 1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes 3/4 pound penne rigata 32 manila clams, washed well 2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley or basil Salt and freshly ground pepper if desired 1. Begin heating a large pot of generously salted water for the pasta.

2. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large, flameproof casserole or Dutch oven. Add the garlic, arugula and chile flakes.

Cook, stirring, until the arugula wilts, three to five minutes.

3. Turn up the heat to high under the casserole, add the clams, cover tightly and steam until they open, three to five minutes. Add the parsley or basil, stir the mixture, taste and season as desired. Turn off the heat, and return the lid to the pot.

4. Cook the pasta al dente, following timing instructions on the package but checking a minute before the indicated time. Add 1/4 cup of the pasta cooking water to the pan with the arugula and clams. Drain the pasta, toss with the arugula and clam mixture, and serve.

Yield: Serves four.

Advance preparation: This is a last-minute dish that can be finished in the time it takes to boil water for the pasta.

Nutritional information per serving: 478 calories; 10 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 39 milligrams cholesterol; 69 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 88 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 27 grams protein

Pasta With Beet Greens and Tuna

T

his is an adaptation of a wonderful recipe for orecchiette with beet leaves, tuna and olives that I came across on Clifford A. Wright’s impressive Web site. Beet greens are readily available at this time of year at your local farmers’ market.

Greens from 1 bunch of beets, stemmed, washed in two changes of water (about 3 cups greens) 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 2 anchovy fillets, rinsed and chopped 2 garlic cloves, minced 1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes (optional) 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley Salt and freshly ground pepper 1 5-1/2-ounce can tuna packed in olive oil, drained 3/4 pound orecchiette, fusilli or farfalle 1/4 cup (1 ounce) grated pecorino or parmesan (optional) 1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil, and salt generously. Fill a bowl with ice water. Add the beet greens and blanch for one minute. Without draining the water, remove the greens with a skimmer or a slotted spoon and transfer to the ice water. Cool for a minute, then drain and squeeze out excess water. Chop coarsely. Keep the water in the pot at a simmer.

2. Heat the oil over medium heat in a large, wide skillet. Add the anchovies, garlic and red chile flakes.

Cook for 30 seconds to a minute until fragrant, crushing the anchovies with

the back of your spoon. Stir in the beet greens and parsley. Stir together for a minute or two until the greens are nicely seasoned and coated with oil.

Turn off the heat, add the tuna and stir together, breaking up the tuna with your spoon. Taste and season if desired with salt and pepper (I find the anchovies and red pepper flakes to be sufficient seasoning).

3. Bring the water in the pot back to a boil. Add the pasta. Cook al dente, following the timing instructions on the package but checking about a minute before the indicated time. Add 1/4 cup of the pasta cooking water to the pan with the beet green mixture.

Drain the pasta, and toss with the beet greens and tuna. Sprinkle with the cheese, toss again and serve.

Yield: Serves four.

Advance preparation: I usually blanch my beet greens after I’ve returned from the market. They will keep for about four days in the refrigerator.

Nutritional information per serving (without the cheese): 545 calories; 16 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 28 milligrams cholesterol; 66 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 456 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 32 grams protein Nutritional information per serving (with the cheese): 575 calories; 18 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 35 milligrams cholesterol; 67 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 564 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 35 grams protein

Kitchen

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January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Penne With Swordfish or Tuna and Tomato Sauce

T

he sauce here is a sort of fish ragout common throughout Sicily and Southern Italy. In summer, use fresh tomatoes, but you can make it now with canned.

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 pound swordfish or tuna steaks, skinned and cut in approximately 1/2-inch dice Salt and freshly ground pepper 1/2 cup dry white wine (optional) 1 small onion, finely chopped 2 to 4 garlic cloves (to taste), minced 1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes (optional) 2 anchovy fillets, finely chopped 1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes, with juice, or 2 pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and diced or grated 1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley 1 pound penne 1. Begin heating a large pot of water for the pasta.

2. Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large, heavy nonstick skillet, and add the onion. Cook, stirring, until the tender, about five minutes. Turn the heat to mediumhigh. Add the garlic, red chile flakes, anchovies and diced swordfish or tuna. Season with salt and pepper.

Cook, stirring, until the fish changes color slightly, about two minutes.

Add the wine, bring to a boil and continue to cook for two minutes

while stirring. Then, using a slotted spoon, remove the fish and transfer to a bowl. Continue to boil the liquid in the pan until it has reduced to a couple of tablespoons.

3. Add the tomatoes to the pan, and bring to a simmer. Cook, stirring often, for 15 minutes until they have cooked down slightly and smell fragrant. Stir the fish back into the pan, add the parsley and season the mixture to taste with salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer, and simmer 10 minutes until the sauce is thick and fragrant. Taste, and adjust seasonings.

4. Bring the pasta water to a boil, and salt generously. Add the penne and cook al dente, eight to nine minutes or according to the timing directions on the package. Add 1/4 to 1/2 cup of the pasta cooking water to the fish ragout, and stir well. Drain the pasta, toss with the sauce in the pan or in a pasta bowl, and serve.

Yield: Serves six.

Advance preparation: The fish ragout can be made a few hours before you’re ready to cook the pasta.

Refrigerate, then reheat gently.

Nutritional information per serving: 445 calories; 9 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 29 milligrams cholesterol; 65 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 330 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 26 grams protein

Linguine With Red Clam Sauce

A

classic dish that has been popular in Italian-American restaurants for decades, this dish can be made with a light hand, as it is here.

32 Littleneck or Cherrystone clams, or 40 Manila clams, cleaned and rinsed 2 fat garlic cloves, minced, plus 1 clove, crushed 1/2 cup dry white wine 1 dried chile pepper 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes 1 (14-ounce) can chopped tomatoes, with juice Salt and freshly ground pepper 3/4 pound linguine 1/4 cup chopped flat leaf parsley 1. Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil for the pasta. Meanwhile, in a wide skillet over high heat, combine the crushed garlic clove, the white wine and the chile. Bring to a boil, and add the clams. Cover and cook four to six minutes, shaking the pan from time to time, until the clams open up. Remove from the heat, and remove the clams from the pan with tongs. Allow them to cool, then remove them from their shells, holding them over the pan to catch the juices. Rinse briefly to rid them of any lingering sand, then cut in half or chop coarsely and set aside. Strain the liquid

in the pan into a bowl through a cheesecloth-lined strainer.

2. Heat the olive oil over medium-high heat in the pan in which you cooked the clams. Add the minced garlic and the red chile flakes. Cook, stirring, just until fragrant, about 30 seconds to a minute. Add the tomatoes and their juice. Cook, stirring often, for five to 10 minutes until the tomatoes have slightly cooked down. Add the broth from the clams, and bring to a simmer. Taste, and add salt and freshly ground pepper as needed. Keep at a simmer while you cook the linguine.

3. When the pasta water comes to a rolling boil, add the pasta. Cook al dente following the timing directions on the package but checking about a minute before the indicated time. Drain the pasta, and add to the pan with the clams and parsley. Toss together and serve.

Yield: Serves four.

Advance preparation: You can make this through Step 2 an hour or two before you cook the pasta. Reheat gently, and proceed with the recipe.

Nutritional information per serving: 495 calories; 9 grams fat; 1 gram saturated fat; 39 milligrams cholesterol; 72 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 232 milligrams sodium (does not include salt added during preparation); 27 grams protein

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

25

The Enigmatic First Chinese Emperor Q

in Shi Huang (259 BC – September 10, 210 BC), given name Yíng Zhèng, was king of the Chinese State of Qin from 247 BCE to 221 BCE. He became the first emperor of a unified China in 221 BCE. He ruled until his death in 210 BCE, calling himself the First Emperor. The given name was never used except by close relatives. As a ruler, he was referred to as the “King of Qin”. He was known for the introduction of Legalism and also for unifying China.

Reign of Qinshihuang Qin Shi Huang remains a controversial figure in Chinese history.

After unifying China, he and his chief adviser Li Si passed a series of major reforms meant to preserve unification. Together, they undertook gigantic projects, including the first version of the current Great Wall of China, the now famous city-sized mausoleum guarded by a life-sized Terracotta Army, and a massive national road system, all at the expense of many lives. To ensure stability, Qin Shi Huang outlawed Confucianism and is purported to have buried alive many of its scholars. All books other than those officially decreed were banned and burned.

Despite the tyranny of his autocratic rule, Qin Shi Huang is regarded as a pivotal figure in Chinese history whose unification of China has endured for more than two thousand years.

At the time of the young

Zheng’s birth, China was divided into antagonistic feudal states, so this era of Chinese history is referred to as the Warring States Period.

The competition was extremely fierce and by 260 BCE there were only a handful of states left, including Zheng’s state, Qin, which was the most powerful. It was governed by a Legalist government and focused earnestly on military matters. Zheng was born in Handan, the capital of the enemy State of Zhao, so he had the name Zhao Zheng. He was the son of Zichu, a prince of the royal house of Qin who served as a hostage in the State of Zhao under an agreement between the states of Qin and Zhao. Zichu later returned to Qin after many adventures and with the help of a rich merchant called Lü Buwei, and he managed to ascend the throne of Qin, Lü Buwei becoming chancellor (prime minister) of Qin. According to a widespread story, Zheng was not the actual son of Zichu, but the son of the powerful chancellor Lü Buwei. This tale arose because Zheng’s mother had originally been a concubine of Lü Buwei before he gave her to his good friend Zichu shortly before Zheng’s birth.

Zheng ascended the throne in 245 BCE at the age of 13, and was king under a regent until 238 BCE when, at the age of 21 and a half, he staged a palace coup and assumed full power. Contrary to the accepted rules of war of the time, he ordered the execution of prisoners of war.

He continued the tradition of tena-

ciously attacking and defeating the feudal states and finally took control of the whole of China in 221 BCE by defeating the last independent Chinese state, the State of Qi. Then in that same year, at the age of 38, the king of Qin proclaimed himself First Emperor of the unified states of China, making him the most powerful man in China.

Qin Shi Huang commanded all the members of the former royal houses of the conquered states to move to Xianyang, the capital of Qin, in modern day Shaanxi province, so they could be kept under tight surveillance for rebellious activities.

Qin Shi Huang also ordered most previously existing books burned, excepting some medical and agricultural texts held in the palace archives.

Qin Shi Huang and Li Si unified China economically by standardizing the Chinese units of measurements such as weights and measures, the currency, the length of the axles of carts (so every cart could run smoothly in the ruts of the new roads), the legal system, and so on.

The emperor also developed an extensive network of roads and canals connecting the provinces to improve trade between them and to accelerate military marches to revolting provinces. Perhaps most importantly, the Chinese script was unified. Under Li Si, the seal script of the state of Qin, which had already evolved organically during the Eastern Zhou out of the Zhou dynasty script, was

standardized through removal of variant forms within the Qin script itself. This newly standardized script was then made official throughout all the conquered regions, thus doing away with all the regional scripts and becoming the official script for all of China. Contrary to popular belief, Li Si did not invent the script, nor was it completely new at the time. Edicts written in the new script were carved on the walls of sacred mountains around China, such as the famous carved edicts of Mount Taishan, to let Heaven know of the unification of Earth under an emperor, and also

Continues on page 26

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Comes from page 25 to propagate the new script among people.

Qin Shi Huang continued military expansion during his reign, an nexing regions to the south (what is now Guangdong province was penetrated by Chinese armies for the first time) and fighting nomadic tribes to the north and northwest.

These tribes (the Xiongnu) were subdued, but the campaign was essentially inconclusive, and to prevent the Xiongnu from encroaching on the northern frontier any longer, the emperor ordered the construction of an immense defensive wall, linking several walls already existing since the time of the Warring States. This wall, for whose construction hundreds of thousands of men were mobilized, and an unknown number died, is a precursor of the current Great Wall of China. It was built much further north than the current Great Wall, which was built during the Ming Dynasty, and when more than a century was devoted to

January 13 - 19, 2011

building the wall Very little survives today of the great wall built by the First Emperor.

Later in his life, Qin Shi Huang feared death and desperately sought the fabled elixir of life, visiting Zhifu Island several times in order to achieve this end. He even sent a Zhifu islander Xu Fu with ships carrying hundreds of young men and women in search of Mount Penglai, where the Eight Immortals lived.

These people never returned, because they knew that if they returned without the promised elixir, they would surely be executed. Legends claim that they settled down on one of the Japanese islands, a view that many Chinese and Japanese people are familiar with today.

The emperor often took tours of major cities in his empire to inspect the efficiency of the bureaucracy and to symbolize the presence of Qin’s prestige.

The reason of Qingshihuang death

The emperor died while on one of his tours of Eastern China, on September 10, 210 BCE at the palace in Shaqiu, about two months away by road from the capital Xianyang.

Reportedly, he died of swallowing mercury (poison)pills, made by his court scientists and doctors, which contained too much mercury. Ironically, these pills were meant to make Qin Shi Huang immortal. The “theory”, devised by alchemists, was that if mercury could even absorb gold, then if eaten, it would give that person its own powers, making him immortal. Mercury compounds were mixed with some food so as to make it edible.

Prime Minister Li Si, who accompanied him, was extremely worried that the news of his death could trigger a general uprising in the empire, given the brutal policies of the government, and the resentment of the population forced to work on Herculean projects such as the Great Wall in Northern China or the mausoleum of the emperor.

It would take two months for the government to reach the capital, and it would not be possible to stop the uprising. Li Si decided to hide the death of the emperor, and return to Xianyang. Most of the imperial entourage accompanying the emperor was left uninformed of the emperor’s death, and each day Li Si entered the wagon where the emperor was supposed to be traveling in, pretending to discuss affairs of state.

The secretive nature of the emperor while he was alive allowed this stratagem to work, and it did not raise doubts among his courtiers. Li Si also ordered that two carts containing rotten fish be carried immediately before and after the wagon of the emperor. The idea behind this

The San Juan Weekly was to prevent people from noticing the foul smell emanating from the wagon of the emperor, where his body was starting to decompose severely.

Mausoleum of Qinshihuang Qin Shi Huang was buried in his mausoleum. Located approximately 30 km outside of the presentday capital, X’ian of the Shaanxi province of modern China, the tomb remains a symbol of the infinite power and ego of China’s first Emperor. The Chinese historian Sima Qian, writing a century after the First Emperor’s death, wrote that it took 700,000 men to construct it.

The British historian John Man points out that this figure is larger than any city of the world at that time and calculates that the foundations could have been built by 16,000 men in two years. Sima Qian’s description of the tomb includes replicas of palaces and scenic towers, ‘rare utensils and wonderful objects’, 100 rivers made with mercury, representations of ‘the heavenly bodies’, and crossbows rigged to shoot anyone who tried to break in.

Recently discovered in 1974 by Chinese peasants who were drilling a well, the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi proved to be one of the greatest archaeological finds in both historical importance and in sheer physical bulk. Archaeologists were uncertain when the excavations began of the great magnitude of this site. The although the tomb itself is, according to legend, very elaborate and beautiful, the center piece of Shi Huangdi’s mausoleum is the terra-cotta army of approximately 8,000 life-sized men and horses.

January 13 - 19, 2011

San Juan Weekly

27

modern love

We Should Dance While We Can

By JENNY BROWNE

W

E have reached that recognizable wedding-reception moment when the D.J. queues up “Brown Eyed Girl,” the groom’s great-aunt grinds down to the floor in her silk pantsuit, and then needs a lift up. The caterers have replenished the empty steam trays with cheeseburger sliders, and the bridesmaids have removed their shoes. Anything could happen.

I’ve got two little brown-eyed girls back at home, a sitter who can stay until 1 a.m., and their father, Scott, standing next to me in his seersucker suit. I married him nearly a decade ago in this same chapel on the shady grounds of the Southwest School of Art, tucked along a slow curve of the San Antonio River.

“Come on,” I say. “We should dance while we can.”

Our own wedding reception was held in the garden, but my father managed to sneak upstairs and out onto the balcony, where he raised a flute of Champagne.

An old-school WASP physician from the Midwest who would later endure both of my homebirths, he’d nonetheless had just about enough of the collectivist vibe of our wedding: a banjo processional, a woman preacher in cowboy boots, a Paul Éluard poem read in its original French, and me, walking through the grass in a ponytail, holding both his hand and my mother’s.

The time had come for him to make sure everyone knew who was paying for this free-flowing love.

“I’m the father of the bride,” he boomed. Later, he gulped a few of the halffinished mimosas that had been left on the patio, muttering, “Each one of those looks like a five-dollar bill flying away.”

Wynn, Scott’s only brother, was there

too. A practicing Buddhist and perpetually underemployed English major, he could recite “Green Eggs and Ham” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from memory. His other party trick involved nauseating contortions of his double-jointed elbows and knees. During the ceremony he’d given a little speech about the Buddhist concept of sangha, which can refer to a gathering of like-minded people coming together in support of a common idea, our marriage in this case. The rings were passed until everyone had touched them, and then returned to us, warm.

Six years later I was on the University of Texas campus, eight months pregnant and waddling out of a graduate school workshop on prose poems, when I got the first phone call: my father, saying that the dye test used to see whether a melanoma found on his chest was spreading to his lymph system had come back clear.

“Well, Niffer,” he said, “I’d say we dodged a bullet.”

Less than an hour later, as I headed home to San Antonio on I-35, my cellphone buzzed again. This time it was my husband, his voice soft with disbelief, saying they’d found Wynn in his apartment in the Montrose neighborhood of Houston.

“Found him how?” I said, confused, or at least hoping I was.

The signal dropped before he could reply. I set the phone on the passenger seat, then looked at it when it shuddered back to life, an insect I wasn’t eager to pick up. For 37 years, Wynn had slept with a stuffed Paddington Bear. His friend found the bear with him in bed where he’d swallowed a bottle of antidepressants.

This was not his first struggle with staying here on earth, only his last.

Dad was dead less than a year later, the tumors that no one could see like

ghosts filling his lungs, liver and brain.

The last time I saw him alive, we ate enchiladas and drank margaritas on the River Walk. He piled on the fire-roasted salsa despite the ravage a last-ditch bio-chemo protocol was wreaking on his intestines.

His familiar claim that he wasn’t hungry, followed by his subsequent scavenge of everyone else’s plate, made the day seem almost normal.

But as we stood to leave he stared at the bill, his brain unable to remember how to calculate a tip. Later, at the airport, he struggled to get out of the passenger seat of my Subaru, stumbling backward, grabbing for the door, which then shut hard on his fingers, trapping them. He looked at me, eyes desperate.

The prose poem we read in class that day when good news and bad collided inside my car was Kafka’s parable about the leopards that break into the temple and “drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers.” They do this so many times that it becomes expected, and is made a part of the ceremony.

Our wedding ceremony wasn’t what my father expected, but his mimosaslurping frugality was classic. Wynn’s behavior was also classic for him: he drew a crowd, looping his leg around his neck, reciting, “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky.”

In truth, two hours with my brother-inlaw was about all I could stand, while my father — impatient, sappy and often sexist — could do little wrong. Their most predictable behaviors were like leopards in the ceremony of their beings, in sickness and health, for better and worse.

When I pulled into our driveway, some 70 miles after getting those two calls, all of the lights were on. The deep orange tint of the living-room walls made the room glow warmly, but I didn’t want to get out of the car. A random memory of debating about paint swatches — Sandstone, Sandbar, Saltillo — flashed through my head. That’s the kind of decision I’m good at making quickly, without looking back. But I didn’t hesitate to say yes to marriage either.

I loved Scott. My life felt bigger with him in it. We drove out to the Hill Country for the weekend and wrote vows that included funny bits about who would make the coffee, and feed the cat, and not lose their keys, but we didn’t actually say for better or for worse, or discuss what we’d do when better became worse. Had I allowed myself to believe we’d be exempt from the hard parts?

Scott was sitting at the kitchen table.

He pressed his wet face into my belly, and I felt myself flinch, wishing I could protect the baby, all three of us really, from this, but knowing I couldn’t. Then I made some

nachos, and we ate them straight out of the pan.

That baby is 4 now, and we talk to her about my father, and about Wynn, knowing all she will remember are stories.

We don’t talk about Scott tracing dead-end e-mail trails night after night, researching mental illness, raging at his lost brother and at me, digging futilely for answers.

We don’t tell her how we stopped talking as my own grief wound tight, leaving me drinking Johnnie Walker and smoking Natural Spirits on the back porch, part tribute and part giving the finger to my father’s 35 years as a lung doctor and dying on me anyway. How for a long while I decided that not feeling anything was easier than loving someone, knowing you could lose him at any moment.

When we finally reach the bride and groom at the end of the receiving line, it doesn’t seem appropriate to share these thoughts prowling around in my brain, to say, “Congratulations on all you’ve found together, and all you now have to lose.

Congratulations, this may be the best and worst day of your life, all wrapped into one. And some days you won’t be able to tell the difference.”

I don’t say it, but I think it. And I don’t feel bad for thinking it. I hope that naming the mix of fear and joy I feel at weddings doesn’t mean I’m trashing the temple. Inviting these leopards into the sangha feels like one way to name them, and maybe set them free.

We spent our wedding night at the Gage Hotel in Marathon, and we’ll go back in a few months, 10 years to the day. Looking around the dance floor I see people who used to be married to other people.

I also see the people they used to be married to, and others trying hard to stay married to each other. I can’t explain why one union works and another doesn’t, and I won’t try. Somehow I’m still standing here, holding my husband’s hand.

One night, wanting to be led around the two-stepping dance floor at Gruene Hall, tearful and full of Shiner Bock, I shouted at Scott, “Is this how it’s always going to be?”

We laugh about it now, my default to the worst-case scenario, the leopard in my logic. If we’ve learned one thing, it’s that no moment, good or bad, is how it’s always going to be. Sometimes he dances.

Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes the voices we miss most are the only ones we can hear, calling us out into the night, filling the darkness with howls. And sometimes they quiet a little, gratefully, right about when Van Morrison starts singing, “Hey, where did we go? Days when the rains came...”

For better or worse, we all know this song. We might as well dance.

modern love

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January 13 - 19, 2011

San Juan Weekly

The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage

By TARA PARKER-POPE

A

lasting marriage does not always signal a happy marriage. Plenty of miserable couples have stayed together for children, religion or other practical reasons.

But for many couples, it’s just not enough to stay together. They want a relationship that is meaningful and satisfying. In short, they want a sustainable marriage.

“The things that make a marriage last have more to do with communication skills, mental health, social support, stress — those are the things that allow it to last or not,” says Arthur Aron, a psychology professor who directs the Interpersonal Relationships Laboratory at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “But those things don’t necessarily make it meaningful or enjoyable or sustaining to the individual.”

The notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first?

