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Arecibo Telescope P4

García Padilla Announces Candidacy UPR Riot

Proves Einstein Theory Finds 2 Pulsars P3

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Gilligan’s Island Taste & Mingle At Saborea P8 María Elena P47 Perales Pride of Beltran Gives Mets Puerto Rico Manager Scare P59 P17

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Arecibo Telescope Finds 2 Pulsars

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One 15 kilometer diameter & 30,000 light years to earth

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esearchers find success using the Arecibo Radio Observatory and a massive computing network called Einstein@Home to search radio waves for pulsars. In the coming decade they hope to find evidence of gravitational waves The Einstein@Home project, both times using the Arecibo Observatory, has made its second big celestial find in the past six months—a pulsar 15 kilometers in diameter located more than 30,000 light years from Earth. Not a bad track record for a network that runs on processing power donated from computers worldwide. The finding represents one of many discoveries expected in the coming years.

Einstein@Home is a project that allows computer users (whether individuals or organizations) to contribute their

PCs’ unused computing power to the greater cause of helping scientists search for pulsars, which are spinning neutron stars (aka collapsed, super-dense stars) that emit pulses of radio waves, x-rays or gamma rays. Last week alone, about 100,000 PCs contacted Einstein@Home servers to download a few megabytes of data at a time for analysis or upload analyzed data.

The project was set up in February 2005 as way of searching for gravitational waves (also emitted by pulsars) in data collected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detector instruments. Gravitational waves, which have never been detected directly, were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 on the basis of his theory of general relativity, although he thought they were too weak to be observed, says

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Exquisite Cuisine in an Oppulent Setting Einstein@Home Director Bruce Allen, a physicist.

“Pulsars are the cores of old stars that are crushed by gravitational forces,” Allen says. “They get crushed into a ball that basically—if you could crush this ball to be a factor of three smaller, it would collapse into a black hole. It’s the last stage of matter before you collapse into a black hole.” Such objects allow researchers to study the behavior of matter at extremely high pressures and densities.

By tapping into computers signed up for the project, researchers are given access to more processing power than was available through their own computers or any other computer system that the National Science Foundation could afford to pay for, Allen says. With gravitational wave data, “it’s a situation where the sensitivity of your search is determined by how much computing power you have,” he adds. “More computing power lets us search more deeply in the LIGO data.”

Given the uncertainty of finding gravitational waves, Allen and his team in 2009 expanded the Einstein@Home program to search for binary pulsars by analyzing radio-wave data from the Arecibo Observatory. Through this work, Einstein@Home researchers located two pulsars: The first, found in August, is a disrupted binary pulsar 17,000 lightyears away rotating more than 40 times a second that had broken free of its binary companion. The most recent pulsar, iden-

tified as PSR J1952+2630, is surprisingly similar in some ways to the earlier pulsar, Allen says. “The second pulsar is located in roughly the same part of the sky, and it’s spinning at roughly the same rate,” he says. Yet the new pulsar is more unusual than the first because it’s still part of a binary star system, but its companion star is a white dwarf star that is more massive than is typically the case.

Whereas the Arecibo data gives Einstein@Home researchers and volunteers a more attainable goal, Allen is hoping that upgrades to the LIGO instruments combined with faster PC processing power will enable the project to detect gravitational waves within the next decade. Nearly half of these volunteer PCs already have superfast graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to central processing units (CPUs). GPUs, originally designed for rendering highly sophisticated video game graphics, can now be programmed to process information between 10 and 20 times faster than CPUs. “It’s like we’ve got about another a half million functioning machines,” on the network, Allen says.

Working with leading GPU maker NVIDIA Corp., Allen and his team have improved Einstein@Home software so that it can use GPUs more efficiently.

“The detection of gravitational waves from new neutron stars using LIGO data will be a combination of increasingly sensitive LIGO instruments and an increase in the use of GPUs,” Allen says.

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March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

García Padilla Announces Candidacy By: Daniel Morales Pomales

T

he Nestor Morales Stadium at Humacao, was the setting for the first massive activity of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) after the crushing defeat at the general elections of 2008.

Dozens of delegations from all 78 cities of the island, packed the stadium from the early hours of Sunday 6 March.

Public employees of various government agencies and private companies were part of the event. The demonstration was attended by the senior staff of the PPD. The host was Mayor Marcelo Trujillo Panisse, mayors Joe Roman Abreu, San Lorenzo, Alfredo ‘Papo’ Alejandro de Juncos, senators, Juan Eugenio Hernández Mayoral, Eduardo Bhatia, José Luis Dalmau , Jorge Suárez Cáceres, Tony Fas Alzamora, Jorge Colberg Toro, Jaime Espinosa Narde representatives, Brenda Lopez de Arraras, Sylvia Corujo, José ‘Conny’ Varela, and former Sen. Roberto Vigoreaux among others.

The mayors of Caguas, Carolina and Mayagüez, William Miranda Torres, José Carlos Aponte Dalmau José Guillermo Rodríguez, respectively came together to the event.

The salsa orquestra PVC entertained the preamble to the political ceremony estimated at more than 7,000 people.

Just before the start of the act, Mr. José Alfredo Hernández Mayoral took his seat, causing a loud applause among the crowd.

“Today will begin a new movement for the country to eliminate unemployment and rampant crime. Today begins the great movement of hope. Today we call the new leader who comes from the people with discipline, effort,

hard work and desire to serve. I know him well since he was a lawyer. He is an amazing human being. A leader full of energy and prepared to lead the country. Today we make a commitment to work and to unite, I urge you to join the new leader of our party and the new governor of Puerto Rico Alejandro García Padilla “said the host, Humacao Mayor Marcelo Trujillo in his welcome message.

Jose Orlando Delgado, a young man from Coamo, recounted some experiences. He then presented on a giant screen a summary of what has been the “misrule” of Luis Fortuño from the lenses of the Popular Party: layoffs, increased prices, rampant crime, the covers of the various newspapers of the island outlined them. This preamble with an audiovisual presentation provided a framework to formally present: Alejandro García Padilla as a candidate for Governor.

“I do not know if I’ll get the job when I finish studying, young people today live in fear of a government that uses clubs, but there’s hope on the horizon. I want to make my future here, I want to grow and make my life here surely but with high unemployment, with respect and peace in every place. Today I see a ray of hope and positive spirit with energy, with a future of opportunity, that light covers Puerto Rico, from Humacao, that future will arrive soon”.

In his message that lasted a little more than an hour García Padilla used what would be one of his campaign slogans, “This government is useless”, saying that “No government has brought so much damage in so little time” Two planes flew over the stadium, the first contained a phrase that said ‘I do not decide yet’ and the second ‘Sila

2012’. The former governor wasted no time and issued a statement disapproving the messages.

“We must return the PPD its ideological roots of social justice, where people are important. It is for the people the PPD exist. I take full responsibility” said García Padilla, who if elected would become the tenth governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

The candidate said in his message that he will seek permanent solutions in areas such as the medicalization of drugs, the economy, crime, job creation, education, health and status. Regarding the status, he said he believed in the Constituent Assembly on the condition that it is not an excuse to address the other problems of Puerto Rico. He said it would treat everyone fairly, regardless of ideology, using the tools of the Commonwealth to achieve fiscal autonomy.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

UPR Students Riot R

ector Ana Guadalupe held a meeting with teachers at the UPR Rio Piedras School of Architecture. After rioting students punched the doors and windows of the room they broke into the meeting climbing through a window and unlocking the door for other rioters.

Guadalupe’s hair was pulled.

She was hit by thrown bottles. Guards including the Director of Security Jor-

S&P Upgrades Bonds

F

ollowing Moody’s lead, Standard & Poors (S&P) upgraded Puerto Rican government bonds to BBB with a stable outlook from BBBwith a positive outlook.

Over the 30 year period typically given these government bonds, the rate improvement saves up to $150 million.

EDITORS NOTE: We want our children to believe in freedom and justice. we also want them not to become criminals. $800 can be earned in 3 weeks at minimum wage at Mc Donald’s.

Most fast food restaurants are looking for staff. Our coffee needs to be harvested. In Cuba the communists send student revolutionaries to cut sugar cane. Our student revolutionaries would rather riot than pick coffee beans or even fry french fries.

Pro Independence US Congressman Luis Gutierrez monopolized the US Congress’s time showing photos of rioting students and maligning Puerto Rico’s finest, our police officers.

At some point in time, you have to say “enough”! Violent behavior is not a right. It is just a crime.

MATT. FULL DESDE

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ge Rodríguez managed to get her to a vehicle which eventually would remove her from the campus, but very slowly so as not to injure a student who had climbed on the roof. In the process the glass window beside Guadalupe was smashed. Drops of blood could be seen on Guadalupe’s arm. Rodríguez was punched and hurt in his face.

The students demanded Guadalupe resign.

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Taste And Mingle At Saborea Puerto Rico

S

aborea Puerto Rico “A Culinary Extravaganza” will take place from April 1-3 celebrating the best in Caribbean traditions and worldwide flavors with chefs from Puerto Rico and around the world. San Juan’s blue flag Escambrón Beach is “center stage” of a weekend full of zest, with tastings from 60 of the island’s finest restaurants, a wide variety of rums, wine, beer and distilled spirits, and the naparticipation of more than 50 international and local Culinary Personalities.. is “We are truly excited with this es edition of the festival which promises to be more refreshing and innovative.. d We will keep your taste buds tempted all weekend long”, notes Clarisa Jiménez, president & CEO of the Puerto Rico Hotel & Tourism Association (PRHTA).