Not anymore. For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself. But in modern relationships, people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who died last January, called it the “Michelangelo effect,” referring to the manner in which close partners “sculpt” each other in ways that help each of them attain valued goals.

Dr. Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, have studied how individuals use a relationship to accumulate knowledge and experiences, a process called “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

To measure this, Dr. Lewandowski developed a series of ques-

tions for couples: How much has being with your partner resulted in your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? (Take the full quiz measuring self-expansion.)

While the notion of self-expansion may sound inherently self-serving, it can lead to stronger, more sustainable relationships, Dr. Lewandowski says.

“If you’re seeking self-growth

and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position,” he explains. “And being able to help your partner’s self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself.”

The concept explains why people are delighted when dates treat them to new experiences, like a weekend away. But self-expansion isn’t just about exotic experiences. Individuals experience personal growth through their partners in big and small ways. It happens when they introduce new friends, or casually talk about a new restaurant or a fascinating story in the news.

The effect of self-expansion is particularly pronounced when people first fall in love. In research at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 325 undergraduate students were given questionnaires five times over 10 weeks. They were asked, “Who are you today?” and given three minutes to describe themselves. They were also asked about recent experiences, including whether they had fallen in love.

After students reported falling in love, they used more varied words in their self-descriptions.

The new relationships had literally

broadened the way they looked at themselves.

“You go from being a stranger to including this person in the self, so you suddenly have all of these social roles and identities you didn’t have before,” explains Dr. Aron, who co-authored the research. “When people fall in love that happens rapidly, and it’s very exhilarating.”

Over time, the personal gains from lasting relationships are often subtle. Having a partner who is funny or creative adds something new to someone who isn’t. A partner who is an active community volunteer creates new social opportunities for a spouse who spends long hours at work.

Additional research suggests that spouses eventually adopt the traits of the other — and become slower to distinguish differences between them, or slower to remember which skills belong to which spouse.

In experiments by Dr. Aron, participants rated themselves and their partners on a variety of traits, like “ambitious” or “artistic.” A week later, the subjects returned to the lab and were shown the list of traits and asked to indicate which ones described them.

People responded the quickest to traits that were true of both them and their partner. When the trait described only one person, the answer came more slowly. The delay was measured in milliseconds, but nonetheless suggested that when individuals were particularly clo-

se to someone, their brains were slower to distinguish between their traits and those of their spouses.

“It’s easy to answer those questions if you’re both the same,” Dr. Lewandowski explains. “But if it’s just true of you and not of me, then I have to sort it out. It happens very quickly, but I have to ask myself, ‘Is that me or is that you?’ ” It’s not that these couples lost themselves in the marriage; instead, they grew in it. Activities, traits and behaviors that had not been part of their identity before the relationship were now an essential part of how they experienced life.

All of this can be highly predictive for a couple’s long-term happiness. One scale designed by Dr. Aron and colleagues depicts seven pairs of circles. The first set is side by side. With each new set, the circles begin to overlap until they are nearly on top of one another.

Couples choose the set of circles that best represents their relationship. In a 2009 report in the journal Psychological Science, people bored in their marriages were more likely to choose the more separate circles.

Partners involved in novel and interesting experiences together were more likely to pick one of the overlapping circles and less likely to report boredom. “People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says.

“If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”

January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

29

PEOPLE

After Acquittal, Player Gets His Senior Season and Life Back

By DAN FROSCH

M

ontana ’s Jimmy Wilson hurled himself into the quarterback with such ferocity that it sent the player’s helmet flying. It was in that moment, against Cal Poly in the second game of the season, that Wilson knew he could still play football.

There were plenty of sleepless nights in jail when he had imagined what it would be like to hit someone again on the field, as he had done for three seasons as a shutdown cornerback for the Grizzlies.

But there he stayed, locked away for murder, his college career seemingly finished and his dreams of the N.F.L. ruined.

More than three years had elapsed since Wilson was arrested for shooting to death his aunt’s boyfriend during an argument on a June night in 2007, before his senior year at Montana.

He had spent much of that time behind bars. Though he maintained his innocence, it did not help that he had left the scene and driven from California to Montana. After a first trial ended with a hung jury, with all but one juror finding Wilson not guilty, a second jury acquitted him on July 9, 2009.

In November, at 24, Wilson played his final game for Montana after returning for his senior season. It has been a bitter road

back.

“Some things have happened in my life that nobody is ever going to be able to say happened to them,” Wilson said during a recent interview at a friend’s apartment here. “I’m a slim percent.”

Wilson was a star running back and safety at Point Loma High School in San Diego who earned a full scholarship to Montana, a power in the Football Championship Subdivision. At 17, he found himself in Missoula, a world away from the poor neighborhood in which he grew up.

A tireless worker with an easygoing charm, the 5-foot-11, 190-pound Wilson tackled with an aggressiveness that raised eyebrows. His hits seemed to carry the heaviness of a hard childhood, one in which his mother worked as a secretary, his father drifted in and out of prison and his best friend was murdered in a shooting.

“It’s not often as a coach that you have to hold a kid back from being physical, but with Jimmy you had to hold him back,” said Mike Hudson, Montana’s linebackers coach.

“He was one of the fiercest — if not the fiercest — competitor I have ever coached.”

Wilson played in every Grizzlies game as a freshman. As a junior, he was a secondteam all-Big Sky Conference pick. He was poised to lead the defense heading into his final season.

“He was going to be the guy that

made the play that helped you win games,” said Tim Hauck, a former secondary coach at Montana now with the Tennessee Titans.

“You looked at him and you thought this kid may get an N.F.L. shot.”

A Bad Decision

On June 2, 2007, Wilson and a teammate, Qwenton Freeman, were driving to Montana for the team’s first preseason meeting of the year. Along the way, they stopped at Wilson’s grandmother’s house in Lancaster, north of Los Angeles, planning to make it a quick visit.

During dinner, the phone rang. It was Wilson’s aunt, Opal Davis, who lived

nearby. Davis, who at 26 was close to Wilson, tearfully told his grandmother that her boyfriend, Kevin Smoot, had gotten drunk, beat her and urinated on her.

“I told my grandmother, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll go get my aunt,’ ” Wilson recalled saying. “I thought I could go get her and their two young kids and be out of there.”

According to Wilson, when he arrived at the house, Smoot emerged from the garage, drunk and yelling at him to leave. Wilson backed away, thinking he saw Smoot clutching something. As the two argued,

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PEOPLE

30 January 13 - 19, 2011

Comes from page 39 Smoot drew a small rifle, Wilson said.

“My aunt screams,” Wilson said.

“There was a split second and, boom, I grabbed the gun. We were wrestling over the gun and I hear a pop.”

Wilson sprinted toward his car thinking Smoot was shooting at him. He sped off. Glancing back, he saw Smoot’s body on the ground and his aunt screaming.

Wilson left for Montana that night. It was a bad decision, he conceded. But Wilson said he felt scared and confused, and his grandmother worried that Smoot’s friends might come looking for him.

“The worst thing that could ever happen, happened,” Wilson said. “It felt like a dream. I kept on thinking about how my mom was going to feel. How my grandmother was going to feel. My aunt. Everything about it was just killing me.”

According to court filings, authorities had a different theory, one in which Wilson, in his zeal to defend his aunt, committed a premeditated act of street justice.

Based on initial witness accounts, the police and prosecutors said that after Davis

told her family about being beaten, Wilson drove to his aunt’s house with a gun. He and Smoot argued. Then, they alleged, Wilson shot him in the head.

Wilson knew he was in trouble. When he reached Montana, he spoke with a lawyer.

A day later, he returned to California and turned himself in.

“I wished I had never gone over there,” he said, “but I’d go over there 10,000 times to protect my aunt. That night, I wished I hadn’t gone.”

Wilson was charged with first-degree murder and bail was set at $2 million, which his family could not raise. He pleaded not guilty, claiming he had acted in self-defense.

“We were all crushed,” Hudson said.

“Jimmy is like a second son to me. My wife cried for two days. I’m not saying Jimmy is a perfect angel, but everybody knows Jimmy has a good heart. The thing you kept thinking about was that football was his way out.”

Wilson had little time to adapt to life in a Los Angeles County jail. A cellmate helped him understand internal politics. His father, who was in prison, wrote him letters with lessons on jailhouse survival.

The San Juan Weekly “Where you from?” gang members hissed at him. The tiniest perceived slight would end in violence, and Wilson said he had to fight other inmates just so he would be left alone.

The occasional impromptu football game using a plastic bottle was a rare respite.

“Every day somebody was getting beat up or cut,” Wilson said. “Imagine a bad high school where everyone was the bully.”

The Trial It took more than a year for Wilson’s case to go to trial. During that time, Hauck, who had been hired as an assistant at U.C.L.A., visited Wilson in jail. Hauck was shaken to see him.

“You don’t realize what it’s all about until you’re there face to face with a young man who had everything in the palm of his hand and it had been taken away from him,” Hauck said. “It hurt.”

Meanwhile, Wilson’s case was dragging. At a pretrial hearing, his aunt testified that she saw Wilson and Smoot fighting but that she did not know who fired the gun or even whose gun it was. Prosecutors tried to show that Davis changed her story.

When the trial finally began, prosecutors argued that Wilson had killed Smoot in cold blood. His lawyer, Jerome Bradford, countered that Wilson was defending his family and that Smoot was the aggressor. The gun, which was never found, was Smoot’s, Bradford contended.

After nearly six days of deliberation the jury deadlocked. Eleven jurors wanted to acquit. The judge declared a mistrial.

Believing they could still get a conviction, prosecutors decided to retry Wilson. A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, Sandi Gibbons, said it was unusual to retry a case after a deadlocked jury leaned so heavily toward acquittal. The decision, she said, was based “on evidence that law enforcement had presented to us.”

Wilson remained in jail, resigned to possibly never leaving. Six months passed before he went to trial again. This time, prosecutors called an expert on crime scenes.

He testified that Smoot was shot from a few feet away. Bradford argued that the rising trajectory of the bullet, and scratches on Smoot’s hands, showed that there had been a struggle.

It took less than a full day for the jury to acquit Wilson. After a little over two years behind bars, he left jail later that day.

“He lost two years of his life,” Bradford said. “But Jimmy had his life.”

Steve Rubino, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department who helped investigate the killing, declined to comment on the acquittal but added that Wilson would have to live with the events of that night.

“He knows what happened,” Rubino said. “His aunt was the only witness. She’s related to Jimmy Wilson. He’s no hero.”

For Wilson, freedom was not easy.

His jailhouse routines stayed with him.

Lighthearted ribbing from friends made him angry. He found it difficult to connect with anyone.

Instead of returning to college, Wil-

son worked construction for a year with his uncle. In the meantime, the five-year period the N.C.A.A. gives athletes to complete four seasons in a sport had expired.

Last May, in light of Wilson’s acquittal and after Montana’s new head coach, Robin Pflugrad, visited Wilson and his family, university officials successfully petitioned the N.C.A.A. to extend the deadline to allow him to play his senior season.

“After looking at all the facts, and closely following the court proceedings, we discussed this thoroughly with various campus officials and our football staff,” Montana’s athletic director, Jim O’Day, said in a statement. “We felt it was in the best interest of this young man.”

Wilson returned to Montana to a locker room thrilled to have him back. He vomited after his first team workout, and it took weeks to regain his football legs.

Things were not much smoother off the field. In August, a woman accused Wilson of biting her leg while they were in a car with friends after a night out.

Wilson insisted that he and the woman were horsing around. Still, he was furious at himself. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, reduced from misdemeanor assault. He was suspended for a game.

Coaches warned him that everyone was watching.

“I know I can’t get in any trouble, Wilson said. “Everyone has put their name on the line for me.”

Wilson worked his way into a starting role from the third string, this time at safety, his old tackling talents having returned. Despite a hamstring injury, he finished the season honorable mention all-Big Sky. Coaches voted him the team’s hardest hitter. They also noticed a gentle, appreciative side to Wilson that was not always apparent before he went to jail.

“He’s tough because he’s had to be,” Hudson said. “Jimmy hasn’t had an easy road.”

Back in San Diego recently on winter break, Wilson said that a few N.F.L. teams had expressed interest in him as a possible special teams player. And scouts from the Jets, the Browns and the Patriots watched him play this season.

A former teammate, Colt Anderson, now a safety with the Philadelphia Eagles, described Wilson as one of the few he had played with at Montana good enough to make it to the pros.

Pflugrad said Wilson reminded him of Patrick Chung, the hard-hitting Patriots safety who played for him at Oregon.

Wilson knows his past troubles could turn some teams off. If the N.F.L. doesn’t pan out, he said, he will try to play in Canada.

And if that doesn’t work, then perhaps with the sociology degree he is working toward he might become a social worker.

Wilson tries not to think about the night of the shooting or his long days in jail.

But they still pass through his mind, as do memories of the inmates who shook their heads when he vowed to reach the N.F.L. “I told them: ‘Man, you’ll see. I can play,’ ” he said.

San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

31

FASHION & BEAUTY

Practice Those Pliés

By RUTH LA FERLA

T

HE notion that film inspires fashion is one of the style world’s hoariest clichés. But in the case of “Black Swan,” in which Natalie Portman plays an ambition-maddened dancer, that chestnut bears some truth. Darren Aronofsky’s Grand Guignol of a film both reflects — and anticipates — a trend in the making, its multilayered tutus, feathers and cobwebby knits attesting to a shift in the fashion wind.

The kinky costumes in “Black Swan” were the brainchild of the costume designer Amy Westcott, working with Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, a label known for its fusion of chastity and chills. The Mulleavy sisters, celebrated for their raw (and often goth-inflected) fabric treatments, conceived a look for Ms. Portman’s dancer in the dark that echoes the movie’s alternating moods of innocence and iniquity.

“We had an affinity for the subject matter,” Kate Mulleavy said, adding that the film gave her an understanding of the ballet world’s “darker nature and twisted kind of underbelly.”

How better to captivate the fashion flock? As far back as last fall, its more progressive members seemed to have anticipated the lightness, and the creepiness, of the ballet-within-

the-film. Cecilia Dean, a trend-setting founder of Visionaire, celebrated Halloween in a ballerina-inspired Gigi Burris feathered headpiece and a vintage Giorgio di Sant’Angelo black feathered bodice.

On the runway, Karl Lagerfeld

explored the twin themes of sweetness and perversity in a Chanel spring 2011 ready-to-wear collection infused with plumes and shredded fabrics. A surrealistically avian theme was exploited by Sarah Burton in her debut collection for Alexander McQueen, its severity softened by marabou tufts. A similarly airborne feeling was reflec-

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FASHION & BEAUTY

Comes from page 31 ted in a J. Mendel cocktail dress with winglike panels flaring from its hips; in a Club Monaco faux marabou miniskirt; and in the vintage toe shoes enjoying a run at Early Halloween, the vintage shop in Chelsea.

Come spring, a ballet-inspired trend may well extend to every level of the market: Lipsy of London, a line sold a Bloomingdale’s; ASOS, the online boutique; and BCBG Max Azria

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January 13 - 19, 2011

are all selling tutus, to say nothing of the rehearsal togs and balletic underpinnings that are American Apparel’s stock in trade.

On or off the runways, some froth is refreshing, an archly feminine, and patently escapist, alternative to a season of trouser suits, utility looks and aggressive militaria.

Does this mean that come spring we will see a flurry of tutus and danceinspired frills rarely seen since Carrie Bradshaw’s girly heyday? Count on it.

San Juan Weekly

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

33

w

El Gran Combo A Puerto Rican Icon

E

l Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, commonly known as El Gran Combo (and sometimes abbreviated as EGC), is a Puerto Rican Salsa music orchesorches

tra. It is Puerto Rico’s most successful musical facto musical director on tours, with Ithier congroup, and one of the most popular salsa or- ducting the group and playing occasionally in chestras across Latin America. The group re- select live performances. They are still actively performing after 47 years together. ceiv ceived the moniker La Universidad de la Salsa (Th (The University of Salsa) in Colombia, due to the sheer number of famous salsa musicians and singers who developed their careers with it, w who started with the group (particularly And Andy Montañez), or who were occasionally bac backed up by the band (including Celia Cruz, Héc Héctor Lavoe and La India).

El Gran Combo was founded in May 196 1962,by Rafael Ithier. Ithier is still nominally its musical director, and he and saxophonist Edd Eddie “La Bala” Pérez are the only remaining me members from the band’s original lineup. as of 2010 Willie Sotelo, who joined the group i 2006 as pianist, has become the band’s de in

34 Rafael Ithier had been a member of Rafael Cortijo’s “Cortijo y su Combo” orchestra. After singer Ismael Rivera faced legal problems in Panama, some of the group’s musicians departed, with Ithier relocating temporarily to the eastern United States before returning to Puerto Rico. Rafael Alvarez Guedes, the Cuban-born owner of the Gema recording label (and brother of comedic actor Guillermo), needed a backing band to record an album for legendary Dominican merengue singer Joseíto Mateo.

He asked Ithier for assistance, and Ithier responded by bringing in many of his former colleagues to the studio. For their first recording sessions, the orchestra included some musicians from Cortijo’s original lineup, including saxophonist Hector Santos, trumpet player Rogelio “Kito” Velez, and percussionists Martín Quiñones, Miguel Cruz and Roberto Roena. Alvarez Guedes then named the group El Gran Combo, as to refer to the musicians’ former affiliation, but addressing their regrouping as a “new and improved” version of Cortijo’s orchestra. The album they recorded was titled Menéame Los Mangos, El Gran Combo con Joseito Mateo (the phrase translates as Shake My Handles or Shake My Mangoes, a play on words).

The group met again to define the foundations of a proper orchestra and chose singers Daniel Vázquez, Pellín Rodríguez and Chiquitín García (who later composed, among other major EGC hits, “No Hago Más Ná”, or “I Don’t Do A Thing”). On May 21, 1962, El Gran Combo was heard for the first time on Puerto Rican radio. Later on, they became the in-studio musicians of the live television show, “La Taberna India”, sponsored by India Beer.

After their live debut at Hotel La Concha in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Chiquitín García left the orchestra. Vocalist Sammy Ayala, who had also played with Ithier in the Cortijo orchestra, recommended the hiring of Andy Montañez. Felipe

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

Rodríguez, a legendary singer of romantic music, also followed the group’s career closely, sometimes even making suggestions to Ithier.

First albums

On November 20, 1963, El Gran Combo released their first group album, Acángana, with Rodríguez and Montañez as lead singers. The album became a number one hit in New York, Panama and Puerto Rico. Their success opened doors for them in many Latin American markets and they gained an exclusivity spot on the Puerto Rican television show El Show de las 12. The album also reached gold status.

On 1964, trumpet player and arranger Elías Lopés joined the orchestra, coinciding with the group’s first popularity wave. With their daily TV appearances and extensive touring, however, demand for the group declined due to overexposure. Still, in 1967, their album Boogaloo con el Gran Combo also reached gold status. In 1969, Roena and Lopés left the orchestra to form the Apollo Sound together. Despite all this, that same year the group was awarded an Agüeybana de Oro in Puerto Rico.

Near death experience

On February 15, 1970, the members of El Gran Combo shared a near death experience. They were returning to Puerto Rico from Curaçao, and had to stop at Las Américas International Airport in Santo Domingo.

One of the band’s members had a bad premonition about the flight they were about to embark on, and the orchestra decided not to take that flight, which would turn out to be

the Dominicana Airlines DC-9 that crashed off the Caribbean coast.

The 1970s

In 1970, their contract with Gema Records wasn’t renewed. Despite offers from the renowned Motown label, El Gran Combo decided to produce their own albums, under the label “Combo Records”. Their first album under their label, EGC, is titled Estamos Primeros.

In 1971, El Gran Combo introduced the trombone to their instrument mix. The trombone was played by Fanny Ceballos.

Soon after, their production named De Punta a Punta (slang for “From Coast to Coast”) was released. In 1973, Pellín Rodriguez left the group to embark on a solo career. Rodríguez was replaced by Charlie Aponte at the recommendation of Jerry Concepción and the well known sportscaster Rafael Bracero, both friends of Ithier.

In 1973, El Gran Combo sang in front of 50,000 fans at the famous Yankee Stadium in New York City as the opening act for the Fania All-Stars’ sold out concert.

Montañez left the band in early 1977 and went to live in Venezuela, where he received a good contract to replace Oscar D’León in another orchestra, Dimension Latina. Jerry Rivas was then chosen to join the orchestra. Both Rivas and Aponte are still members of the orchestra to this day. The success of this new duo was proved with their 1977 album International and 1978’s En Las Vegas which reached gold record status.

In 1975, El Gran Combo en Navidad, a Christmas album, was released, with Martín Quiñones appearing as Santa Claus in the album’s cover. After an automobile accident in early 1977, Quiñones was replaced in the band by his son, Martín Quiñones Jr. He stayed until 1979, being replaced by Luis Díaz.

Recent years

The band continues to receive nume-

rous awards throughout Latin America. In 1984, they traveled to Alaska where they received a great welcome soon after they released their album titled Breaking the Ice which garnered them their first Grammy nomination.

In 1982 they celebrated their 20th anniversary playing at Madison Square Garden. They also reached Europe that year playing in Paris, France.

In the early 90s, they were honored in the city of Madrid, Spain to open the decade on the right track. On March 29, 1992, they celebrated a huge concert in the Hiram Bithorn Stadium in front of 30,000 people.

The new millennium

In 2002, El Gran Combo celebrated their 40th anniversary with two sold-out concerts at the Ruben Rodríguez Coliseum in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. This celebration spawned a renowned album that was recognized as one of the best of the year. A year later, they received a Grammy for Best Tropical Album. Among other musicians, they are one of the “enduring superstars of the island” As of 2006, the orchestra has released over 40 albums or CD’s, and it has received many awards, including golden albums, a “Calendario de Plata” in Mexico, a “Golden Combo” in Colombia, a “Paoli Award” in their native Puerto Rico, an honorable distinction in Spain and countless others.

In 2006, they released their latest album titled Arroz con Habichuela (“Rice and Beans”). It has already spawned three hit singles. The first one titled “No Hay Manera” (“There’s No Way”), the title song, and “Si La Vez Por Ahí”.

In 2007, El Gran Combo performed two massive concerts at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum to celebrate their 45th anniversary.

In 2010, two tribute albums were released, one by former member Andy Montañez and another by the bank Banco Popular, as part of their annual music series.

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

35

Giving Alzheimer’s Patients Their Way, Even Chocolate

By PAM BELLUCK

M

argaret Nance was, to put it mildly, a difficult case. Agitated, combative, often reluctant to eat, she would hit staff members and fellow residents at nursing homes, several of which kicked her out. But when Beatitudes nursing home agreed to an urgent plea to accept her, all that changed.

Disregarding typical nursing-home rules, Beatitudes allowed Ms. Nance, 96 and afflicted with Alzheimer’s, to sleep, be bathed and dine whenever she wanted, even at 2 a.m. She could eat anything, too, no matter how unhealthy, including unlimited chocolate.

And she was given a baby doll, a move that seemed so jarring that a supervisor initially objected until she saw how calm Ms. Nance became when she rocked, caressed and fed her “baby,” often agreeing to eat herself after the doll “ate” several spoonfuls.

Dementia patients at Beatitudes are allowed practically anything that brings comfort, even an alcoholic “nip at night,” said Tena Alonzo, director of research.

“Whatever your vice is, we’re your folks,” she said.

Once, Ms. Alonzo said: “The state tried to cite us for having chocolate on the nursing chart. They were like, ‘It’s not a medication.’ Yes, it is. It’s better than Xanax.”

It is an unusual posture for a nursing home, but Beatitudes is actually following some of the latest science. Research suggests that creating positive emotional experiences for Alzheimer’s patients diminishes distress and behavior

problems.

In fact, science is weighing in on many aspects of taking care of dementia patients, applying evidence-based research to what used to be considered subjective and ad hoc.

With virtually no effective medical treatment for Alzheimer’s yet, most dementia therapy is the caregiving performed by families and nursing homes. Some 11 million people care for Alzheimer’s-afflicted relatives at home.

In nursing homes, two-thirds of residents have some dementia.

Caregiving is considered so crucial that several federal and state agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, are adopting research-tested programs to support and train caregivers.

This month, the Senate Special Committee on Aging held a forum about Alzheimer’s caregiving.

“There’s actually better evidence and more significant results in caregiver interventions than there is in anything to treat this disease so far,” said Lisa P. Gwyther, education director for the Bryan Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Duke University.

The National Institute on Aging and the Administration on Aging are now financing caregiving studies on “things that just kind of make the life of an Alzheimer’s patient and his or her caregiver less burdensome,” said Sidney M. Stahl, chief of the Individual Behavioral Processes branch of the Institute on Aging. “At least initially, these seem to be good nonpharmacological techniques.”

Techniques include using food, scheduling, art, music and exercise to

generate positive emotions; engaging patients in activities that salvage fragments of their skills; and helping caregivers be more accepting and competent.

Changing the Mood Some efforts involve stopping antianxiety or antipsychotic drugs, used to quell hallucinations or aggression, but potentially harmful to dementia patients, who can be especially sensitive to side effects. Instead, some experts recommend primarily giving drugs for pain or depression, addressing what might be making patients unhappy.

Others recommend making cosmetic changes to rooms and buildings to affect behavior or mood.

A study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that brightening lights in dementia facilities decreased depression, cognitive deterioration and loss of functional abilities. Increased light bolsters circadian rhythms and helps patients see better so they can be more active, said Elizabeth C. Brawley, a dementia care design expert not involved in the study, adding, “If I could change one thing in these places it would be the lighting.”

Several German nursing homes have fake bus stops outside to keep patients from wandering; they wait for nonexistent buses until they forget where they wanted to go, or agree to come inside.

And Beatitudes installed a rectangle of black carpet in front of the dementia unit’s fourth-floor elevators because residents appear to interpret it as a cliff or hole, no longer darting into elevators and wandering away.

“They’ll walk right along the edge but don’t want to step in the black,” said Ms. Alonzo, who finds it less unsettling than methods some facilities use, brace-

lets that trigger alarms when residents exit. “People with dementia have visualspatial problems. We’ve actually had some people so wary of it that when we have to get them on the elevator to take them somewhere, we put down a white towel or something to cover it up.”

When elevator doors open, Beatitudes staff members stand casually in front, distracting residents with “over-the-top” hellos, she said: “We look like Cheshire cats,” but “who’s going to want to get on the elevator when here’s this lovely smiling person greeting you? It gets through to the emotional brain.”

New research suggests emotion persists after cognition deteriorates. In a University of Iowa study, people with brain damage producing Alzheimer’slike amnesia viewed film clips evoking tears and sadness (“Sophie’s Choice,” “Steel Magnolias”), or laughter and happiness (Bill Cosby, “America’s Funniest Home Videos”).

Six minutes later, participants had trouble recalling the clips. But 30 minutes later, emotion evaluations showed they still felt sad or happy, often more than participants with normal memories. The more memory-impaired patients retained stronger emotions.

Justin Feinstein, the lead author, an advanced neuropsychology doctoral student, said the results, being studied with Alzheimer’s patients at Iowa and Harvard, suggest behavioral problems could stem from sadness or anxiety that patients cannot explain.

“Because you don’t have a memory, there’s this general free-floating state of distress and you can’t really figure out why,” Mr. Feinstein said. Similarly, happy emotions, even from socializing with

Continues on page 36

36 January 13 - 19, 2011

Comes from page 35 patients, “could linger well beyond the memories that actually caused them.”

One program for dementia patients cared for by relatives at home creates specific activities related to something they once enjoyed: arranging flowers, filling photo albums, snapping beans.

“A gentleman who loved fishing could still set up a tackle box, so we gave him a plastic tackle box” to set up every day, said the program’s developer, Laura N. Gitlin, a sociologist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and newly appointed director of the Center on Aging and Health at Johns Hopkins University.

After four months, patients seemed happier and more active, and showed fewer behavior problems, especially repetitive questioning and shadowing, following caregivers around. And that gave caregivers breaks, important because studies suggest that “what’s good for the caregiver is good for the patient,” Professor Gwyther said.

Aiding the Caregiver In fact, reducing caregiver stress is considered significant enough in dementia care that federal and state health agencies are adopting programs giving caregivers education and emotional support.

One, led by Mary S. Mittelman, a New York University dementia expert, found that when people who cared for demented spouses were given six counseling sessions as well as counselors whom they could call in a crisis, it helped them handle caregiving better and delayed by 18 months placing patients in nursing homes.

“The patient did not have fewer symptoms,” Dr. Mittelman said. “It was the caregiver’s reaction that changed.”

The Veterans Affairs Department is adopting another program, Resources

for Enhancing Alzheimer’s Caregiver Health, providing 12 counseling sessions and 5 telephone support group sessions.

Studies showed that these measures reduced hospital visits and helped family caregivers manage dementia behaviors.

“Investing in caregiver services and support is very worthwhile,” saving money and letting patients remain home, said Deborah Amdur, chief consultant for care management and social work at the Veterans Affairs Department.

Beatitudes, which takes about 30 moderate to severe dementia sufferers, introduced its program 12 years ago, focusing on individualized care.

“In the old days,” Ms. Alonzo said, “we would find out more about somebody from their obituary than we did when they were alive.”

The dementia floor was named Vermillion Cliffs, after colorfully layered rock formations formed by centuries of erosion, implying that, “although weathered, although tested by dementia, people are beautiful” and “have certain strengths,” said Peggy Mullan, the president of Beatitudes.

The facility itself is institutionallooking, dowdy and “extremely outdated,” Ms. Mullan said.

“It’s ugly,” said Jan Dougherty, director of family and community services at Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix. But “they’re probably doing some of the best work” and “virtually have no sundowning,” she said, referring to agitated, delusional behavior common with Alzheimer’s, especially during afternoon and evening.

Beatitudes eliminated anything potentially considered restraining, from deep-seated wheelchairs that hinder standing up to bedrails (some beds are lowered and protected by mats). It drastically reduced antipsychotics and medications considered primarily for “staff convenience,” focusing on relieving pain, Ms. Alonzo said.

The San Juan Weekly It encouraged keeping residents out of diapers if possible, taking them to the toilet to preserve feelings of independence. Some staff members resisted, Ms. Alonzo said, but now “like it because it saves time” and difficult diaper changes.

Family members like Nancy Mendelsohn, whose mother, Rose Taran, was kicked out of facilities for screaming and calling 911, appreciate it. “The last place just put her in diapers, and she was not incontinent at all,” Ms. Mendelsohn said.

Ms. Alonzo declined to pay workers more to adopt the additional skills or night work, saying, “We want people to work here because it’s your bag.”

Finding Favorite Things For behavior management, Beatitudes plumbs residents’ biographies, soothing one woman, Ruth Ann Clapper, by dabbing on White Shoulders perfume, which her biographical survey indicated she had worn before becoming ill.

Food became available constantly, a canny move, Ms. Dougherty said, because people with dementia might be “too distracted” to eat during group mealtimes, and later “be acting out when what they actually need is food.”

Realizing that nutritious, low-salt, low-fat, doctor-recommended foods might actually discourage people from eating, Ms. Alonzo began carrying chocolate in her pocket. “For God’s sake,” Ms. Mullan said, “if you like bacon, you can have bacon here.”

Comforting food improves behavior and mood because it “sends messages they can still understand: ‘it feels good, therefore I must be in a place where I’m loved,’ ” Ms. Dougherty said.

Now, when Maribeth Gallagher, dementia program director for Hospice of the Valley, which collaborates in running Beatitudes’s program, learns someone’s favorite foods, “I’m going to pop that on your tongue, and you’re going to go ‘yum,’ ” she said. “Isn’t that better than an injection?”

Beatitudes also changed activity programming. Instead of group events like bingo, in which few residents could actually participate, staff members, including housekeepers, conduct one-onone activities: block-building, coloring, simply conversing. State regulators initially objected, saying, “Where’s your big group, and what you’re doing isn’t right and doesn’t follow regulations,” Ms. Alonzo said.

Ms. Mullan said, “I don’t think we ever got cited, but it was a huge fight to make sure we didn’t.”

These days, hundreds of Arizona physicians, medical students, and staff members at other nursing homes have received Beatitudes’ training, and se-

veral Illinois nursing homes are adopting it. The program, which received an award from an industry association, the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging, also appears to save money.

Arlene Washington’s family moved her to Beatitudes recently, pulling her from another nursing home because of what they considered inattentive and “improper care,” said her husband, William. Mrs. Washington, 86, was heavily medicated, tube fed and unable to communicate, “like she had no life in her,” said Sharon Hibbert, a friend.

At Beatitudes, Dr. Gillian Hamilton, administrative medical director, said she found Mrs. Washington “very sedated,” took her off antipsychotics, then gradually stopped using the feeding tube. Now Mrs. Washington eats so well she no longer needs the insulin she was receiving.

During a recent visit, she was alert, even singing a hymn.

That afternoon, Ms. Nance, in her wheelchair, happily held her baby doll, which she named Benjamin, and commented about raising her sons decades ago.

Ms. Alonzo had at first considered the doll an “undignified” and demeaning security blanket. But Ms. Gallagher explained that “for a lot of people who are parents, what gives them joy is caring for children.”

“I was able,” Ms. Gallagher said, “to find Margaret’s strength.”

Ms. Gallagher said she learned when approaching Ms. Nance to “look at her baby doll, and once I connect with the doll, I can look at her.”

She squatted down, complimented Benjamin’s shoes, and said, “You’re the best mom I know.”

Ms. Nance nodded earnestly.

“It’s good to know,” Ms. Nance said, “that somebody knows that you care.”

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

37

Detecting Tuberculosis: No Microscopes, Just Rats

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

R

esearchers have found a new way of testing for tuberculosis that is fast, cheap and widely available: large rats that can smell the bacteria in a sputum sample.

There are expensive and complicated laboratory tests for tuberculosis, and the World Health Organization recently endorsed a new machine that can give accurate results in under two hours. But the device costs $17,000, and each test requires a $17 cartridge.

Whatever else can be said about them, rats are cheaper.

Today, the most commonly used detection method in developing countries is smear microscopy. This 100-year-old technique involves collecting sputum, dyeing it with a substance that colors only Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the germ that causes TB, and examining the sample under a microscope.

The technique can be used in places where facilities are minimal, but it is not very sensitive — unless there is a high concentration of them, the bacilli are easy to miss, and that results in as many as 60 to 80 percent of positive cases going undiagnosed.

Studies suggest that the Gambian pouched rat can do better. The animal, an omnivorous rodent with puffy cheeks and that chillingly familiar rat body and tail, weighs 10 to 15 pounds and thrives in colonies of up to 20 all over sub-Saharan Africa.

The Gambian pouched rat apparently can smell the difference between tuberculosis bacilli and the myriad other germs that inhabit human phlegm.

The lead author of one study on the rats, Alan Po-

ling, a professor of psychology at Western Michigan University, said that while the animals had been accepted as a reasonable diagnostic tool in Tanzania, “the medical community is still skeptical.”

Writing in the December issue of The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Dr. Poling and his colleagues report a test of the rats using samples that were confirmed by laboratory culture as either positive or negative.

The animals’ sensitivity — that is, their ability to detect the presence of tuberculosis — ranged as high as 86.6 percent, and their specificity, or ability to detect the absence of the germ, was over 93 percent.

In another test that compared the rats’ success to microscopy, the rats picked up 44 percent more positive cases.

The rats, raised in captivity, are all descended from animals captured in the Uluguru Mountains in Tanzania, or on the outskirts of Morogoro, a city of about 200,000 people in the nearby Tanzanian highlands. This is the same animal, Cricetomys gambianus, that has been trained to sniff out land mines.(It is light enough not to set them off.)

The newborns open their eyes at about 4 weeks, and immediately begin a habituation and socialization program. When the rats are about 8 weeks old, the trainers put sputum samples, positive and negative for tuberculosis, under “sniffing holes” in a specially designed cage.

When a rat spends at least five seconds at a positive sample, it is rewarded with peanuts and bananas.

Eventually, the rats learn that a longer sniff at a positive sample gets a reward, and that negative samples are

unproductive and should be skipped over quickly.

By the time they are 26 weeks old, some have flunked, but the clever ones among them are experts.

Some human experts are dubious. “They’re a long way from demonstrating the robustness of their technique,” said Dr. Neil W. Schluger, a professor of medicine at Columbia University who specializes in lung diseases.

“These rats can do something amazing,” he continued, “but even if you accept that it worked within their lab, are they still good at it a year later? Do they all have to be trained by the same person? How do they have to be cared for? If you change their cage or their bedding, does it still work?”

Dr. Poling conceded that research on the rats was still preliminary. But he said, “We think that eventually there will be a place for them in first-line screening.”

Dr. Poling says he likes Gambian pouched rats.

“They’re handsome animals, they follow you around, come when you call them,” he said.

“If they didn’t have those long, scaly tails,” he added wistfully, “they’d be lovable.”

SCIENCE / TECH 38

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology

By SAM GROBART

Y

our gadgets and computers, your software and sites — they are not working as well as they should. You need to make some tweaks.

But the tech industry has given you the impression that making adjustments is difficult and time-consuming. It is not.

And so below are 10 things to do to improve your technological life. They are easy and (mostly) free.

Altogether, they should take about two hours; one involves calling your cable or phone company, so that figure is elastic. If you do them, those two hours will pay off handsomely in both increased free time and diminished anxiety and frustration. You can do it.

GET A SMARTPHONE Why: Because having immediate access to your e-mail, photos, calendars and address books, not to mention vast swaths of the Internet, makes life a little easier.

How: This does not have to be complicated. Upgrade your phone with your existing carrier; later, when you are an advanced beginner, you can start weighing the pluses and minuses of your carrier versus another. Using AT&T? Get a refurbished iPhone 3GS for $29. Verizon? Depending on what’s announced next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, get its version of the iPhone, or a refurbished Droid Incredible for $100. Sprint? Either the LG Optimus S or the Samsung Transform are decent Android phones that cost $50.

T-Mobile users can get the free LG Optimus T. STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER Why: Because, while the latest version has some real improvements, Internet Explorer is large, bloated with features and an example of old-style Microsoft excess.

How: Switch to either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Both are first-rate, speedy browsers, and both are free. It remains a tight race between the two, but Chrome has had the lead lately in features and performance. Both browsers include useful things like bookmark syncing. That means that your bookmarks folder will be the same on every computer using Chrome or Firefox, and will update if you change anything.

UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS TO THE CLOUD Why: Because you’ll be really sorry if an errant cup of coffee makes its way onto your PC, wiping away years of photographic memories. Creating copies of your digital photos on an online service is a painless way to ensure they’ll be around no matter what happens to your PC. It is also an easy way to share the photos with friends and family.

How: There are many good, free choices. To keep things simple, use Picasa, Google’s service. After your initial upload — which may take a while, so set it up before you go to sleep — you will have a full backup of your photo library. And by inviting people to view it, privately, with passwords, you will not have to e-mail photos anymore. Anytime you have new pictures, upload them to Picasa, send a message to your subscribers, and they can view your gallery at their leisure.

GET MUSIC OFF YOUR COMPUTER Why: Because music bought digitally wants to be freed, not imprisoned in your portable player or laptop. It wants to be sent around the home, filling rooms like good oldfashioned hi-fi.

How: Using iTunes for your digital music? Buy Apple’s Airport Express for $99 and connect it to your stereo. When you play music on your computer, you can stream it to the Express and, therefore, your stereo’s speakers. Have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad? Download Apple’s free Remote app and you will be able

to control your music from anywhere in the house.

BACK UP YOUR DATA Why: Because photos are not the only important things on your computer.

With online backup services, you do not have to buy any equipment; you just install software, which sits on secure servers and runs in the background, regularly updating a mirror image of all your files while you spend time on more important things, like confirming that Ben Gazzara really was the bad guy in “Road House” (he was).

How: Go to sosonlinebackup. com. Pay $80 a year. Install the software. Sleep easy.

SET UP A FREE FILE-SHARING SERVICE Why: Because while e-mailing yourself files is a perfectly decent workaround, there are easier, more elegant ways to move files around — and they do not cost anything, either.

How: Go to dropbox.com and set up a free account. You will then get an icon that sits on your desktop.

Drag and drop files onto that icon, and they are immediately copied to the cloud. The free account gives you up to two gigabytes of disk space; 50and 100-gigabyte are also available, but they cost $10 or $20 a month.

Set up your account on all your other computers, and they all have the access to the same files. You can set up shared, private and public folders, and apps for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android mean you can gain access to shared files from

anywhere.

GET FREE ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE Why: Because attacks on unwitting users are more widespread and tactics are growing more advanced.

How: Windows users should download Avast Free Antivirus. Mac users can download iAntiVirus Free Edition. Both applications will provide a basic level of security against a variety of so-called malware. And they cost zero.

GET A BETTER DEAL FROM YOUR CABLE, PHONE AND INTERNET PROVIDER Why: Because it does not take much to get them to give you free (or cheaper) services.

These companies are generally indifferent to customer needs, but they are quick to cough up discounts — if you ask.

How: Just call and ask — they will probably give you something.

Other tactics: Measure your Internet speed, using dslreports.com/speedtest; if it is less than what you are paying for, ask for a free upgrade. Or ask to speak to the cancellation department. That usually scares them.

BUY A LOT OF CHARGING CABLES Why: Because you should never have a gadget’s battery die on you, and they are cheap. Smartphone user? Have a charging cable at the office, one in the car, and a couple at home. Laptops? Have enough chargers in the house, so you are not tethered to the den when the power runs low.

How: eBay. Search for what you need with terms like “original” or “oem” (original equipment manufacturer). You will often see accessories for as little as one-tenth their normal retail price. Buy them by the gross.

CALIBRATE YOUR HDTV Why: Because that awesome 1080p plasma or LCD TV you bought has factory settings for color, brightness, contrast and so forth that are likely to be out of whack. They need to be adjusted.

How: Order Spears and Munsil High Definition Benchmark: Blu-ray Edition, a DVD, for $25. Its regimen of tests and patterns will help you adjust your TV’s settings to more natural levels. After you use it, you may want to fine-tune the TV some more, but you can do so knowing you are getting the most out of your display.

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

39 SCIENCE / TECH

Quest for Dark Energy May Fade to Black

By DENNIS OVERBYE

W

hat happens to a dark energy dream deferred?

An ambitious $1.6 billion spacecraft that would investigate the mysterious force that is apparently accelerating the expansion of the universe — and search out planets around other stars, to boot — might have to be postponed for a decade, NASA says, because of cost overruns and mismanagement on a separate project, the James Webb Space Telescope. The news has dismayed many American astronomers, who worry they will wind up playing second fiddle to their European counterparts in what they say is the deepest mystery in the universe.

Last summer, after 10 years of debate and interagency wrangling, a prestigious committee from the National Academy of Sciences gave highest priority among big space projects in the coming decade to a satellite telescope that would take precise measure of dark energy, as it is known, and also look for planets beyond our solar system. The proposed project goes by the slightly unwieldy acronym Wfirst, for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

The Academy’s report was ambushed by NASA’s announcement in November that the successor to the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, which had been scheduled for a 2014 launching, would require at least another $1.6 billion and several more years to finish, pushing the next big mission to 2022 at the very earliest. The Webb will search out the first stars and galaxies to have formed in the universe, but is not designed for dark energy.

To take up the slack until 2025 — or whenever the American mission can finally fly — the space agency has proposed buying a 20 percent share in a European darkenergy mission known as Euclid that could fly as soon as 2018. In return, NASA would ask for a similar investment

by Europe in Wfirst.

“Most of us think it is hard to imagine if we do Euclid now we will do a dark-energy mission then.”

Last month, the American astronomers’ worries about falling behind seemed to be validated by a second Academy panel convened to consider the Euclid option.

The panelists pointed out that part of the reason that Wfirst had been given such high priority was that it could be launched sooner rather than later. The panel urged NASA to stay the course or to explore merging Wfirst and Euclid in a joint operation.

Euclid must survive a bake-off with two other projects before it is approved by the European Space Agency.

Not until then, European astronomers say, will they be able to talk about changes to the project.

NASA has not said how it plans to get the $1.6 billion it needs to finish the Webb telescope, and thus how much will be left for other projects this decade. Some of the answers will be in the 2012 NASA budget due next month.

“Fitting the E.S.A. and NASA processes together at this stage would be a challenge, but the scientific benefits are clear”.

Jon Morse, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said in an interview that NASA was committed to carrying out the recommendations of the original Academy survey that endorsed Wfirst. It is the “sense of Congress,” he said, that the Academy “should guide NASA science programs.”

Asked about worries that Euclid could give the Europeans a big leg up in dark-energy work, Dr. Morse said, “The Europeans have developed a significant capability for doing their own missions.” “The scientific return for their investment has been outstanding,” Dr. Morse said, adding that European astronomers are looking for “frontier scientific discoveries” to make.

AHEAD IN THE GAME A Model of the Webb Space Telescope in Dublin. A European dark-energy mission known as Euclid could fly as soon as 2018.

Dark energy certainly counts as frontier science. The discovery a decade ago that the universe is speeding up, in defiance of common sense or cosmic gravity, has thrown into doubt notions about the fate of the universe and of life within it, not to mention gravity and even the nature of the laws of physics. It is as if, when you dropped your car keys, they shot up to the ceiling.

Physicists have one ready-made explanation for this behavior, but it is a cure that many of them think is worse than the disease: a fudge factor invented by Einstein in 1917 called the cosmological constant. He suggested, and quantum theory has subsequently confirmed, that empty space could exert a repulsive force, blowing things apart.

But the best calculations predict an effect 10 to the exponent of 120 times greater than what astronomers have measured, causing physicists to metaphorically tear their hair out and mutter about multiple universes.

The astronomers who made this discovery were using the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic distance markers to track the expansion rate of the universe.

Since then, other tools have emerged by which astronomers can also gauge dark energy by how it retards the growth of galaxies and other structures in the universe. So far the observations are consistent with it being Einstein’s constant, but not definitive; more precise measurements, many of which can only be done from space, are needed.

Dr. Perlmutter, who works in the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, proposed a dark energy mission known as SNAP (Supernova Acceleration Probe) in 1999. In 2003, the White House asked the Energy Department to partner with NASA on the project, which became known as JDEM, for Joint Dark Energy Mission, and a call went out for competing proposals.

But NASA and the Energy Department found it hard to collaborate, and several rounds of meetings and committees went nowhere. “Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to ride two horses,” Dr. Perlmutter said.

In 2008, NASA and the Energy Department budgeted $600 million, not including launching costs, for a mission, but a working group of dark-energy scientists could not come up with a design that would fit in the budget.

Feeling that the blessing of the National Academy of Sciences was needed to proceed with a more expensive project, Dr. Morse submitted a couple of versions of the dark energy mission to the Academy panel — also known as Astro2010 — that was charged with setting priorities for the astronomical community for the next decade.

Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who led one of the panel’s subcommittees, noticed that three of the submitted projects — including dark energy, a search for

planets around other stars, dubbed exoplanets, and a survey of infrared radiation from the heavens — all required the same hardware. He proposed combining them into a larger mission (“putting more eggs into the basket,” in Dr. Perlmutter’s words), in a project that could launch around 2020. That larger mission they dubbed Wfirst.

“It looked then and it still looks to me like a good deal,” said Roger Blandford of Stanford, an astrophysicist and the chairman of the Astro2010 panel.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency had also made dark energy a priority. Last February, the Europeans sent NASA a letter offering the Americans a 20 percent piece of Euclid and two slots on the mission’s science team. American astronomers were ambivalent. Joining Euclid would divert resources from their own mission, thus delaying it.

In September NASA’s advisory committee on astrophysics, which is led by Dr. Boss of the Carnegie Institution, concluded that Euclid could spend three or four years “skimming the cream off the dark energy pail” before Wfirst got into the sky.

Both Dr. Boss’s council and yet another committee, the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, which counsels the National Science Foundation and Energy Department as well as NASA, concluded that joining Euclid was not in keeping with the original Academy recommendations.

By the time the second Academy panel reported in December, the news about the Webb telescope’s problems had made everything worse. The Webb, which was the highest Academy priority 10 years ago and has already cost $5 billion, could not be launched any earlier than 2015 and would probably be even later, because of NASA’s inability to correctly estimate how long it would take to do things like test the telescope. How much of the $2.2 billion that NASA was to have available for new astrophysics missions this decade will be left once Webb is taken care of is anybody’s guess.

On top of that, NASA faces what Dr. Morse calls “an evolved difficult fiscal environment,” with Republicans bent on reducing the federal budget taking over the House of Representatives.

Some astronomers said they felt ambushed by NASA and Dr. Morse, who briefed the Astro2010 panel during its two years of deliberations. “He didn’t know? He should be fired,” said Dr. Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories.

Dr. Morse said he understood and shared his colleagues’ frustration. But said he had warned the panel all along that its plans could be upset by the Webb, which has always been known to have problems. “The community,” he said, referring to the Astro2010 panel, “did the best job they could with what they were given. The fiscal constraints are far worse now than we could imagine a year ago.”

Or, as Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and a member of Astro2010, put it, “We’re in a terrible mess.”

In December, NASA solicited proposals from astronomers who want to join Euclid and named a team that will begin meeting in February to begin planning Wfirst.

One problem with Euclid from the Academy point of view is that it does not include observations of supernovae, the technique by which dark energy was discovered.

Nor does the United States play a leadership role.

Those recommendations were out of date with new realities — budget and otherwise — and that following them could keep the United States out of what might be the only dark-energy mission for some time.

“The European Union is producing more papers per year than the U.S.,” Dr. Boss went on. “They passed us a year ago and are doing quite well.”

SCIENCE / TECH 40

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

Flying Machines, Amazing at Any Angle

By JIM ROBBINS

T

he flying abilities of even the most prosaic bird put airplane maneuvers to shame, and experts here at the University of Montana Flight Laboratory are cognizant of that every day.

“Birds can do some pretty spectacular things,” said Kenneth P. Dial, a biologist who, in 1988, founded the lab at a field station near the University of Montana. “They can go from 40 miles an hour to zero and land on a branch that’s moving, all in a couple of seconds. It’s inspiring.”

Dr. Dial and Bret W. Tobalske, a biologist and the director of the lab, are obsessed with trying to bridge the gap in flying abilities between humans and birds. At a laboratory filled with wind tunnels, highspeed cameras, lasers, surgical equipment and a device that generates clouds of olive oil, they and several graduate students try to divine the secrets of bird flight.

In a quiet field, Dr. Dial, 57, with a shaved head and goatee, stands out with his evangelical zeal about understanding bird flight. He has hosted a television show on adventures in bird-watching, and is so enthusiastic about flight that he and his son, Terry, also a biologist, are planning to fly around the world as pilot and co-pilot.

Dr. Dial’s 28 years of studying the functional morphology of all kinds of birds have led him and others at the lab to numerous insights into ecology, biodiversity, airplane design, aerospace and even paleontology. In a recent paper, Dr. Dial and a graduate student, Brandon E. Jackson, presented a novel idea about how some dinosaurs used their proto-wings — a possible step in the evolution of flight. They based their paper on the observation of day-old Australian brush turkey chicks.

The laboratory, at Fort Missoula, was once a stable for the United States Cavalry.

What makes it unique as a lab, though, is its location in the wilderness of western Mon-

tana, with bald eagles, peregrine falcons, meadowlarks, ducks and other wild birds in the mountains and rivers right out the door.

Dr. Dial says some of his most important observations have been made watching a bird glide by while he is fly fishing, and then heading back to the lab with a new theory to test.

After observing woodpeckers in the lab’s wind tunnel both flying and “bounding” — gliding missilelike with their wings tucked, a behavior not previously identified in these birds — Dr. Tobalske was able to see the same gliding a few hundred yards out the door, which confirmed it was not a product of lab conditions.

One key to the insights here is a small, dark room with two 1,000-frames-per-second cameras, developed by the military to study ballistics, which slow high-speed action in high resolution. Wild birds in flight are misted with a fog of vaporized olive oil, which is illuminated by a green strobing laser operating in tandem with the camera.

The system allows researchers to track the movement of misty air around the birds, showing where they are generating lift and drag. It led to the discovery here of a vortex on the leading edge of bird wings, which adds to a bird’s lift.

The birds, ranging from delicate diamond doves to burly ravens, have crystal sensors surgically implanted in their pectorals and elsewhere that measure muscle contractions as they fly.

“Pectorals are the motor for 80 percent of flight,” said Dr. Tobalske, which explains why they are the largest part of the anatomy. “That’s how birds generate enormous power and can resist fatigue, and why some can fly from one pole to the other” without stopping.

Birds are also put in wind tunnels and photographed at high speed so researchers can see in detail how they perform at 20 miles per hour or more. They are also fitted

with tiny masks that measure metabolism.

CT scans are used on birds to tease out the hidden physics of flying. Using technology developed at Brown University, researchers scan birds’ bones and combine that with three-dimensional X-rays taken in flight. Together they create a very real animation of a bird in flight. “It gives you three-dimensional joint movement,” said Ashley Heers, a doctoral student doing the work.

Dr. Tobalske said, “These tools allow us to see things that have always been dreamed about.”

The lab has won National Science Foundation funding for 25 years, and published dozens of papers.

“This has been a classic area of research since Leonardo da Vinci,” said Richard O. Prum, a professor of ornithology and ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. “Functional morphology is being left behind in a lot of places, but it’s important and they are doing some great stuff.”

Work at the Montana lab, Dr. Prum said, has led people to realize how complex flight is and how many different things are happening when a bird flies. “What they have discovered is that bird flight is like Muhammad Ali boxing, with 15 different movements,” he said.

For example, birds clap their wings together at the peak of the upstroke during takeoff — that’s the clatter of a pigeon taking off in the park — and rotate their wings on the way down to get lift. “The wings suck in air, like a fan,” Dr. Tobalske said, “and create a jet of air below it traveling at 10 miles per hour.”

The most astounding fliers, in Dr. Tobalske’s opinion, are the world’s 9,000 or so species of hummingbirds, which, largely because of their size, have mastered flight like no other bird. The calliope hummingbird weighs only as much as two paper clips, yet it migrates annually between Canada and Mexico.

In fact, a major theme in research here is how the morphology of the bird influences its behavior. The smaller the bird, for example, the more agile the flying — a swan may need the equivalent of two football fields to take off and get lift, while a hummingbird can rise like a helicopter. “It’s like a Porsche that can drive circles around a semi,” Dr. Tobalske said.

“The smaller the bird, the more viscous the air is,” he said, which is partly why hummingbirds can maneuver so well and for so long. They have evolved with greatly shortened wing bones, as well as large pectorals that allow them to beat their wings 80 times a second. “A hummingbird can hover like a helicopter for one and a half hours, nonstop,” Dr. Tobalske said. “No other bird can do that.” By comparison, pigeons pro-

duce one-tenth the number of strokes.

Implanted sensors show that a hummingbird’s wing flaps so fast that the brain is generating the muscle signal for the downbeat of its wing while the wing is still going up.

These new, deeper views into winged flight have affected other studies. Almost as an aside, the study of birds — which are widely believed to be descendants of some dinosaurs — has led Dr. Dial to a novel hypothesis.

The one-day-old Australian brush turkey, he says, may behave as theropods once did. Theropods were early winged and feathered dinosaurs that walked mainly on their hind legs and were incapable of flight.

Ground-nesting birds like the brush turkey are precocial — they hit the ground running when they are born, a crucial defense from predators. A day-old brush turkey can run straight up a rock wall or a tree, an ability that diminishes as the bird gets older.

A key to this early skill is flapping its small wings. This is not to try to fly, Dr. Dial said, but to serve the same role as a spoiler on a race car: to keep the bird on the ground so it can generate more force with its feet and climb steep walls. Dr. Dial calls it “wing-assisted incline running” and has high-speed videos of ground birds running up walls.

When the birds arrive atop a rock, and any threats have passed, they jump to the ground using their wings to slow the descent; that is how Dr. Dial believes flight may have begun. “This form of behavior — independence, locomotor capacity, parental care and development — could be similar to the life history of the theropod,” he said.

Dr. Prum called the idea intriguing.

“He’s demonstrated the phenomena exists and it’s plausible,” he said. “But other plausible alternative claims are out there.”

As far as birds informing human flight techniques, Dr. Dial said he believes that the future of human flight will incorporate birds’ remarkable shape-shifting abilities. “Birds are constantly morphing, and morphing on different levels,” he said.

“A bird can look like a bullet, and two milliseconds later looks like a hang glider,” Dr. Dial said. “We have a lot more to learn about that. Imagine a 747 blasting off its wings and tail to become a bullet.”

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

41 SCIENCE / TECH

Searching for the Source of a Fountain of Courage

By NATALIE ANGIER

I

n his 20 years as a firefighter and paramedic in Colorado Springs, Bruce Monson, 43, has had his little fist-bumps with death: a burning roof collapsing on top of him, toxic fumes nearly suffocating him.

Yet far more terrifying than any personal threats are what Mr. Monson describes as the “bad kid calls,” like the one from a mother who had put her 18-month-old son down in his crib right next to a window with a Venetian blind and its old-fashioned cord.

“The kid had grabbed the cord and gotten it twisted around his neck, and the mother came in and found him hanging there,” said Mr. Monson. “I’m the first one in the door, she’s in a panic, and she shoves the kid into my arms, crying, ‘Please save him, please save him!’ ” The child’s body was blue, but Mr. Monson and his fellows met parental despair with professional focus and did everything they could. “We worked on him for over an hour,” said Mr. Monson. “It’s like a state of calm. You’re so tuned in to what you’re doing, you’re not thinking about the reality of the situation.”

Their best was not enough, however, and later, at the hospital, the terrible sadness settled in.

As Mr. Monson filled out his report, the mother sat in the trauma room’s designated “bereavement rocking chair,” rocking her dead son, saying her goodbyes, while family members filed in and wailed at the sight.

An image of that mother in her rocking chair comes to Mr. Monson’s mind every time he answers another “bad kid” call, spurring him to keep going, to never give up or grow sloppy or cynical, to simply do his job; and through doing his job, he has saved far more lives than he has lost.

Only once did he allow the furniture connection to spook him — when his own wife was at the same hospital having emergency surgery for a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and his young daughter happened to climb onto the bereavement seat. “I knew it was a totally irrational thing to do,” he said, “but I made her get out of that chair.”

Courage is something that we want for ourselves in gluttonous portions and adore in others without qualification. Yet for all the longstanding centrality of courage to any standard narrative of human greatness, only lately have researchers begun to study it systematically, to try to define what it is and is not, where it comes from, how it manifests itself in the body and brain, who we might share it with among nonhuman animals, and why we love it so much.

A new report in the journal Current Biology describes the case of a woman whose rare congenital syndrome has left her completely, outrageously fearless, raising the question of whether it’s better to conquer one’s fears, or to never feel them in the first place.

In another recent study, neuroscientists scanned the brains of subjects as they struggled successfully to overcome their terror of snakes, identifying regions of the brain that may be key to our everyday heroics.

Researchers in the Netherlands are exploring courage among children, to see when the urge for courage first arises, and what children mean when they call themselves brave.

The theme of courage claims a long and gilded ancestry. Plato included courage among the four cardinal or principal virtues, along with wisdom, justice and moderation.

“As a major virtue, courage helps to define the excellent person and is no mere optional trait,” writes George Kateb, a political theorist and emeritus professor at Princeton University. “One of the worst reproaches in the world is to be called a coward.”

Yet defining what it means to be courageous has often proved as thistly as distinguishing the wise ones from the fools. For Plato and many other authorities, courage is above all a martial art, most readily displayed on the battlefield — the iconic brave solder running into the line of fire to retrieve an injured comrade.

But Dr. Kateb points out that if courage finds its highest expression in war, then the trait paradoxically becomes an immoral virtue, ennobling war and carnage by insisting that only in battle can men — and it usually

is men — discover the depths of their nobility.

Marilynne Robinson, the novelist and social critic, has observed that courage is “dependent on cultural definition” and “rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it.” Where religious martyrdom is lionized, there will be martyrs; where social or political protest is seen as glorious warfare in civvies, there will be a rash of red-faced declaimers, soapboxes on every street.

In pioneering work from 1970s and beyond, Stanley J. Rachman of the University of British Columbia and others studied the physiology and behavior of paratroopers as they prepared for their first parachute jump.

The work revealed three basic groups: the preternaturally fearless, who displayed scant signs of the racing heart, sweaty palms, spike in blood pressure and other fight-orflight responses associated with ordinary fear, and who jumped without hesitation; the handwringers, whose powerful fear response at the critical moment kept them from jumping; and finally, the ones who reacted physiologically like the handwringers but who acted like the fearless leapers, and, down the hatch.

These last Dr. Rachman deemed courageous, defining courage as “behavioral approach in spite of the experience of fear.”

By that expansive definition, courage becomes democratized and demilitarized, the property of any wallflower who manages to give the convention speech, or the math phobe who decides to take calculus.

Through interviews with some 320 children aged 8 to 13, Peter Muris of Erasmus University Rotterdam and his colleagues found that children also equate courage with the conquering of one’s fears, and more than 70 percent of the respondents claimed they had performed one or more brave acts, including rescuing a little brother who’d fallen in the swimming pool, saving a cat from a tree, biking home through the woods at night, and stealing money from one’s mother’s purse — yes, that will make the heart race, all right.

Joel Berger, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Montana, also distinguishes between animals that behave boldly for lack of experience — like mockingbirds unfamiliar with humans that will alight on the rim of a person’s cup to take a drink — and those that are aware of a danger but proceed in the face of it.

He cited the time he and his colleagues had immobilized a young bison in preparation for taking blood samples, and when they returned, an unrelated adult male bison was standing guard over the yearling, refusing to let the scientists approach.

“He knew that he could be attacked by us, and there was no genetic kinship involved,” said Dr. Berger. “Courage may be a human construct, but I’d call this a courageous,

even heroic act.”

Seeking to capture the sensation of courage in real time, Yadin Dudai, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues scanned the brains of people with a known phobia toward snakes as they were confronted with a live, large, harmless but indubitably serpentine corn snake.

Lying in the scanner, the subjects could choose either to allow a box holding the snake to come closer, or to keep it away.

As reported last June in the journal Neuron, the participants who squelched their terror and pressed the “snake approach” button showed activation of a brain region called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

Located toward the front of the brain, the structure has been implicated in depression and, intriguingly, altruistic behavior, and is thought to help negotiate between emotion and cognition, impulse and calculation.

The thumb-size bundle of neurons acknowledges the yellow belly within but then moves to stanch its quivering power. And it does this in large part by dialing down the activity of the amygdala, long known as the brain’s central headquarters of fear.

For the serious cowards among us, the chronic need to conquer fear can get tedious.

Why not just skip the anterior cingulate reveille and muzzle the brain’s fear response for good? The story of SM, a 44-year-old woman whose rare genetic condition has selectively destroyed the brain’s twinned set of amygdala, shows the clear downside of a life without fear.

As Justin Feinstein, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Iowa, and his colleagues describe in Current Biology, the otherwise normal SM is incapable of being spooked.

She claimed to fear snakes and spiders, and maybe she did in her pre-disease childhood, but when the researchers took her to an exotic pet store, they were astonished to see that not only did she not avoid the snakes and spiders, she was desperate to hold them close.

The researchers took SM to a haunted house, and she laughed at the scary parts and blithely made the monster-suited employees jump. She was shown clips from famous horror films like “The Silence of Lambs” and “Halloween,” and she showed no flickers of fright.

This fearlessness may be fine in the safety of one’s living room, but it turns out that SM makes her own horror films in real life. She walks through bad neighborhoods alone at night, approaches shady strangers without guile, and has been repeatedly threatened with death.

“We have an individual who’s constantly putting herself into harm’s way,” said Mr. Feinstein. “If we had a million SMs walking around, the world would be a total mess.”

The bad calls would keep coming, and the rocking chairs never stop.

42

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

For Pet Owners, Too, Toys Are a Reason for Concern

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

W

hen Lane Nemeth, who founded Discovery Toys in 1978 and sold the company to Avon two decades later, decided to start a pet products company a few years ago, one of the first things she did was to look for regulations about how to manufacture pet toys safely.

She could not find any. ‘’It was totally shocking,’’ said Ms. Nemeth, whose company, Petlane, sells items like doggie tiaras and squirrel-shaped chew toys. ‘’I was stunned because I had come from such a highly regulated industry to one that has no regulations.’’

After the pet food contamination this year, which is believed to have caused the deaths of at least 300 dogs and cats, and a spate of children’s toy recalls, which highlighted the problem of lead in products from China, pet owners have been stepping forward to ask: How safe are pet toys? ‘’We get e-mails literally every day from people across the country saying, ‘Hey, we note your product is made in China -- is it still safe for my dog or cat?’ ‘’ said Gerry Brostek, chief executive of Penn-Plax Plastics, which manufactures toys under brands like Rruff Stuff and Purr-Pet. A year ago, he said, pet owners rarely inquired about safety.

Although the concerns are different when it comes to pets -- if a golden retriever loses a few I.Q. points, will anyone notice? -- the inquiries have continued to pour in during the Christmas season, when people are most likely to buy pet toys. According to the American Pet Products Association, 56 percent of dog owners and 42 percent of cat owners buy their pets toys or other treats for Christmas, in an industry with $40 billion in annual sales.

So far, there does not seem to be any cause for serious concern. Some companies, like PetSmart, do test their products for lead, and some individual dog lovers have taken matters into their own hands (call them the helicopter parents of the pet set), but nobody has stepped forward to report egregious problems. ‘’Is there a risk to pet owners and their children who come into contact with these toys that these dogs have been slobbering on?’’ asked James R. Hood, who runs a Web site, Consu-

merAffairs.com, that recently sent dog toys purchased from Wal-Mart to a lab that found trace levels of lead and other toxins. (Wal-Mart responded in a statement that the levels the lab found were ‘’barely traceable’’ and that its own testing found the toys safe.) ‘’A lot more lead will come off something when it’s wet and it has been partially digested in a pet’s mouth,’’ Mr. Hood said. ‘’There should be standards to protect humans first, and we need to find out what level is safe in this application. Somebody needs to look into this issue.’’

Such initiative is unlikely to come from the Consumer Products Safety Commission, whose lack of resources was an issue during the recent toy recalls. In its 34-year history, the commission has never recalled a pet toy because it was deemed hazardous. ‘’We do not have jurisdiction over pet toys or pet products,’’ said Scott Wolfson, a commission spokesman. ‘’Our jurisdiction would only come into play if we found that a pet toy or pet product was causing physical harm to the owner.’’

Lead is dangerous to animals as well as people. According to the Merck/Merial Manual for Pet Health, many species are susceptible to lead poisoning, but it is most common among birds and dogs, who, like children, face higher risks in older homes with lead paint. Symptoms of lead poisoning in dogs include ‘’hysterical barking,’’ vomiting, diarrhea, convulsions and blindness.

And many pet owners do worry

about their animal’s mental faculties.

One product sold by Petlane is described this way: ‘’The Hide-A-Squirrel will not only keep dogs occupied and eliminate boredom, but it also develops a dog’s intelligence and puzzlesolving skills.’’

Nancy Rogers, who has had three dogs that died in the last four years -one from kidney problems, one from liver failure, and one from cancer -said she thinks twice about what she gives her dogs today. Ms. Rogers, 57, a registered nurse from Orland Park, Ill., said she recently checked and found all of her dog toys had ‘’Made in China’’ labels.

After going to a Petco and searching in vain for toys made elsewhere, Ms. Rogers purchased 24 toys from Petco and PetSmart and had them tested for lead at a lab at the Illinois Department of Agriculture.

All were found to fall below the federally regulated children’s toy leadcontent limit of 600 parts per million.

(The American Academy of Pediatrics wants the limit reduced to 40 parts per million.) ‘’I’m concerned that we don’t have any standards, but the levels were well below the lead point limit for children, and I thought that was good,’’ said Ms. Rogers, who paid $192 for the tests.

The lab found the most lead in a PetSmart-brand tennis ball, which had 336 parts per million of lead. Jennifer Ericsson, a PetSmart spokeswoman, said that even before safety concerns were raised, the company happened to be in the process of switching tennis

ball manufacturers and had been vigilant after the children’s toy recalls. ‘’There’s no cause for concern,’’ Ms. Ericsson said. ‘’We proactively test representative samplings of all our products and have even heightened our testing with all the news reports.’’

Toys often carry warnings that they should not be left with unsupervised pets and should be discarded at first sign of damage.

Dogs tend to ‘’eat first and think later,’’ said Bernadine Cruz, a veterinarian from Laguna Hills, Calif. ‘’I always tell new pet parents that if you thought it was difficult to childproof your house, it’s even more difficult to pet-proof your house because it’s more likely your dog will chew on electrical cords and toxic plants.’’

Parents have nothing on pet owners when it comes to fretting: the term ‘’pet food recall’’ was searched on the Internet more than twice as frequently as ‘’toy recall’’ during those respective commotions, according to Hitwise, which tracks Web use.

The lack of lead-paint restrictions for pet toys was the subject of television news reports and discussions on pet blogs like Pet Connection, Itchmo and Dogster. Web sites for home leadtesting kits started recommending their products for pet toys. ‘’When the pet food issue hit, you started getting a little bit of noise, but once the toy recalls kicked in, it really ramped up,’’ said Mr. Brostek of PennPlax Plastics.

Robert L. Vetere, president of the Pet Products Manufacturing Association, said that manufacturers were ‘’ramping up on quality control’’ and reviewing their lists of factories, many of them also makers of children’s toys.

The pet industry is unlikely to seek mandatory federal guidelines. ‘’You never invite yourself to be handcuffed and regulated,’’ Mr. Vetere said.

But Ms. Nemeth, the children’s industry veteran who now owns Petlane, said she would welcome such oversight. ‘’If lead paint is dangerous for children,’’ she said, ‘’it’s more dangerous for animals because they’re absolutely going to put it in their mouth.’’

Photos: Nancy Rogers, a nurse in Orland, Ill., paid $192 to have her dogs’ toys tested for lead paint. The results fell within acceptable levels for children’s toys; there is no federal standard for pet toys.

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

43

A Year Later, Haiti Struggles Back

By DEBORAH SONTAG

I

n 2010, Daphne Joseph, a slim, shy teenager, took a pounding from life.

She watched with horror as her mother’s mangled body was carted off in a wheelbarrow after the Jan. 12 earthquake. She fell in with a ragtag group of orphans taken under the wing of a well-meaning but ill-equipped community group. She left them unwillingly when a selfproclaimed relative took her away to use her as a servant.

And then last fall, not long before her 15th birthday, Daphne found herself in an actual home, reunited with the other orphans stranded after the disaster they all call “goudougoudou” for the terrible sound of the ground shaking. She wore a party dress; she blew out candles; she smiled.

“I believe that Daphne was a fragile, sensitive girl even before ‘goudou-goudou,’ ” said Pierre Joseph, a psychologist who counsels her.

“After, she was like a glass that got filled to the brim and then overflowed.

You could say she is still in shock. But she is finding her equilibrium.”

After a year of almost unfathomable hardship in Haiti, there is little reason to be hopeful now.

More than a million displaced people still live under tents and tarpaulins. Reconstruction, of the buildback-better kind envisioned last March, has barely begun. Officials’ sole point of pride six months after the earthquake — that disease and violence had been averted — vanished with the outbreak of cholera and political unrest over a disputed presidential election.

And indeed, for some, misery is a constant. Rose, a young woman abducted, repeatedly raped and torturously stashed in earthquake ruins last June, was forced to flee to the countryside after her kidnappers made a second attempt. Marie Claude Pierre, whose son was whisked abroad in an orphan airlift, was sad even before the earthquake. She is sadder now.

Yet despite this gloomy backdrop, many Haitians, like Daphne, have started to find some equilibrium — to heal, to rebuild or simply to readjust their sights. A dancer whose leg was amputated is walking on a new limb. A pastor whose church was

devastated is reveling in a congregation doubled in size. A businessman, stubbornly loyal to Haiti, is opening an earthquake-proof factory where his old one collapsed.

Here, haunting and hopeful, are some of their stories.

Fabienne Jean Fabienne Jean, the dancer who lost a leg in the earthquake, smiled so radiantly and expressed such courage that everybody who met or read about her wanted to help. Doctors, prosthetists, choreographers, dancers with disabilities, charitable groups — they all aspired to adopt Ms. Jean.

By early spring, Ms. Jean was struggling with conflicting offers: to be fitted here for a prosthetic limb by a New Hampshire nonprofit group or to fly to New York, where Mount Sinai Medical Center would provide corrective surgery, rehabilitation and a stay of months in the city. The foreigners’ attention was overwhelming.

After a period of agonizing indecision, Ms. Jean chose to stay in Haiti, where she felt at home. The New Yorkers were proposing a second operation to strengthen her stump. That, Ms. Jean said, was a deal-breaker. “I didn’t want another operation,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose any more of my leg.”

Recently, standing proudly on two feet, Ms. Jean led the way into her family home. Always fashionconscious, she was wearing chunky jewelry, a spaghetti-strap tunic top and slim jeans. Her new limb, ending in a stockinged foot encased in a delicate slingback flat, peeked out from beneath the cuff. Using a cane,

she gracefully, but with a slight limp, navigated the house’s challenging terrain — a sloped, rutted entryway and unfinished concrete stairs without banisters.

Ms. Jean had moved back in with her extended family after breaking up with her longtime boyfriend, also a dancer, for “reasons of the heart, nothing to do with the leg,” she said. About a week ago, she proudly settled into a rental apartment of her own, which she shares with her mother and her young daughter (a niece whom she had adopted before the earthquake).

Several times a week, Ms. Jean does pliés and arabesques as part of an exercise routine overseen by a high school senior trained as a physical therapy assistant by the New Hampshire group. That group, the Nebco Foundation, which built and fitted her limb, will be fine-tuning the socket next month and testing out feet that will allow her to dance again.

Ms. Jean looks forward to that, she said, but she added: “Realistically, there is no way I’ll be a professional performer again. So I will need another way to make a living.” She envisions a fashion boutique or a dance school.

Ms. Jean said that she did not want to be a drain on her family, which had always expected her, the oldest child and the most talented, to support them. Her father, she said, was scared after the earthquake that she would end up “in a corner, like a handicapped person.” But that is not going to happen, she said.

“There are some disabled people who think that life is over, who are ashamed,” she said, before jauntily swinging her prosthesis over her shoulder during a photo shoot. “I’m not like that. Except for the fact that I lost a part of myself on Jan. 12, I’m still Fabienne.”

The Rev. Enso Sylvert As if he had not budged since the earthquake, the Rev. Enso Sylvert sat one recent morning on the same metal chair under the same tarpaulin, now ripped, where he held court after the disaster.

In the shadow of his collapsed church on Avenue Poupelard, Pastor Sylvert was still sporting a blazing orange shirt and wrinkled yellow tie, still preaching about the end of times.

But his vow to rebuild in 2010 had been tempered by reality. The bank recently foreclosed on the property after he fell disastrously behind on loan payments because his parishioners could not afford donations. Any day now, he said, the bank will be seizing what remains of the church.

Still, the pastor insisted, just as his chorus narrowly escaped death when the church fell, just as his daughter was spared when she stood to answer a teacher’s question while the girl who slid into her seat was killed by a concrete block, so, too, would “a miracle” keep the Evangelical Church of Grace alive.

“I am certain — certain! — that we will rise again on Avenue Poupelard,” he said. “The events of Jan. 12 destroyed hundreds of church buildings. But did they kill our churches?

Ah, no. Au contraire. We don’t need roofs to pray. God is our cover.”

Beyond the church, the survivalist spirit along the hard-hit Avenue Poupelard, which pulsed so brightly right after the earthquake, chugs along wearily. People are resourceful, the pastor said, “but they carry their losses inside like nagging sorrows.”

Pastor Sylvert holds open-air services on property adjoining the church, and many are lured by the oversize speakers that blast his fiery preaching. But misery itself has been good for business, he said.

“In moments like this, with destruction all around, with electoral crisis in the air, with cholera in the water, people have only God,” he said. “God is Haiti’s only uncorrupted leader.”

Marie Claude Pierre Deep inside a maze of alleyways in the Eternal City slum, Ms. Pierre, 30, shyly welcomed visitors into the one-room shanty that she shares with a dozen relatives — but not with any of her children.

Ms. Pierre’s oldest son, Fekens, 11, has been living at a Pittsburgharea orphanage since a week after the earthquake, when he was plucked from Haiti aboard an orphan airlift engineered by Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania. As it turned out, several of the other children on that flight were not orphans, either, and did not have adoptive parents waiting for them.

Continues on page 44

44 Comes from page 43 Images of the children’s landing in Pittsburgh were broadcast worldwide, but Ms. Pierre did not know Fekens was gone until days after he left. By the time she made her way through the disaster zone to the Bresma orphanage, where Fekens and the others had been staying, it was empty. When she finally learned why, what troubled her most, she said, was that Fekens must have been trying to reach the cellphone she had lost in the earthquake to say goodbye.

A petite woman with tiny studs embedded in her front teeth, Ms. Pierre described herself as accepting without protest whatever life dealt her.

Speaking softly in a shack dominated by a bookshelf cluttered with stuffed animals, she explained how she had

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first come to lose custody of Fekens — and her four other children.

She and her ex-husband used to fight, she said, and she would flee, battered, to relatives’ homes. During one separation, her husband “made the decision to give away our children,” she said. She was granted no say, she said, but she imagined that their stay at Bresma, which she visited monthly, would be temporary.

It was, although not in the way she had expected. Four of her children were adopted by a French family before the earthquake, according to the orphanage director, Margarette St. Fleur. Only Fekens, the oldest, remained at Bresma, and “Fekens wanted to be adopted, too,” Ms. St. Fleur said.

When the earthquake struck, leaving the orphanage damaged but

standing, two Pittsburgh-area women devoted to Bresma’s children sent out an urgent appeal for their rescue, which Governor Rendell answered.

After the plane landed in Pittsburgh, the federal Department of Health and Human Services assumed legal custody of a dozen children, including Fekens, who were not in the midst of adoption proceedings. Then, in early December, the children were all cleared for adoption. Not long before that, Ms. Pierre said, Ms. St. Fleur had asked her to sign papers relinquishing her parental rights. She did.

Ms. Pierre said that she missed her children. “I hope that one day they will return to visit me,” she said.

She requested that a message be given to Fekens: “Tell him bonjour, bonsoir.

Tell him to behave and not to make problems. Send him kisses.”

Asked if that were all, she hesitated. “I know he is not working,” she said of her 11-year-old, “so I cannot ask him to wire me money.”

Alain Villard A few days after the earthquake, Alain Villard, shaking his head, surveyed the tree-shaded property in Pétionville where his boutique hotel, Villa Thérèse, lay in ruins. Ten had died there, including four Haitian children and the foreign parents who were adopting them. Several bodies lay bundled in cloth, swarming with flies.

Down in Carrefour, Mr. Villard’s large garment factory, Palm Apparel, had been flattened, and the death toll appeared to be in the hundreds. A worker’s putrefying corpse dangled out the window from which she had tried to leap to safety.

Floods Take Toll on Australia Economy

By AUBREY BELFORD

C

hurning floodwaters continued to rise across a vast stretch of northeastern Australia as the authorities worked to grapple with the multibillion-dollar economic toll from record inundations that have killed at least nine people.

Rain predicted for Wednesday is expected to worsen flooding that has struck the state of Queensland, said Jimmy Stuart, a senior hydrologist at the state branch of the Bureau of Meteorology. At least 200,000 people have been affected since heavy rains and floods in late December struck the state, where flooding is a seasonal regularity.

Queensland’s government is expected to hold an emergency cabinet meeting on Wednesday to develop a strategy to deal with the cost of the disaster to its agricultural and mining sectors, said Kimberley Gardiner, a spokeswoman for the state premier, Anna Bligh. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has pledged assistance to flood victims.

“To be frank, there aren’t many industries that haven’t been affected in Queensland,” Ms. Bligh’s spokeswoman said. State authorities and private aircraft had been carrying out airdrops of feed to livestock stranded in flooded fields, she said.

Of particular concern is damage to fruit crops and cotton, which supply both the domestic and export market, and Queensland’s production of coking coal, which is used in the production of steel. Queensland produces about

one-third of the world’s supply of the commodity.

Flooded mines and transport disruptions, which have left export stocks dwindling at the port of Gladstone, mean the coal industry could take months to recover, pushing up global prices, the spokeswoman said.

Helen Lau, an analyst for the Hong Kong offices of UOB Kay Hian, said prices of Australian coking coal exports on Tuesday were at $230 a ton and may peak at up to $270 a ton in the coming weeks. Australian exports of thermal coal, used for power plants, were at $130 a ton and could peak at $140 a ton, she said.

“The blue-sky scenario is prices and shipments will be affected for six weeks,” Ms. Lau said. “The worst case would be up to three months.”

The chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council, Michael Roche, said the floods had already cost the state’s coal industry about $1 billion in

damages. About a dozen mines have been flooded while others are running at reduced capacity, he said.

“It’s going to be hard work to get that back into full production,” Mr. Roche told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Mines have a lot of water to deal with, and so we’ll be talking to the Queensland government about some practical measures to safely get rid of excess water.”

Howard Au, chairman of Hong Kong-based Petrocom Energy Limited, was optimistic that the impact on coal shipments from Australia would last for weeks, rather than months.

“If these floods happened in other developed countries, I would say it would take longer to return to normal production,” Mr. Au said.

Floodwaters have still not reached expected peaks in some areas, including the city of Rockhampton, where water more than 30 feet high in some places has cut off all but one road out of

town and the military has been called in to help with supplies, said Alistair Dawson, acting assistant commissioner of the Queensland police.

“This is a prolonged flooding event in Queensland, and it is unlikely to recede in the very near future,” he said. “And we expect that once the peaks have been reached in and around a lot of these centers that the waters will remain high, that is about major flood levels, for some days after that event.”

The authorities have warned residents against venturing into the muddy waters that have swamped farms and 22 towns and cities across the sparsely populated tropical state, warning of both raging currents and dangerous animals like snakes and crocodiles.

Tony Higgins, the owner of the Fitzroy Hotel pub in Rockhampton, said he had stayed open serving beer and soft drinks despite a lack of electricity since Sunday and floodwaters that had reached his front veranda.

“I’ve had about four or five boats here most of the time,” Mr. Higgins said. “They come up to the veranda and off they get — police, journalists, that sort of thing.” Local residents were a “resilient mob” who had long anticipated the flood damage, he said.

Dozens of snakes had taken over the backyard beer garden of the hotel, Mr. Higgins said.

“I reckon the snakes are using it as a lap pool to get ready for the next stage of their journey,” he said. “You wouldn’t know what’s in the water, you really wouldn’t know. It’s a bad place to be.”

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45

Europe’s Young Grow Agitated Over Future Prospects

By RACHEL DONADIO

F

rancesca Esposito, 29 and exquisitely educated, helped win millions of euros in false disability and other lawsuits for her employer, a major Italian state agency. But one day last fall she quit, fed up with how surreal and ultimately sad it is to be young in Italy today.

It galled her that even with her competence and fluency in five languages, it was nearly impossible to land a paying job. Working as an unpaid trainee lawyer was bad enough, she thought, but doing it at Italy’s social security administration seemed too much. She not only worked for free on behalf of the nation’s elderly, who have generally crowded out the young for jobs, but her efforts there did not even apply to her own pension.

“It was absurd,” said Ms. Esposito, a strong-willed woman with a healthy sense of outrage.

The outrage of the young has erupted, sometimes violently, on the streets of Greece and Italy in recent weeks, as students and more radical anarchists protest not only specific austerity measures in flattened economies but a rising reality in Southern Europe: People like Ms. Esposito feel increasingly shut out of their own futures. Experts warn of volatility in state finances and the broader society as the most highly educated generation in the history of the Mediterranean hits one of its worst job markets.

Politicians are slowly beginning to take notice. Italy’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, devoted his year-end message on Friday to “the pervasive malaise among young people,” weeks after protests against budget cuts to the university system brought the issue to

the fore.

Giuliano Amato, an economist and former Italian prime minister, was even more blunt. “By now, only a few people refuse to understand that youth protests aren’t a protest against the university reform, but against a general situation in which the older generations have eaten the future of the younger ones,” he recently told Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest newspaper.

The daughter of a fireman and a high school teacher, Ms. Esposito was the first in her family to graduate from college and the first to study foreign languages. She has an Italian law degree and a master’s from Germany and was an intern at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. It has not helped.

“I have every possible certificate,” Ms. Esposito said dryly. “I have everything except a death certificate.”

Even before the economic crisis hit, Southern Europe was not an easy place to forge a career. Low growth and a corrosive lack of meritocracy have long posed challenges to finding a job in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. Today, with the added sting of austerity, more people are left fighting over fewer opportunities. It is a zerosum game that inevitably pits younger workers struggling to enter the labor market against older ones already occupying precious slots.

As a result, a deep malaise has set in among young people. Some take to the streets in protest; others emigrate to Northern Europe or beyond in an epic brain drain of college graduates.

But many more suffer in silence, living in their childhood bedrooms well into adulthood because they cannot afford to move out.

“They call us the lost generation,”

said Coral Herrera Gómez, 33, who has a Ph.D. in humanities but still lives with her parents in Madrid because she cannot find steady work. “I’m not young,” she added over coffee recently, “but I’m not an adult with a job, either.”

There has been a national debate for years in Spain about “mileuristas,” a nickname for college graduates whose best job prospects may well pay just 1,000 euros a month, or $1,300.

Ms. Herrera is at the lower end of the spectrum. Fed up with earning 600 euros a month, or $791, under the table as a children’s drama teacher, Ms. Herrera said she had decided to move to Costa Rica this month to teach at a university.

As she spoke in a cafe in Madrid, a television on the wall featured a report on the birthday of a 106-year-old woman who said that eating blood sausage was the secret to her longevity.

The contrast could not have been stronger. Indeed, experts warn of a looming demographic disaster in Southern Europe, which has among the lowest birth rates in the Western world. With pensioners living longer and young people entering the work force later — and paying less in taxes because their salaries are so low — it is only a matter of time before state coffers run dry.

“What we have is a Ponzi scheme,” said Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University and an expert in fiscal policy.

He said that pay-as-you-go social security and health care were a looming fiscal disaster in Southern Europe and beyond. “If these fertility rates continue through time, you won’t have Italians, Spanish, Greeks, Portuguese or Russians,” he said. “I imagine the Chinese will just move into Southern Europe.”

The problem goes far beyond youth unemployment, which is at 40 percent in Spain and 28 percent in Italy.

It is also about underemployment. Today, young people in Southern Europe are effectively exploited by the very mechanisms created a decade ago to help make the labor market more flexible, like temporary contracts.

Because payroll taxes and firing costs are still so high, businesses across Southern Europe are loath to hire new workers on a full-time basis, so young people increasingly are offered unpaid or low-paying internships, traineeships or temporary contracts that do not offer the same benefits or protections.

“This is the best-educated generation in Spanish history, and they are entering a job market in which they are underutilized,” said Ignacio Fernández Toxo, the leader of the Comisiones Obreras, one of Spain’s two largest labor unions. “It is a tragedy for the country.”

Yet many young people in Southern Europe see labor union leaders like Mr. Fernández, and the leftwing parties with which they have been historically close, as part of the problem. They are seen as exacerbating a two-tier labor market by protecting a caste of tenured older workers rather than helping younger workers enter the market.

For Dr. Kotlikoff, the solution is simple: “We have to change the labor laws. Not gradually, but quickly.”

Yet in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, any change in national contracts involves complex negotiations among governments, labor unions and businesses — a delicate dance in which each faction fights furiously for its interests.

Because older workers tend to be voters, labor reform remains a third rail to most politicians. Asked at a news conference last year about changing Italy’s de facto two-tier system, Italy’s center-right finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, said simply, “You can’t make violent changes to the system.”

New austerity measures in Spain, where the overall unemployment rate is 20 percent, the highest in the European Union, are further narrowing the employment window. Spain has pledged to raise its retirement age to 67 from 65, but incrementally over the next 20 years.

“Now people are being sent into early retirement at age 55,” said Sara Sanfulgencio, 28, who has a master’s degree in marketing but is unemployed and living in Madrid with her mother, who owns a children’s shoe store.

“But if I haven’t started working by age 28 and I already have to stop at 55, it’s absurd.”

In Italy, Ms. Esposito is finishing her lawyer traineeship at a private firm in Lecce. It pays little but sits better on her conscience than her unpaid work for the government.

“I’m a repentant college graduate,” she said. “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t go to college and would just start working.”

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January 13 - 19, 2011

For Tolstoy and Russia, Still No Happy Ending

By ELLEN BARRY and SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

A

couple of months ago one of Russia’s elder statesmen set out on a paradoxical mission: to rehabilitate one of the most beloved figures in Russian history, Tolstoy.

This would have seemed unnecessary in 2010, a century after the author’s death.

But last year Russians wrestled over Tolstoy much as they did when he was alive.

Intellectuals accused the Russian Orthodox Church of blacklisting a national hero. The church accused Tolstoy of helping speed the rise of the Bolsheviks. The melodrama of his last days, when he fled his family estate to take up the life of an ascetic, was revived in all its pulpy detail, like some kind of early-stage reality television.

And in a country that rarely passes up a public celebration, the anniversary of his death, on Nov. 20, 1910, was not commemorated by noisy galas or governmentfinanced cinematic blockbusters. Officially speaking, it was barely noted at all.

With this in mind Sergei V. Stepashin, a former prime minister here, sat down to write to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has become an arbiter of politics and culture. In painstakingly diplomatic language, acknowledging “the particular sensitivity” of “this delicate theme,” Mr. Stepashin asked forgiveness on behalf of Tolstoy, who was excommunicated 110 years ago.

The impulse had swelled up during a lonely visit to an unmarked mound of earth where Tolstoy is buried. Mr. Stepashin described the visit — made while he was Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) remains excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church.

director of the Federal Security Service, successor to the K.G.B. — as an emotional experience that he has never been able to shake off.

“You look at the house where he lived and worked, where he created his works, and then you come to a place where there is nothing but this small hill,” said Mr. Stepashin, who has close ties to the church. “It was puzzling, on a human and a moral plane. And then I decided to write this letter.”

Ambivalence toward Tolstoy is new in Russia.

The Soviets planted him at the top of their literary pantheon, largely because of the radical philosophy he preached amid the early rumblings of the October Revolution. The publication of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” made Tolstoy so famous that one contemporary described him as Russia’s second czar. He used that position to rail against the church, as well as the police, the army, meat eating, private property and all forms of violence.

Lenin loved Tolstoy’s “pent-up hatred.” He anointed him “the mirror of the Russian Revolution,” ignoring his pacifism and belief in God. As the 50th anniversary of his death approached, the Central Committee of the Communist Party began preparing two years in advance, so a monument would be ready for unveiling.

For the centennial, in a Russia wary of utopian thought, there was nothing of the kind. By contrast, Chekhov received lavish official tributes in 2010 for his 150th birthday, including a birthplace visit from President Dmitri A. Medvedev.

Though a star-studded Tolstoy biopic, “The Last Station,” opened in Moscow just ahead of the anniversary, it was filmed in Germany, acted by Britons and directed by an American. The Russian filmmaker Andrei S. Konchalovsky, a producer of the film, said he petitioned “every ministry” in the Russian government for support. In the end, he said, he was forced to invest his own money.

“I represent Russia,” he said, with a wry smile, while promoting the film.

None of this came as a surprise to Vladimir I. Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s great-greatgrandson, who oversees the museum at Yasnaya Polyana, the author’s estate.

Mr. Tolstoy, 48, has the slender, avid look of a professional intellectual, but his last name has called on him to wade into politics. He worked on one of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s presidential campaigns and does favors for area officials when they need “the authority or prestige of Tolstoy,” as he put it.

Ten years ago he asked the church to revisit the 1901 ruling that excommunicated his great-great-grandfather. He received no answer. Though his efforts have not ended — a visitor to Yasnaya Polyana recalled a

Vladimir I. Tolstoy, his great-great grandson, at the author’s estate, now a museum. banquet table laid out in the orchard for the local bishop — Mr. Tolstoy said he was not hopeful.

Aside from a reception held by the minister of culture, the anniversary transpired with “a conscious ignoring of Tolstoy,” he said.

“Any power tries to adapt great people to its needs,” he added. “The current authorities don’t adapt him, or they are not clever enough. Maybe they are so self-confident they don’t think they need to.”

It was a relief when Mr. Stepashin joined the effort. The men met about 15 years ago, when Mr. Stepashin, then director of the Federal Security Service, presented Mr. Tolstoy with sheaves of family letters pulled out of Soviet intelligence files. Mr. Stepashin, who recalls staying up two nights as a 10-year-old so that he could finish Tolstoy’s novel “Resurrection,” shared the sense that the writer was getting short shrift.

“I understood that there would not likely be a decision to return him to the church,” said Mr. Stepashin, now president of the Russian Book Union. “But as for the attitude to him as a person, as a person who did a lot for Russian culture and for the Russian language, I just counted on that, on a change of attitude toward him.”

The church’s letter of response, published in a state-run newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, suggested not. It acknowledged Tolstoy’s “unforgettable, beautiful works,” and said Russian Orthodox readers were allowed to say solitary prayers for him on the anniversary of his death.

But its tone was mournful, calling Tolstoy the most “tragic personality” in the history of Russian literature. It said that Tolstoy “purposely used his great talent to destroy Russia’s traditional spiritual and

social order” and that it was “no accident that the leader of the Bolsheviks extremely valued the aim of Leo Tolstoy’s activity.” So there could be no candles burned for Tolstoy inside Orthodox churches and no commemorations read, according to the letter, signed by the cultural council secretary to Patriarch Kirill I, the church’s leader.

Mr. Stepashin said he expected this response and was glad the letter included some praise.

But intellectuals did not hide their astonishment.

“It’s as if in the 20th century the church did not survive persecution that made Tolstoy’s criticisms look like childish prattle,” wrote the literary critic Pavel V. Basinsky, whose new book examines Tolstoy’s final days. “It’s as if we have found ourselves in the situation that we were in at the beginning of the last century.”

And, as in the last century, much of the discussion surrounding the Tolstoy centennial was akin to gossip. Mr. Basinsky’s book is part of a wave of new works that, like the film “The Last Station,” plunge into Tolstoy’s flight from the family estate — the moment when he seemed finally to choose his radical ideas over the aristocratic comforts of home. He died a few days later at a train station, surrounded by throngs of reporters.

At the time of Tolstoy’s death, Russian pundits cast his decision as a spiritual triumph, but the new works retell it as a family tragedy, said William Nickell, author of “The Death of Tolstoy.” From this perspective, Tolstoy’s wife is a sympathetic figure, his followers are manipulative parasites and his ideas are hopelessly utopian.

“It is as if he is lumped now with communism,” Mr. Nickell said. “Good idea in principle, but a disaster in practice.”

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47

Fort San Felipe Del Morro L

ies on the northwestern-most point of the islet of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Named in honor of King Philip II of Spain, the fort, also referred to as el Morro or promontory, was designed to guard the entrance to the San Juan Bay, and defend the city of Old San Juan from seaborne enemies. In 1983, during the Reagan Administration, the fort was declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations in conjunction with the San Juan National Historic Site.

Over two (2) million visitors a year explore the windswept ramparts and passageways making the fort one of Puerto Rico’s main visitor attractions.

Facing the structure, on the opposite side of the bay, a smaller fort known as El Cañuelo complemented the fort’s defense of the entrance to the bay.

The construction of the Fort San Felipe del Morro began in 1539 when King Charles V of Spain authorized its construction, including the surrounding walls. The purpose was to defend the port of San Juan.It was also constructed to control the entry to the harbor. Construction started the same year with a tiny proto-fortress that was “completed” in 1589.

This small section comprises perhaps 10% of the structure people see today.

In 1587, engineers Juan de Tejada and Juan Bautista Antonelli designed the actual appearance of the castle following well established Spanish military fortification design principles. Similar Spanish fortifications of the 17th-18th centuries can be seen

in Cuba, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Veracruz and Acapulco, Mexico, Portobello and Panama City, Panamá,and many other Latin American locations which were governed as part of the Spanish Empire during the Age of Exploration. The first fort of the Americas, Fort San Felipe, was built in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic in 1540. Many complex additional new structures were added to El Morro over the next 400 years.

The outer walls are six meters thick.

In 1680, Governor Enrique Enríquez de Sotomayor begun the construction of the walls surrounding the city of San Juan, which took 48 years.

By the late 18th century, El Morro’s walls had grown to be 18 feet (5.5 m) thick. Today El Morro has six levels that rise from sea level to 145 feet (44 m) high. All along the walls are seen the dome-covered sentry boxes known as garitas, which have become a cultural symbol of Puerto Rico itself. The El Morro or Port San Juan Light was built atop the fort in 1843, but in 1908, it was replaced by the US military with the current lighthouse.

Including the exterior open killing grounds, known as the glacis and esplanade, dominated by cannon in the 17th and 18th centuries, El Morro can be said to take up over 70 acres (280,000 m²).

During the Spanish occupation of the island, El Morro survived several attacks from foreign powers on various occasions. In 1595, Sir Francis Drake from England attacked San Juan with his fleet. He fai-

led, however, when Spanish gunners shot a cannonball through his cabin.

In 1598, the British attacked again led

by George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland. Clifford succeeded because he entered San Juan through land instead of entering through the San Juan Bay and El Morro. However, an epidemic of dysentery forced him to flee the island.

El Morro The Dutch, led by Boudewijn Hendricksz, also attacked the island following George Clifford’s idea of invading through land. The cannons of El Morro managed to make them retire, although the Dutch were able to sack and burn the city before leaving. El Morro’s last active fight occurred during a naval bombardment by the United States Navy during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Ending the age of naval warfare in the Caribbean, at least in the classical sense. However, the United States’ first shots of World War I were fired from

the fort’s battery in 1915. The short war ended with the signing of Treaty of Paris. Spain ceded ownership of the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines to the United States. El Morro and many other Spanish government buildings in Old San Juan then became part of a large U.S. Army post, called Fort Brooke. In the early 20th century, the U.S. military filled up the esplanade, or green space in front of “El Morro” with baseball diamonds, hospitals, officers’ quarters, an officers’ club and even a golf course.

During the Spanish-American War, the castle was attacked at least three times by American naval forces, the most major of which being the Bombardment of San Juan on May 12, 1898. On March 21, 1915, Lt. Teofilo Marxuach was the officer of the day at El Morro Castle. The Odenwald, built in 1903 (not to be confused with the German World War II war ship

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Morro’s cannon would have had in colonial Spanish times. Parking lots and paved roads were also removed, and the El Morro lighthouse repaired and restored to its original appearance. El Morro was used as a film set in the 1996 motion picture Amistad.

Steven Spielberg used it to represent a fort in Sierra Leone where African

Comes from page 47 which carried the same name), was an armed German supply ship which tried to force its way out of the bay and deliver supplies to the German submarines waiting in the Atlantic Ocean. Lt. Marxuach gave the order to open fire on the ship from the walls of the fort. The Odenwald was forced to return and its supplies were confiscated.[1] The shots ordered by Lt. Marxuach have been considered as the first fired by the United States in World War I. The first actual wartime shot fired by the U.S. came on the day war was declared, during the Scuttling of SMS Cormoran off another small American island, Guam.

During World War II the United States Army added a massive concrete bunker to the top of El Morro to serve as a Harbor Defense Fire Control Station to direct a network of coastal artillery sites, and to keep watch for German submarines which were ravaging shipping in the Caribbean. A

lighthouse, rebuilt by the U.S. Army in 1906–08 is the tallest point on El Morro, standing 180 feet (55 m) above sea level. Flagpoles on El Morro today customarily fly the United States flag, the Puerto Rican flag and the Cross of Burgundy Flag, also known in Spanish as las Aspas de Borgoña, a standard which was widely used

by Spanish armies around the world from 1506–1785.

One of many iconic garitas In 1961, the United States Army officially retired from El Morro. The fort became a part of the National Park Service to be preserved as museums. In 1983, the Fort was declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations. In honor of the Quincentennial of the voyages of Columbus in 1992 the exterior esplanade was cleared of palm trees that had been planted by the U.S. Army in the Fort Brooke era, and restored to the open appearance this “field-of-fire” for El

slaves were auctioned in 1839. The real history of Castillo de San Felipe del Morro in Puerto Rico has absolutely nothing to do with the slave trade. No such activity took place on or near El Morro. El Morro was strictly a defensive military fortification and a major component of San Juan’s harbor defense system.

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In Kanazawa, Japan, Ancient Beauty Fuses With Modern Art The imperial Kanazawa Castle is the former home of the Maeda clan, who ruled the area for nearly 300 years. The original castle was built in the 16th century, but through the years, fires repeatedly destroyed it, so it has been rebuilt several times.

The most recent renovations include the re-installment of the castle moat, and this past spring, the reconstructed front gate and rear turret.

But it’s the Kenrokuen Garden that is the finest — and most enduring — attraction.

The meticulously groomed garden incorporates the six characteristics — spaciousness, tranquillity, artifice, antiquity, aquatic elements and panoramic views — that collectively create the ideal, balanced Japanese garden.

By INGRID K. WILLIAMS

O

N a sunny early November afternoon in the Japanese city of Kanazawa, the alchemy of autumn had already begun transforming the city’s beloved Kenrokuen Garden from an oasis of leafy greens into a gold-tinged sanctuary. Workers were busy constructing yukitsuri — thick ropes tied to fragile tree branches, intended to brace them against heavy snowfalls — in dramatic pyramids that soar over the gnarled wood. And the transformation continues as the seasons progress.

“It’s so beautiful, like a black-andwhite calligraphy,” Masaki Yokokawa, the owner of Guest House Pongyi, a small hostel that opened in 2009, said of the garden in winter. And when the icy chill eventually gives way to springtime, the awakening branches will bloom with feathery pink and white cherry blossoms.

With distinct, captivating looks for each season, the garden is the year-round star attraction in Kanazawa, a history-rich city in the Ishikawa Prefecture on Japan’s western coast.

The garden is “a national treasure,” said Junko Morita, an English-speaking liaison who works at one of the city’s tourist offices. “All Japanese know about it.”

It is also part of the rich traditional side of the city, along with a feudal-era castle, well-preserved geisha districts and a dazzling “ninja” temple.

The historic sights now have contemporary company in the form of some

decidedly modern attractions that have opened in the last few years. This fusion of the old and the new means that the city spans the centuries in just a few miles. And though, as Ms. Morita noted, Kanazawa has always been on the radar of the Japanese, an increasing number of foreigners are being pulled in by the city’s eye-opening range of temptations.

The tourism office where Ms. Morita works, the city’s second, opened last year as part of an extensive effort by the city to accommodate international visitors to Kanazawa. To that end, the city now boasts a comprehensive tourism Web site and straightforward, easy-to-navigate tourist bus routes. In May, a group called the Goodwill Guide Network began offering free English-language tours of the garden and the adjacent Kanazawa Castle.

In 2004, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art opened in a striking circular glass building designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, winners of the 2010 Pritzker Prize. Inside, pieces

by Japanese artists like Noboru Tsubaki share space with works by James Turrell, Anish Kapoor and Jan Fabre. Outside, the periphery is also sprinkled with artworks, including “Colour activity house,” a spiral-shaped, multihued glass installation by Olafur Eliasson that was unveiled this year.

Modern and ancient styles come together at Kanazawa’s train station, which was revamped in 2005 to include a colossal glass-and-steel dome fronted by an equally large and impressive traditional wooden gate. The station will soon wel-

come the Shinkansen, Japan’s bullet train, when an extension of the Hokuriku line is completed in 2014. With a direct, highspeed line from Tokyo, travel time between the cities will be cut from about four hours to two and a half. Though this change will most likely be a boon for business and tourism, some residents are wary.

“Some people say that if the Shinkansen comes, the tourists won’t stay in Kanazawa, they will do daytrips,” said Mr. Yokokawa, the guesthouse owner. But for now, “the people who come to Kanazawa want to know Japan more deeply” and visitors are duly rewarded with a glimpse of the real Japan.

Complementing all that glorious ar-

chitecture is the still-flourishing tradition of Japanese handicrafts — lacquerware, pottery, kimono design and gold leaf (99 percent of Japanese gold leaf is produced in the city) — which earned the city a Unesco City of Crafts and Folk Art designation in 2009. With tree-lined canals, wood-paneled teahouses and temple-dotted hills, Kanazawa is reminiscent of another well-preserved, though markedly more touristy Japanese city, Kyoto.

“Kanazawa is called ‘small Kyoto’ because the ambience is similar,” said Mr. Yokokawa, though the cities also share a history. Like Kyoto, “in World War II the

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Visitors can get an authentic peek into feudal Japan in the Higashi Chaya District, one of only three culturally designated chaya, or entertainment, districts in the country. The area’s narrow streets are lined with two-story wooden teahouses, where geisha once entertained wealthy, sake-drinking clients.

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The San Juan Weekly

of the geisha performances took place.

For a glimpse into a world filled with Americans didn’t bomb Kanazawa, a different sort of intrigue, the Myoryuji so many of the city’s old traditional things Temple, commonly called the Ninja Temremain,” said Sakumi Sakai, a retired Ka- ple, is unparalleled. Though the tour guinazawa resident who was in the middle des insist there is no connection to furtive of an English lesson with Ms. Morita at masked men, the 23-room temple has all the tourist center. the trappings you would expect from a ninBut it’s the garden that is the finest ja hideout — hidden passageways, pitfalls, — and most enduring — attraction. trap doors, optical illusions. Even the ex“This is one of the three most beau- ternal structure is deceiving: what appears tiful landscaped gardens in Japan,” said to be a two-story temple actually includes Noboru Orito, a volunteer tour guide for four stories with seven internal levels, part the Goodwill Guide Network. It’s an oft- of an elaborately layered maze. uttered sentiment, as is the fact that the This emphasis on refinement and meticulously groomed garden incorpora- complexity can be found in Kanazawa’s tes the six characteristics — spaciousness, food scene, which centers around elaboOutside the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, the periphery is tranquillity, artifice, antiquity, aquatic ele- rate meals that rival any kaiseki in Kyoto, sprinkled with artworks, including “Colour activity house,” a spiral-shaped, ments and panoramic views — that collec- and boisterous izakayas, or gastropubs, multihued glass installation by Olafur Eliasson that was unveiled this year. tively create the ideal, balanced Japanese serving endless cups of local sake and garden. “Gardens with all six features are plates of fresh vegetables from the nearby very rare,” he added.

Kaga plains. But the one dining experienAdjacent to the garden is the impe- ce that nearly every local recommends is rial Kanazawa Castle, the former home kaiten, or conveyor-belt, sushi. of the Maeda clan, who ruled the area for “Kaiten sushi started here,” said Ms. nearly 300 years. The original castle was Morita from the tourist office, explaining built in the 16th century, but through the that the company that manufactures the years, fires repeatedly destroyed it, so it miniature conveyor belts, which wind has been rebuilt several times. The most along a sushi bar transporting tiny plates recent renovations include the re-insta- to hungry diners, is based in Kanazawa. llment of the castle moat, and this past And since the nearby Sea of Japan suspring, the reconstructed front gate and pplies the city with fresh, locally caught rear turret. seafood year-round, the bounty, like the Although the castle is impressive, Kenrokuen Garden, can be enjoyed in any visitors can get an authentic peek into feu- season. dal Japan in the Higashi Chaya District, IF YOU GO one of only three culturally designated From Tokyo, the train to Kanazawa chaya, or entertainment, districts in the typically takes four to five hours and reAt one carefully preserved Edo-era chaya house, the museumlike Shima, country. The area’s narrow streets are li- quires at least one change. Schedules and visitors can sip tea and explore tatami-matted rooms where some of the geisha performances took place. ned with two-story wooden teahouses, ticket prices vary; a useful, comprehensiwhere geisha once entertained wealthy, ve search engine in English can be found sake-drinking clients. At one carefully at hyperdia.com. niwa/kenrokuen/e/index.html) to the dollar. preserved Edo-era chaya house, the mu- WHAT TO SEE Kanazawa Castle (Marunouchi; For something different, reserve seumlike Shima, visitors can sip tea and Kenrokuen Garden (Kenroku-ma81-76-234-3800; pref.ishikawa.jp/siro- the Japanese-style room (6,000 yen for explore tatami-matted rooms where some chi; 81-76-234-3800; pref.ishikawa.jp/sironiwa/kanazawajou/e/index.html) two people) at the backpacker favorite Shima (1-13-21 Higashiyama; Guest House Pongyi (2-22 Rokumai-ma81-76-252-5675; ochaya-shima.com) chi; 81-76-225-7369; english.pongyi.com), The museum opened in 2004 in a striking circular glass building designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, winners of the 2010 Pritzker Prize. Inside, At Myoryuji Temple (1-2-12 No- which opened in 2009. pieces by Japanese artists like Noboru Tsubaki share space with works by James machi; 81-76-241-0888), advance reser- WHERE TO EAT Turrell, Anish Kapoor, Jan Fabre and Michael Lin, seen here. vations are required for tours, which are Mori Mori Sushi (Forus 6F; 3-1 Hogiven only in Japanese. Tour guides will, rikawa-shinmachi; 81-76-265-3510), on however, provide an illustrated, English- the sixth floor of the Forus department language booklet with a summary of the store next to the train station, is the handstour. down local favorite for kaiten sushi. Don’t 21st Century Museum of Contempo- miss the bincyo maguro toro and unagi. rary Art (1-2-1 Hirosaka; 81-76-220-2800; For a more refined experience, kanazawa21.jp) try Komatsu Yasuke (APA Hotel KanaWHERE TO STAY zawa-Katamachi 1F; 2-21 Ikeda-machi; Luxury is scant in Kanazawa, but 81-76-261-6809), considered one of the there is a cluster of standard business ho- best sushi restaurants in Japan. Reservatels conveniently situated near the train tions required. station.

Shikino-An (Koide 1F; 19-4 TakaokaOne comfortable, inexpensive op- cho; 81-76-232-6844) is a cozy spot along tion is the Dormy Inn Kanazawa (2-25 the canal northeast of Nagamachi, the soHorikawa-shinmachi; 81-76-263-9888; called samurai district, and the ideal place hotespa.net/hotels/kanazawa) with do- to warm up with some soba, miso soup ubles from 6,600 yen, about $80 at 82 yen and crispy tempura vegetables.

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January 13 - 19, 2011

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Advertising

Mocked as Uncool, the Minivan Rises Again

By NICK BUNKLEY

C

ould driving a minivan, the ultimate embodiment of the suburban family vehicle, ever be considered cool?

The automakers are trying mightily to persuade us.

In marketing campaigns featuring heavy-metal theme songs, rapping parents, secret agents in cat masks, pyrotechnics and even Godzilla, minivan makers are trying to recast the much-ridiculed mom-mobile as something that parents can be proud — or at least unashamed — of driving.

Toyota led the effort early last spring with a campaign for its Sienna model that features a self-indulgent couple rapping about rolling through the cul-de-sacs with their posse of kids in their “Swagger Wagon.”

“The stories we heard were, ‘I just don’t want to be seen in a minivan. I don’t like being the soccer-mom joke or feeling like I’ve given up all trace of my identity to be a parent,’ ” said Richard Bame, Toyota’s national marketing manager for trucks and minivans.

Other automakers have jumped on the theme, too. For example, in a series of ads that began this fall, Honda claims its 2011 Odyssey “beckons like no van before.”

One spot deploys a song by the metal rockers Judas Priest to awe a grocery-toting father with the van’s capabilities. In another, a couple seeking a romantic night out finds an Odyssey with rose petals spilling out of the sliding doors, chocolate-covered strawberries in a cooler compartment and a fire crackling on the rear-seat video screen.

Chrysler, which invented minivans in 1983, plans to offer a high-powered version of its 2011 Dodge Grand Caravan, aimed at fathers, which it has nicknamed the “man van.”

And Ford Motor, which stopped making minivans in 2006, is jumping back into the game with the diminutive C-Max. The seven-passenger vehicle is about two feet shorter than the Odyssey and Sienna and offers high-tech features like sensors that allow drivers to open the rear liftgate simply by waving a leg under the bumper.

Ford calls the C-Max a compact “people mover” and hopes its European design will make the vehicle practical for families without the unflattering “minivan” label. “Many are hard pressed to notice it has sliding doors. That wasn’t by accident,” said a Ford spokesman, Said Deep.

Having spent recent years making minivans more child-friendly through amenities like dual-screen entertainment systems and reconfigurable seating, the automakers are now focused on making them

more appealing to adults, especially men, who have shied away from the vehicles and their connotations. Nearly every minivan sold in the United States has been redesigned in 2010 to offer flashier looks, more advanced technology and a sportier ride.

Making a minivan seem hip might be a stretch, but the new marketing efforts seem to be paying dividends, although the vehicles remain a small niche of the auto market.

The Toyota Sienna spots have become a Web sensation. The original ad drew more than 7.8 million views on YouTube, and the term “swagger wagon” — coined by the actor playing the father, Brian Huskey — has been adopted by some parents as a generic term for minivans.

Analysts credit the Toyota campaign with helping to increase sales of the Sienna by 18.5 percent through November — double the industry average for minivans and a rare bright spot for Toyota, whose overall sales have been flat since bad publicity over product recalls.

Sales of the Honda Odyssey are up 42 percent since October, when the 2011 model and new ad campaigns were introduced.

Colin McGraw, who has three young daughters and is expecting a fourth child in March, bought a 2011 Odyssey after discovering that most crossovers, which provide the capacity of a sport utility vehicle or minivan but are generally smaller and have four hinged doors, offered less cargo space and lower fuel economy.

“Minivans just make more sense for families,” said Mr. McGraw, a software consultant in Castle Rock, Colo. “They’re easier to get kids in and out of.”

At the Weymouth Honda dealership near Boston, the general manager, Jason Tobias, said the new Odyssey, with a bold new exterior that has been described as ugly in some reviews, has been gaining fans rapidly. Each one arrives on the lot already sold, and there is a waiting list for the top-end Touring Elite trim level, which

sells for more than $40,000.

“With the new design, I think that it’s changed a lot of people’s opinions,” Mr. Tobias said. “So many people used to say, ‘I’ll never drive a minivan,’ and then, guess what? It’s called children.”

Chrysler just started shipping the updated versions of the Town & Country and Dodge Grand Caravan to dealers last month, but their sales rose even before that as Chrysler ramped up its advertising. One of the seemingly nonsensical — and certainly nontraditional — commercials showed suitclad adults donning cat and mouse masks to prepare for a gang-style fight.

Minivans have a long way to go before coming even close to regaining the popularity they enjoyed a decade ago. They account for just 4 percent of all new-vehicle sales in the United States, compared with 20 percent for crossovers, according to Autodata, which tracks industry sales.

Automakers were on pace to sell about 450,000 minivans last year, a 9.3 percent increase from 2009 but far below the peak of 1.37 million in 2000. And the growth in minivan sales trails the overall domestic auto industry, which grew 11.1 percent through November.

Jack Nerad, editorial director at the

Kelley Blue Book, which provides information about vehicles to consumers, said he thought the minivan segment was no longer shrinking. But whether it can grow again depends on how much the automakers can shed the stigma of vans.

“I don’t think anybody can dispute the functionality of a minivan for a family,” he said. “They’re not going to blow you away the way a coupe would, but in terms of what they do, they’re pretty amazing.”

But Chris Cedergren, a partner with Iceology, an automotive marketing consultancy in Los Angeles, said the vehicle would remain a tough sell to shoppers, no matter how well it might suit their needs, because of the image problem.

“Minivans quickly became appliances, and no one wants a white washing machine or a white refrigerator,” he said.

“They want something they feel proud of driving, and they don’t want to be embarrassed.”

That’s why Kristen Howerton, a marriage and family therapist in Costa Mesa, Calif., never wanted to own a minivan. She disliked them so much that she titled her popular parenting blog “Rage Against the Minivan.”

“It’s just a symbol of women becoming the invisible, exchangeable mom — the soccer mom — where we all look the same and no longer have a sense of what’s cool,” Mrs. Howerton said.

But last year, she and her husband found that going anywhere with four young children had become impossible. Many of her readers suggested the unthinkable.

After searching desperately for an alternative, Mrs. Howerton gave in and bought a Toyota Sienna. “As much as I was opposed to it initially, it really has made life easier,” she said. “Mobility is more important than any standards I’m trying to uphold in my mind.”

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The San Juan Weekly

In Investing, It’s When You Start And When You Finish

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has posted double-digit gains for the second year in a row. But the index is still below where it was in early 1999.

So what is the proper perspective?

Ed Easterling, who runs an investment management and research firm from Corvallis, Oregon, faced similar questions a decade ago. In the summer of 2001, Mr. Easterling had a debate with a client about whether investors should expect to achieve long-term average returns in the future.

At the time, the average individual investor expected that the stock market would return about 10 percent a year over the next 10 to 20 years — or about 7 percent after inflation — according to surveys by the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Cen-

ter, as well as UBS and Gallup.

But historical averages can vary widely depending on their starting and ending points. For example, averages that start before the 1929 crash are substantially different from those that start after it, and Mr. Easterling felt that choosing a single date was arbitrary. In response, he created the chart above, which shows annualized returns based on thousands of possible combinations of market entry and exit.

After accounting for dividends, inflation, taxes and fees, $10,000 invested at the end of 1961 would have shrunk to $6,600 by 1981. From the end of 1979 to 1999, $10,000 would have grown to $48,000.

“Market returns are more volatile than most people realize,” Mr. Easterling said, “even over periods as long as 20 years.”

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The New Speed of Money, Reshaping Markets

By GRAHAM BOWLEY

A

SUBSTANTIAL part of all stock trading in the United States takes place in a warehouse in a nondescript business park just off the New Jersey Turnpike.

Few humans are present in this vast technological sanctum, known as New York Four. Instead, the building, nearly the size of three football fields, is filled with long avenues of computer servers illuminated by energy-efficient blue phosphorescent light.

Countless metal cages contain racks of computers that perform all kinds of trades for Wall Street banks, hedge funds, brokerage firms and other institutions. And within just one of these cages — a tight space measuring 40 feet by 45 feet and festooned with blue and white wires — is an array of servers that together form the mechanized heart of one of the top four stock exchanges in the United States.

The exchange is called Direct Edge, hardly a household name. But as the lights pulse on its servers, you can almost see the holdings in your 401(k) zip by.

“This,” says Steven Bonanno, the chief technology officer of the exchange, looking on proudly, “is where everyone does their magic.”

In many of the world’s markets, nearly all stock trading is now conducted by computers talking to other computers at high speeds. As the machines have taken over, trading has been migrating from raucous, populated trading floors like those of the New York Stock Exchange to dozens of separate, rival electronic exchanges. They rely on data centers like this one, many in the suburbs of northern New Jersey.

While this “Tron” landscape is dominated by the titans of Wall Street, it affects nearly everyone who owns shares of stock or mutual funds, or who has a stake in a pension fund or works for a public company. For better or for worse, part of your wealth, your livelihood, is throbbing through these wires.

The advantages of this new technological order are clear. Trading costs have plummeted, and anyone can buy stocks from anywhere in seconds with the simple click of a mouse or a tap on a smartphone’s screen.

Andrei Girenkov, a chief programmer for Direct Edge, said he and his friends had benefited from the burgeoning financial ecosystem of New Jersey. The state has several large data centers.

But some experts wonder whether the technology is getting dangerously out of control. Even apart from the huge amounts of energy the megacomputers consume, and the dangers of putting so much of the economy’s plumbing in one place, they wonder whether the new world is a fairer one — and whether traders with access to the fastest machines win at the expense of ordinary investors.

It also seems to be a much more hair-trigger market. The so-called flash crash in the market last May — when stock prices plunged hundreds of points before recovering — showed how unpredictable the new systems could be. Fear of this volatile, blindingly fast market may be why ordinary investors have been withdrawing money from domestic stock mutual funds —$90 billion worth since May, according to figures from the Investment Company Institute.

No one knows whether this is a better world, and that includes the regulators, who are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation in the great technological arms race that the stock market has become.

WILLIAM O’BRIEN, a former lawyer for Goldman Sachs, crosses the Hudson River each day from New York to reach his Jersey City destination — a shiny blue building opposite a Courtyard by Marriott.

Mr. O’Brien, 40, works there as chief executive of Direct Edge, the young electronic stock exchange that is part of New Jersey’s burgeoning financial ecosystem. Seven miles away,

in Secaucus, is the New York Four warehouse that houses Direct Edge’s servers. Another cluster of data centers, serving various companies, is five miles north, in Weehawken, at the western mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel.

And yet another is planted 20 miles south on the New Jersey Turnpike, at Exit 12, in Carteret, N.J. As Mr. O’Brien says, “New Jersey is the new heart of Wall Street.”

Direct Edge’s office demonstrates that it doesn’t take many people to become a major outfit in today’s electronic market. The firm, whose motto is “Everybody needs some edge,” has only 90 employees, most of them on this building’s sixth floor. There are lines of cubicles for programmers and a small operations room where two men watch a wall of screens, checking that market-order traffic moves smoothly and, of course, quickly. Direct Edge receives up to 10,000 orders a second.

Mr. O’Brien’s personal story reflects the recent history of stockexchange upheaval. A fit, blue-eyed Wall Street veteran, who wears the monogram “W O’B” on his purple shirt cuff, Mr. O’Brien is the son of a seat holder and trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1970s, when the Big Board was by far the biggest game around.

But in the 1980s, Nasdaq, a new electronic competitor, challenged that dominance. And a bigger upheaval came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after the Securities and Exchange Commission enacted a series

of regulations to foster competition and drive down commission costs for ordinary investors.

These changes forced the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to post orders electronically and execute them immediately, at the best price available in the United States — suddenly giving an advantage to startup operations that were faster and cheaper. Mr. O’Brien went to work for one of them, called Brut. The N.Y.S.E. and Nasdaq fought back, buying up smaller rivals: Nasdaq, for example, acquired Brut. And to give itself greater firepower, the N.Y.S.E., which had been member-owned, became a public, for-profit company.

Brokerage firms and traders came to fear that a Nasdaq-N.Y.S.E. duopoly was asserting itself, one that would charge them heavily for the right to trade, so they created their own exchanges. One was Direct Edge, which formally became an exchange six months ago. Another, the BATS Exchange, is located in another unlikely capital of stock market trading: Kansas City, Mo. Direct Edge now trails the N.Y.S.E. and Nasdaq in size; it vies with BATS for third place. Direct Edge is backed by a powerful roster of financial players: Goldman Sachs, Knight Capital, Citadel Securities and the International Securities Exchange, its largest shareholder. JPMorgan also holds a stake. Direct Edge still occupies the same building as its original founder, Knight Capital, in Jersey City.

The exchange now accounts for about 10 percent of stock market trading in the United States, according to the exchange and the TABB Group, a specialist on the markets. Of the 8.5 billion shares traded daily in the United States, about 833 million are bought and sold on Mr. O’Brien’s platforms.

As it has grown, Direct Edge and other new venues have sucked volumes away from the Big Board and Nasdaq. The N.Y.S.E. accounted for more than 70 percent of trading in N.Y.S.E.listed stocks just five years ago. Now, the Big Board handles only 36 percent of those trades itself. The remaining market share is divided among about 12 other public exchanges, several

Continues on page 54

54 Comes from page 51 electronic trading platforms and vast so-called unlit markets, including those known as dark pools.

THE Big Board is embracing the new warp-speed world. Although it maintains a Wall Street trading floor, even that is mostly electronic. The exchange also has its own, separate electronic arm, Arca, and opened a new data center last year for its computers in Mahwah, N.J. From his office in New Jersey, Mr. O’Brien looks back across the water to Manhattan and his former office on the 50th floor of the Nasdaq building at One Liberty Plaza, and he reflects wistfully on the huge changes that have taken place.

“To walk out of there to go across the river to Jersey City,” he says. “That was a big leap of faith.”

His colleague, Bryan Harkins, the exchange’s chief operating officer, sounds confident about the impact of the past decade’s changes. The new world is fairer, he says, because it is more competitive. “We helped break the grip of the New York Stock Exchange,” he says.

In this high-tech stock market, Direct Edge and the other exchanges are sprinting for advantage. All the exchanges have pushed down their latencies — the fancy word for the lessthan-a-blink-of-an-eye that it takes them to complete a trade. Almost each week, it seems, one exchange or another claims a new record: Nasdaq, for example, says its time for an average order “round trip” is 98 microseconds — a mind-numbing speed equal to 98 millionths of a second.

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January 13 - 19, 2011

The exchanges have gone warp speed because traders have demanded it. Even mainstream banks and old-fashioned mutual funds have embraced the change.

“Broker-dealers, hedge funds, traditional asset managers have been forced to play keep-up to stay in the game,” Adam Honoré, research director of the Aite Group, wrote in a recent report.

Even the savings of many longterm mutual fund investors are swept up in this maelstrom, when fund managers make changes in their holdings. But the exchanges are catering mostly to a different market breed — to high-frequency traders who have turned speed into a new art form.

They use algorithms to zip in and out of markets, often changing orders and strategies within seconds. They make a living by being the first to react to events, dashing past slower investors — a category that includes most investors — to take advantage of mispricing between stocks, for example, or differences in prices quoted across exchanges.

One new strategy is to use powerful computers to speed-read news reports — even Twitter messages — automatically, then to let their machines interpret and trade on them.

By using such techniques, traders may make only the tiniest fraction of a cent on each trade. But multiplied many times a second over an entire day, those fractions add up to real money. According to Kevin McPartland of the TABB Group, high-frequency traders now account for 56 percent of total stock market trading. A measure of their importance is that rather than charging

them commissions, some exchanges now even pay high-frequency traders to bring orders to their machines.

High-frequency traders are “the reason for the massive infrastructure,” Mr. McPartland says. “Everyone realizes you have to attract the high-speed traders.”

As everyone goes warp speed, a number of high-tech construction projects are under way.

One such project is a 428,000-square-foot data center in the western suburbs of Chicago opened by the CME Group, which owns the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It houses the exchange’s Globex electronic futures and options trading platform and space for traders to install computers next to the exchange’s machines, a practice known as co-location — at a cost of about $25,000 a month per rack of computers.

The exchange is making its investment because derivatives as well as stocks are being swept up in the highfrequency revolution. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission estimates that high-frequency traders now account for about one-third of all volume on domestic futures exchanges.

In August, Spread Networks of Ridgeland, Miss., completed an 825-mile fiber optic network connecting the South Loop of Chicago to Cartaret, N.J., cutting a swath across central Pennsylvania and reducing the roundtrip trading time between Chicago and New York by three milliseconds, to 13.33 milliseconds.

Then there are the international projects. Fractions of a second are regularly being shaved off of the busy Frankfurt-to-London route. And in

October, a company called Hibernia Atlantic announced plans for a new fiber-optic link beneath the Atlantic from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Somerset, England that will be able to send shares from London to New York and back in 60 milliseconds.

Bjarni Thorvardarson, chief executive of Hibernia Atlantic, says the link, due to open in 2012, is primarily intended to meet the needs of highfrequency algorithmic traders and will cost “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“People are going over the lake and through the church, whatever it takes,” he says. “It is very important for these algorithmic traders to have the most advanced technology.”

The pace of investment, of course, reflects the billions of dollars that are at stake.

The data center in Weehawken is a modern building that looks more like a shopping mall than a center for equity trading. But one recent afternoon, the hammering and drilling of the latest phase of expansion seemed to conjure up the wealth being dug out of the stock market.

As the basement was being transformed into a fourth floor for yet more computers, one banker who was touring the complex explained the matter bluntly: “Speed,” he said, “is money. “ THE “flash crash,” the harrowing plunge in share prices that shook the stock market during the afternoon of May 6 last year, crystallized the fears of some in the industry that technology was getting ahead of the regulators. In their investigation into the plunge, the S.E.C. and Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that the drop was precipitated not by a rogue high-frequency firm, but by the sale of a single $4.1 billion block of E-Mini Standard & Poor’s 500 futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange by a mutual fund company.

The fund company, Waddell & Reed Financial of Overland Park, Kan., conducted its sale through a computer algorithm provided by Barclays Capital, one of the many off-the shelf programs available to investors these days. The algorithm automatically dripped the billions of dollars of sell orders into the futures market over 20 minutes, continuing even as prices started to drop when other traders jumped in.

The sale may have been a case of inept timing — the markets were already roiled by the debt crisis in Europe. But there was no purposeful attempt to disrupt the market, the regulators found.

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

55

Lawrence Ulrich’s Top 10 Cars of 2010

By LAWRENCE ULRICH 1. FERRARI 458 ITALIA The world’s best sports car, a racing video game come to life in three gorgeous, thrilling dimensions. This is the car I would buy tomorrow if I inherited $250,000 today.

2. JAGUAR XJ In one swoop, this flagship sedan has been transformed from Prince Charles (stiff, conservative, tradition-bound) into David Beckham (athletic, fashionable, devilishly handsome). The XJ, especially in its supercharged versions, is not only the lightest and fastest of the big luxury sedans, but it is the most cheeky and vital.

3. CHEVROLET VOLT Let me get this straight: General Motors, after being criticized for (supposedly) killing the electric car and for lagging Toyota in green technology, develops a plug-in hybrid that outdrives the Prius and returns better overall economy than any other new hybrid or clean diesel. And G.M. is excoriated for doing so, not just by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, but by some greenniks. G.M. just can’t win.

4.

PORSCHE BOXSTER SPYDER Among sports cars, the Boxster is like the golden retriever at your feet: Loyal and eager to please, but so old and familiar that you trip right over it. The Boxster Spyder solves that as a lightened-and-toned version that reminds you that this midengine stalwart is one of the sweetest performers around — and the world’s best-handling sports car to boot, according to Car and Driver magazine. The only drawback is its contraption of a manual top: it looks and fits great, but takes several minutes to put down or up, making the Spyder suspect as a daily driver.

5. AUDI A8 By the high-flying standards of Audi design, the tranquil exterior is a letdown. But all is forgiven when you jump into the A8

and drive. The cabin blends nearbespoke luxury with intuitive technology to set the new interior benchmark for large luxury sedans. And the Audi is an amazingly versatile dance partner, able to waltz, tango or mosh, depending on its driver’s mood.

6. HYUNDAI SONATA Never thought I’d say it, but if I were buying a straight-up family sedan I’d take the Sonata over Honda’s Accord, the perennial front-runner. Consumers have noticed, handing the handsome Sonata — in regular, turbo and hybrid versions — the year’s biggest jump in unit sales — up roughly 90,000 — of any car in America.

7. NISSAN JUKE When I first saw the Juke at an auto show, I didn’t know whether to chuckle or upchuck. But this moon buggy turns out to be the year’s most unexpected success, a tall hatchback with more muscle and spirit than the youth-centric crossovers from Scion, Kia and others.

A 188-horsepower directinjection turbo 4, available 6-speed manual transmission, torque-vectoring allwheel drive and a winning interior filled with cool details, all for around $25,000.

What’s not to like?

8. FORD EXPLORER The name sounds like a nostalgic holdover from a VH1 show. But this is the new Explorer, and all I can say is, Welcome back. Asi-

de from the lack of a honking V-8, you won’t notice much difference in dynamic on-road handling, quietness and comfort between this Ford and much more expensive S.U.V.’s like the Land Rover LR4 or Mercedes GLClass. It’s that good.

9. VOLVO S60 Another pleasant surprise, this sedan reminds me of the XC60 crossover, subtly amassing virtues until it’s impossible to ignore.

For those who aren’t already set on a BMW 3 Series, Mercedes C-Class or Infiniti G37, the S60 is a striking alternative and the most fun-to-drive Volvo yet.

10. LOTUS EVORA Driving enthusiasts often profess love for the nano-scale Lotus Elise or Exige, but few show their love by buying such a track-focused toy. The midengine Evora makes just enough compromises to be accommodating — it’s larger, heavier and more deluxe, with a roomier 2-plus-2 layout — but it still feels exotic, adventurous and every bit a Lotus.

When S.U.V.’s Are Parodies DESIGNER IMPOSTOR Sure, it’s a relative bargain, it comes with a free iPad and the Hyundai dealer will fetch the car for service while dropping off a loaner. That’s all great, but if I’m going to drop $60,000 on a Hyundai, there’s only one real issue: is it really a stand-in for flagships like the Mercedes S-Class or Audi A8, or

even the smaller BMW 5 Series? The Equus does not even come close. Dated and dowdy on the outside, a pale imitation of Lexus on the inside, it doesn’t drive or satisfy like the real McCoys.

FREE WILLY By the standards of full-size luxury S.U.V.’s, the redesigned Infiniti QX56 blows away the last version. But who at Infiniti approved the swollen shape, Belugawhale grille and excessive bling? The QX is so obliviously unfashionable it should come with a trucker hat.

ROCKY TERRAIN Another S.U.V. that didn’t get the memo about changing tastes, the GMC Terrain is a parody pile-up of every Hummer-inspired styling theme to emerge from G.M.’s studios: tacky chrome rims, steroid-pumped sheet metal and an overwhelming air of half-bakedness, from its straining engines to its sloppy transmission.

WHAT A HAM For the Kia Soul, the return of the hip-hop hamsters was the year’s most watchable car ad. (I especially enjoyed the rodent cheerleaders, the Hamsterdam Avenue street sign and the stonedlooking drummer.) Best of all, the funky Soul is as endearing as its ad campaign.

THE HEARTBEAT HAS FLATLINED The worst car-company slogan of the year, perhaps among the worst ever: Chevy Runs Deep. What, like a submarine? A tunneling gopher? A wide receiver? By the time you figure out what Chevy’s talking about, the message (and your brain) are vaporized.

ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR

56

January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly seeking the perfect combination of manageable size, graciously proportioned rooms and exquisite taste. The parlor floor rooms are flooded with light from floor to ceiling windows in the commodious living room and formal dining room. A gourmet kitchen, screened porch, wet bar and laundry room complete the parlor level. A guest suite with bath and kitchenette, office, garage and lush courtyard comprise the garden level.

Accommodation has been

Historic Savannah A

masterful restoration of this award winning 1859 home overlooking lovely Chatham Square makes this the ideal residence for the discriminating person

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

57

ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR

made for an elevator to service all three floors of the home. The upper floor contains the master suite with sitting area, fireplace and private screened porch as well as two additional bedrooms and bath.

Bedrooms: 5 Bathrooms: 3 Half Bathrooms: 1

Interior: 4,344 Sq Ft. / 404 m2 Style: Georgian Greek Revival Property Type: Single Family Home Unique Amenities 3+ Fireplaces Historic Hardwood Flooring Terrace/Outdoor Space

58 January 13 - 19, 2011

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

January 13 - 19, 2011

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 January 13 - 19, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Press on with your cunning plan. You may be up against it, but your best intentions will be honoured by the Universe. Just make sure that your heart is pure and your mind clear, otherwise things could get a bit messy. Do not begrudge others their lucky break; yours is up ahead. You will get your best reward if you simply be.

Address a pressing issue before it is too late.

It will pay off to look your best at all times.

You never know who is going to be lurking around the next bend. Try to lighten up and be a bit more free spirited. Then see how the universe responds differently to your dilemmas.

Taurus

Scorpio

(April 21-May 21)

Do speak your mind and admit to a mistake if needs be. There is no point hiding in the shadows: step out into the light. Okay, so the days are getting shorter and the darkness is creeping in all too quickly, but you do not have to go there. There is no need to get sucked into something gloomy or depressing. Keep your spirits buoyant and your outlook bright.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Put your best face on and connect with the magic of the New Year! Let your heart shine. Be open to what is around the next bend. Things will have a forward momentum, after that lengthy phase of confusion created by mercury retrograde, over the festive season. If you feel uncomfortable, it is up to you to change direction. You can transform a tricky situation.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Alter those self-defeating and destructive thought patterns that do you no favours. It pays to keep things light and bright. Try not to get too frustrated by someone else’s process. You have better things to be getting on with. You should be able to pull it all together and meet a deadline.

You are bound to be pleased with the impression you make. Press on with commitments.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Stay as chilled as possible and pay attention It is always important to rise to the occasion.

Now is the time to stand up for your rights.

Do not beat about the bush when you state your case. Stop glossing over details to spare someone’s feelings. It is time to speak up and be totally honest. Chance your arm in love and you just might get away with it!

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Heavenly alignments encourage you to spot your best opportunities and play them to the max. If you do not make your move now, when will you ever? A certain someone can be elusive, but this only adds to their charm and allure. Enjoy the magic and mystery, even complexity, of your romantic liaisons.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Romance is well highlighted, but only once you have decided you are okay with everything that has gone before. Lighten up your emotions and your heart by accepting what’s been and done. A fresh start is your divine right after all.

Simply decide to let go and you will then move forward effectively. Be open to receive. Expect every good thing and life will oblige.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Embrace opportunities in order to spread your wings. You will be surprised at the tricks you can pull out of the bag when you are pushed. Pull out all the stops and give that madcap idea a whirl. Romantic opportunities abound. You will have to be nifty with your moves. Deep-seated emotions come into play and this is where you must trust your heart to deliver the answer.

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Do not get thrown off track. A turn of events may be a challenge designed to strengthen your will. Where there is a will, there is a way. Do not give in to confusion or give your doubts too much air time. If you trust the process, the right moves will be revealed in perfect timing. Simply watch your step and allow Venus to bless your home life. Embrace opportunities.

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19) Precipitous events keep you on your toes. You hate change and it unnerves you. However, the time is ripe for dramatic decisions and change. Make sure you are not being overly stubborn about something. But do not say ‘yes’ for the sake of it, either. Search your soul as you dig deep to come up with the answers.

You can rely on the support of loved ones.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You have the information you need for an intelligent outcome tucked away in your psyche somewhere. Trust the messages you are getting.

Savour your dreams and visions and give them the air time they deserve. The objective, rational approach is not always the right one. Detach and review the situation, by all means. However, be aware that the inner knowing is what counts.

The San Juan Weekly

Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 59

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

61

Sports

Gasp! Blatter Galloping to FIFA’s Rescue

By ROB HUGHES

C

orruption never sleeps. But fear not, soccer will be rid of it very soon.

Barely had the new year begun before the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, declared his plan to purify the sport whose world governing body he has led since 1998. “I will take care of it personally to make sure there is no corruption at FIFA,” Blatter said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, Sonntags Zeitung.

His pledge followed a month after 6 of FIFA’s 24-member executive committee were exposed by a British newspaper undercover operation. Faced with clandestine filmed evidence of two members apparently negotiating to sell their votes in the World Cup bidding process, FIFA banished those two gentlemen from the voting in December. Four others on the executive committee were also fined Swiss francs.

But the voting went ahead.

Russia emerged as the host for the 2018 World Cup, and Qatar for 2022.

The stench of suspicion was deepened, rather than assuaged

by those votes and by the hasty arbitration of its ethics panel. The vote for Qatar was jaw-dropping.

Only after the decision did FIFA executives, including Blatter, give credence to the notion that the tournament might have to be switched from June to January.

It seems that FIFA is having second thoughts. Having accepted Qatar’s promise to build a dozen stadiums air-conditioned, the fear is that players or spectators could fry in the desert heat in summer.

Franz Beckenbauer, a former player who is about to give up his seat on the FIFA panel, was the first to suggest the switch. But FIFA’s own general secretary said it could not be right to vote for a tournament in June/July, then arbitrarily move it to another time of year. Blatter, on a visit to Qatar, however, contradicted him.

Now, Blatter tells the Swiss media, it is time to take care of FIFA’s good name. His idea is, surprise, surprise, another new committee, in addition to the ethics panel that was his previous idea. “This committee,” he said, “will strengthen our credibility and give us a new image in terms of transparency.”

It would be a group of 7 or 9 members, “not only from sport but from politics, finance, business and culture.”

Blatter himself would not take part on this committee because it needs to be seen to be independent to be credible.

In that aspect, he cannot be faulted. But his idea is shot full of contradictions. For a start, FIFA’s own statutes claim that it must be completely free of political interference. Since when were finance and business the institutions to help sports hold onto their ethical values?

Blatter has been FIFA’s president for 12 years. It is no coincidence that he makes cleaning up its image top priority at the start of this year, because in June he intends to stand for a further term of four years in that office.

Through his Swiss newspaper interview, he is kicking off his campaign to stay in power. At this moment, no opponent has declared to stand against him, but there is time yet for someone to do so.

Nominations have to be in two months before the June FIFA congress in Zurich.

Between now and then,

Blatter’s diary is set. He says that leadership is the key to FIFA in 2011, and that he has “a strategic course for the future.”

This he will unveil at each of the six continental federation congresses in the coming weeks and months — starting with the Asian confederation in Doha on Thursday and then the Oceania congress in Pago Pago, American Samoa, on Jan. 15.

The fact that Asia’s congress precedes the Asian soccer championships, held in the months of January and February in Qatar, will not be lost on the remaining FIFA committeemen who are not banned from office.

That the next stop in Blatter’s pre-presidential election tour takes him to Oceania is also significant. An Oceania representative, Reynald Temarii of Tahiti, is still pleading innocence despite being one of the members suspended from FIFA voting in December.

“Not for a single moment have I thought, ‘Now I must go,”’ said Blatter, who will turn 75 in March. “I’m staying, but I need a lot of strength to endure the fierce criticism against me.”

Strength — and credibility.

Guzan Celebrates First Victory With Hull

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A

merican goalkeeper Brad Guzan celebrated the first victory of his loan stint at Hull in a 3-2 victory over Portsmouth in England’s second-tier League Championship.

The 26-year-old was beaten from the penalty spot when Liam Lawrence tied it for Portsmouth in the 57th minute. Hull was ahead 3-1 on goals by Jimmy Bullard, Matt Fryatt and Nick Barmby when Greg Halford sent a header past Guzan in the 76th.

Hull is 15th in the League Championship, six points off the playoff places for promotion to the Premier League.

Guzan was sent to Hull last week on a one-month loan by As-

ton Villa and lost 1-0 to Leicester in his debut.

He joined Villa from Major League Soccer’s Chivas USA in August 2008 but has been unable to oust fellow American Brad Friedel from the starting lineup.

Guzan is a backup to Everton’s Tim Howard on the U.S. national team.

Kaka returned to action for the first time since the World Cup, entering in the 75th minute of Real Madrid’s 3-2 win at Getafe in the Spanish league.

The 28-year-old midfielder, the 2007 FIFA player of the year for AC Milan, had not played in a match since July 2, when Brazil lost to the Netherlands in the World Cup quarterfinals. He left Real Madrid during its preseason

tour in California following medical tests and had left knee surgery on Aug. 5.

“There were moments during my recovery when I didn’t know if I would every play again,” he said. “Now that is over and I hope to get steady playing time so I can continue recovering my form.”

Cristiano Ronaldo scored twice, raising his season total for Madrid to a league-leading 19 goals and 27 in 25 games in all competitions. He converted a penalty kick in the 11th minute and scored Madrid’s final goal in the 57th.

Madrid finished a man short after Alvaro Arbeloa was ejected in the 82nd for his second yellow card, given for a hand ball.

Mesut Oezil gave Madrid a 2-0 lead in the 19th. Daniel Parejo

scored for Getafe in the 29th and Jorge Angel Albin in the 84th.

“I did not like my team,” Real coach Jose Mourinho said. “Normally we are much more compact and concentrated. My team has to defend better. That is its identity.”

Barcelona (15-1-1) leads with 46 points, two ahead of Real Madrid (14-1-2).

Elsewhere, third-place Villarreal defeated Almeria 2-0 on goals by Jose Manuel Catala and Borja Valero. American forward Jozy Altidore entered as an 83rdminute substitute for the Yellow Submarine.

Mallorca beat Hercules 3-0 for its first win in four weeks, Atletico Madrid tied 0-0 with Racing Santander and Zaragoza defeated Real Sociedad 2-1.

Sports

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The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

Anthony Kim Wants to Be About Golf, Not Gossip

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A

nthony Kim wants 2011 to be a season that changes his career.

He hopes it might be enough to change his reputation, too.

One of the most dynamic young talents in golf? That’s what people were saying two years ago, when Kim blew away the field with a record score at Quail Hollow, then shot 65 in the final round at Congressional to win the AT&T National. It made him the youngest American since Tiger Woods to win twice in one year.

If that wasn’t enough, he brought energy and attitude to the Ryder Cup and was the catalyst of a rare U.S. victory.

That now seems like a long time ago.

It’s not that the 25-year-old Californian has disappeared. He is still among the elite at No. 31 in the world, having reached as high as No. 6 toward the end of 2008.

And only PGA Tour winners enjoy the oceanfront room that Kim has at Kapalua, where the Tournament of Champions kicks off a new season Thursday.

But he has a bitter taste about how last year ended.

He won the Houston Open in a playoff, then closed with a 65 at Augusta National to finish third. Thumb surgery a month later kept him out of golf for three months, and he failed to make the Ryder Cup team when he couldn’t make a cut upon his return.

Kim still managed to make news, or at least gossip columns.

He has a zest for living, which first

came to life with tales from his Ryder Cup celebration at Valhalla and carried on through Twitter and blog reports from a night in the Las Vegas casinos in October.

Is he closer to being like Tiger Woods or John Daly?

“That’s a hell of a question,” Kim said, smiling at first before pausing to contemplate.

Daly makes more news off the course these days, so it’s easy to overlook an amazing talent that brought him a PGA Championship title as a 25-year-old rookie in 1991 and a British Open victory at St. Andrews.

Kim found it coincidental that after headlines he made in Las Vegas in October, Daly was the only tour player who reached out to him in a text message.

“Both have majors,” Kim said. “I think I’m closer to Tiger because I love putting in the time. Now, I’ve gotten away from this.

But I definitely feel like I’m closer as far as the values of the Asian culture and putting in time, not worrying about tough times. In a lot of ways, I think people see me as a guy who likes to have fun, and that’s it. But I care about a lot of things.”

Kim is careful not to be motivated for the wrong reasons.

He has trimmed the number of his traveling party and has heard from enough people whom he trusts that playing with the purpose of proving people wrong is the wrong route. Even so, he feels as though fans, the media and players are questioning his devotion to his sport.

“I have a lot of people doubting me, which I like,” he said.

When asked why they are skeptical

of his future, Kim first mentioned the arrival of so many players in his age group.

Indeed, that’s what makes golf more intriguing than it has been in years. Martin Kaymer, who just turned 26, last year became the youngest major champion since Woods in 2001. Rory McIlroy won at Quail Hollow at age 20. Ryo Ishikawa was still 18 when he shot 58 to win in Japan. Jason Day won in Dallas, and at 23 is the youngest player at Kapalua.

Slightly older than Kim, and still very young, are the likes of Dustin Johnson and Hunter Mahan.

“A lot of guys played well who are younger, and they’re overlooking me, which is fine,” Kim said. “It’s not that I have something to prove. I know I’m capable of winning golf tournaments.”

But it’s more than the youth movement bugging Kim. When asked whether he was troubled about players doubting him because of his activity off the course, Kim’s eyes widened and he turned in his chair away from the Orange Bowl game on television.

“One hundred percent. Couldn’t have said it any better,” he said. “I feel that is a major reason why people doubt me. They don’t think I care about golf. It’s hard for people who don’t know me to say, ‘He’s 25, having a good time with his friends.’ If anyone knows me, they know I’m willing to admit to my mistakes. But when I do something, I want to be the best at it. I’m going to scratch and claw my way up the ladder.

People around me see that.”

Kim doesn’t see the need to explain

what happened in Las Vegas. If there was a lesson that came out of that, it was understanding that it’s better to be the center of attention inside the ropes than under a neon sign.

“I feel obligated to my sponsors to do a better job of not even letting some of these stories come out,” he said. “I don’t want to be a player no one can relate to. Sure, I’ve made some mistakes. I know that I was brought up well by two very great people, people that everyone respects. I’m not the type of person to stray off course. Maybe I did for a minute, but I’ve realized that I’ve got to have a game plan — not for my next round, but for my life.”

Leave it to Kim to draw an analogy from George St. Pierre, who said the Ultimate Fighting Championship was a lot like golf. He didn’t get the sense the UFC welterweight knew much about golf, but his words stuck with Kim.

Orioles’ Simon Surrenders to Dominican Police

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

B

altimore Orioles reliever Alfredo Simon surrendered to police to face an involuntary manslaughter charge in a fatal shooting New Year’s Eve. His lawyer said he was firing celebratory shots in the air.

A judge ruled that Simon could be held for up to a year pending trial.

The Dominican pitcher is suspected of killing 25-year-old Michel Castillo Almonte and wounding his 17-year-old brother in the northeast coastal town of Luperon. The dead man is Simon’s cousin, according to the pitcher’s lawyer.

Police initially said a murder charge would be filed against Simon, but Public Prosecutor Victor Mueses told that witness accounts and evidence support an involuntary manslaughter charge instead.

“The version that we have is that there was a dispute between two women and he tried to dissolve it, fired a shot that ended up wounding a young person in the arm and that same bullet lodged in the chest of the deceased,” Mueses said by phone.

Simon could face up to two years in prison if convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

Mueses, the public prosecutor in Puerto Plata, initially said he would request three months of preventive detention for Simon while the case is pending but later

pushed for a year. Judge Adriana Vazquez Jimenez agreed.

Simon’s lawyer, Carlos Olivares, told the AP that he planned a quick appeal. He said his client is not a flight risk and called the ruling an unjust decision.

The Caribbean country’s legal system allows for preventive detention. Human rights groups have long said the provision is abused and thousands of people are held unjustly for extended periods.

Olivares said his client fired random shots with a group of local boys to celebrate New Year’s Eve. But he believes Simon could not have been the shooter because the player’s cousin was shot in the chest.

“We are giving the weapon so that the national police can do the pertinent ballistics tests,” Olivares said.

Ballistics tests should be completed in the next 48 hours, according to Dominican Police Chief Jose Polanco.

Some Dominicans shoot guns in the air on New Year’s Eve especially in the hours leading to midnight, although authorities have repeatedly warned against the practice. Bystanders are killed or wounded

every New Year’s Eve. Simon was accompanied to the police station by free-agent infielder Julio Lugo, who played for the Orioles last season.

“He is scared because he recognizes that he fired shots, although they went into the air,” said Lugo, who advised Simon to surrender after he fled the scene.

The injured teenager was shot in the right arm and remains hospitalized in the Dominican city of Santiago.

Simon joined Baltimore in 2008 but was quickly sidelined with an injury. The 29-year-old pitcher went 4-2 with a 4.93 ERA last season. He had 17 saves before Orioles manager Buck Showalter decided to make Koji Uehara the closer.

John Stockstill, the Orioles’ director of development, was being sent to the Dominican Republic to evaluate the situation.

“The purpose of my trip is to make sure we have the accurate facts as we move forward and take appropriate action”.

Simon joined Baltimore in 2008 but was quickly sidelined with an injury. The 29-year-old pitcher went 4-2 with a 4.93 ERA last season. He had 17 saves.

The San Juan Weekly

January 13 - 19, 2011

63

Sports

The Case for Morris: Big Moments Count

Jack Morris led the majors in wins in the 1980s and won Game 7 of the 1991 World Series.

By TYLER KEPNER

M

ost Baseball Hall of Fame voters think Jack Morris deserves a plaque in Cooperstown. That is not enough to get Morris into the Hall of Fame — he had 52 percent of the vote last year, and candidates need 75 — but it is significant. And it infuriates a lot of people.

If you want proof, look around on the Internet. Then duck. The vitriol will fly off your computer screen.

In some ways, it is hard to believe people are so passionately negative about Morris. He never did anything to make people dislike him, personally. Some writers found him difficult to deal with, but generally mainstream writers are the ones defending him, promoting his case.

The anger over Morris, who pitched for Detroit, Minnesota, Toronto and Cleveland from 1977 to 1994, probably has more to do with a mistrust of writers as arbiters

of the Hall of Fame. A large segment of fans and bloggers doubt that voters realize the statistical truth about Morris: he just wasn’t as good as we remember.

But writers in general have done a remarkably capable job of electing the right candidates. Sometime within their maximum 15 years on the ballot, the most deserving players make it. Last month, the restructured veterans committee considered eight candidates from the era starting in 1973 who had not been elected by the writers. The committee rejected them all.

But the Morris case really touches a nerve, partly because some writers vote for Morris and not Bert Blyleven. (The New York Times does not permit its writers to vote.) Numerous studies clearly prove that Blyleven was a lot better, so the point is not worth debating. One has nothing to do with the other.

Voters have not elected a starting pitcher since 1999 (this year’s results will be announced Wednesday). That speaks to the relative mediocrity of starters in the era when Morris shone. Morris led the major leagues in victories in the 1980s, when a lot of the great ones were winding down (Steve Carlton, Ferguson Jenkins, Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver) or starting up (Roger Clemens, Tom Glavine, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux).

Morris had 162 victories in the 1980s.

No other pitcher had more than 140. The names immediately following him on the list have not sniffed Cooperstown: Dave Stieb, Bob Welch, Charlie Hough, Fernando Valenzuela. It was a strange interlude.

Most of Morris’s detractors recognize

that he could pitch. He was excellent, by any measure, but the Hall of Fame is for the very best. Right?

Well, yes. But within that framework is a lot of room for debate, and the Morris critics seem to fundamentally misunderstand his case.

It is often written that without his 10-inning shutout for the Twins in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, Morris would not get nearly as much support. But he did pitch that game. That’s the whole point. Moments of greatness matter a lot, even though, as tiny slices of time, they rarely say much about the breadth of a player’s career.

Bert Blyleven, a longtime Hall of Fame candidate, won 287 games and had an 3.31 E.R.A.

That, I think, is what bothers so many people about his candidacy. Did Morris’s Most Valuable Player award in the ’91 Series make him overwhelmingly reliable in the clutch? No. He lost twice in the next World Series, when his earned run average was 8.44.

After pitching well and losing Game 1 in Atlanta, Morris started Game 5 in Toronto with a chance to clinch the title for the Blue Jays. Lonnie Smith, of all people, chased him with a grand slam in the fifth inning.

A year before, in that famous seventh game, Smith’s base-running gaffe probably cost the Braves the championship. Had Smith scored from first on Terry Pendleton’s eighth-inning double, instead of falling for a decoy by Twins infielders, Morris might have lost, 1-0. It was the most important play of the game, and Morris lucked out.

But the Braves still had runners on second and third and nobody out and their 3-4-5 hitters coming up. Except for an intentional walk, they did not put another man on base until the next spring.

How many pitchers in the history of baseball have thrown an extra-inning shutout in the final game of the World Series?

Only Morris. Just two others have thrown an extra-inning shutout in any World Series game (the Dodgers’ Clem Labine in 1956 and the Giants’ Christy Mathewson in 1913), but their teams did not win in the end.

That sets Morris apart; the fact that his shutout capped what might have been the most thrilling World Series only helps his cause. He is a borderline candidate with a 3.90 E.R.A., higher than any pitcher in the

Voting for Hall Shouldn’t Be Guessing Who’s Guilty

By TYLER KEPNER

I

t was just a casual conversation one day in the weight room between Jeff Bagwell and Morgan Ensberg, the corner infielders for the Houston Astros. Bagwell was trying to bench-press his usual 300 pounds, and he mentioned to Ensberg that some pla-

yers around the game had gotten huge by using steroids.

“I never did ’em,” Bagwell said, and that was good enough for Ensberg.

“He flat-out told me that he never did anything, and I believe him,” Ensberg said the other day, over the phone from his home in San Diego. “I would go to the grave with

that. And if it turns out that he did? Well, the information I have is that he didn’t because that’s what I was told.”

As far as we know, that is all the information anyone has about Jeff Bagwell and steroids. Yet despite reaching base and slugging at a higher rate than Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, while stealing bases and playing exceptional defense, Bagwell is unlikely to be voted into the Hall of Fame on Wednesday.

Bagwell is eligible for the first time, and some voters have written that they will not vote for him because they suspect he might have used steroids. Give them credit for explaining their rationale. But it is a sad commentary on the era just past.

“The idea that you’re not going to vote for a guy based on something completely subjective and unproven doesn’t make sense to me,” said Ensberg, who is retired and now broadcasts college baseball games.

“I don’t think that’s understanding what your job is as a voter, which is to look at a player’s body of work and decide whether

that merits going to the Hall of Fame.”

The rejection of Bagwell, who has consistently denied using steroids, presumes guilt over innocence. It seems to be based on the fact that Bagwell grew muscular and stocky over the course of his career, and that he did not hit for power in the minors.

But the same could apply to the Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett. In his first two years for the Minnesota Twins, Puckett hit four home runs in 1,248 at-bats. Then he averaged 20 home runs per season for the next decade. He always looked exceptionally strong for his size. He died of a stroke in 2006, at age 45.

Those are facts. Do they prove that Puckett used steroids? Of course not. I have no idea if he did or did not. But his name came up on the Hall of Fame ballot in 2000, before we knew the extent of the steroids problem, and he sailed in with 82 percent of the vote. He played like a Hall of Famer, and he deserves his plaque in Cooperstown.

Circumstantial evidence can be used against anybody. Mike Piazza might have

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January 13 - 19, 2011

The San Juan Weekly