Going on its fourth year, Saborea Puerto Rico has an unparalleled line up of Chefs and personalities prepared for culinarians—such as, ño, local celebrity Chefs Roberto Treviño, arisoll Mario Pagán, Giovanna Huyke, Marisoll Hernández, Ángel Santiago, Dayn Smith, Efraín Cruz, Fernando Parrilla, Mario Ferro, Germania Díaz, Juan Peña and Pablo Budet—have already confirmed their participation and will showcase many of the delectable dishes that have positioned Puerto Rico as a world-class gastronomic destination.

Furthermore, making their mark in this year’s Saborea Puerto Rico are a number of Food Network personalities including famed Latino Iron Chef José Garcés; this season’s Iron Chef Winner, Marc Forgione; Ted Allen, host of Chopped; Anne Burrell, of Worst Cooks in America; and Robert Irvine, of Restaurant Impossible. Cooking Channel’s, Latina chef Daisy Martínez and George Duran host of TLC’s Ultimate Cake Off will also be part of this culinary extravaganza.

Also, notable chefs, Govind Armstrong of Los Angeles, Douglas Rodríguez, Doreen Colondres and Harry Pagancoss of Miami, Denisse Oller, Alex García and Máximo Tejada from New York, Francisco Castro and Kalych Padró of Panama will be participating.

Augusto Schreiner, director of culinary talent, said each presentation pairs up a local chef with a guest chef. “This makes Saborea Puerto Rico a unique opportunity of cultural exchange among professional chefs and continues elevating the fusions of Puerto Rican cuisine,” he stated.

Each day, guests visiting the Saborea Puerto Rico Village will enjoy samples from Puerto Rico’s restaurants. Nine daily demo kitchens will provide visitors with the opportunity to learn the techniques and ingredients used to prepare recipes the way the experts do. A one-day pass allows “foodies” to access all areas for tastings and demon-

strations strations.

Mario González Lafuente, executive director of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, explained that, “the Tourism Company has the goal of captivating food enthusiasts, reinforcing Puerto Rico as a well-rounded destination with diverse offerings, able to meet the needs of all visitors”.

The Festival will also have a Kids Pavilion adjacent to the Saborea Puerto Rico Village, where, for a modest price, kids will learn how to prepare simple meals and snacks. Games, cooking, arts & crafts are just some of the activities planned for younger participants.

“Puerto Rico is full of music, passion and great food. The evolution of its cuisine has transformed the island into the Gastronomic Capital of the Caribbean”, said Festival Founder and Director, Barbara Mari-Pennock. “Don’t miss out on this gastronomic feast specially made for you”.

For more information and tickets visit saboreapuertorico.com or tcpr.com.

About Saborea Puerto Rico and the PRHTA: Saborea Puerto Rico is a Puerto Rico Hotel and Tourism Association event to benefit the tourism industry employees’ education fund and other programs focused on this industry’s development on the island.

It aims to promote Puerto Rico as a culinary destination and provide a platform for the island’s gastronomic industry.

The PRHTA is the organization that represents Puerto Rico’s private tourism sector. Founded in 1950, the PRHTA has 600 corporate members, including large, medium and small hotels, restaurants, airlines and other businesses that serve tourism in Puerto Rico.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

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March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

11 Mainland

Pressure for Answers on Fracking

By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

C

ongressional Democrats are demanding answers from the Environmental Protection Agency about the safety of hydraulic fracturing, a form of natural gas drilling also known as fracking, after revelations that wastewater from such drilling, which contains radioactive material, is regularly dumped into rivers and streams without proper treatment.

The dumping of the contaminated water was detailed in an investigative series on natural gas drilling

by Ian Urbina of The New York Times that began on Sunday.

“The natural gas industry has repeatedly claimed that fracking can be done safely,” Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement. “We now know we need a full investigation into exactly how fracking is done and what it does to our drinking water and our environment.”

“Americans should not have to consume radioactive materials from their drinking water as a byproduct of natural gas production,” he said.

Mr. Markey requested internal documents from the E.P.A. regarding studies of wastewater treatment plants and their ability to process contaminated water from gas wells.

He further demanded that Lisa Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, explain what steps the agency was taking to test sources of drinking water downstream from treatment plants for signs of contamination.

Joining Mr. Markey’s plea for information from the agency were several House Democrats from New York, who additionally requested hearings on the matter by Republican-led Congressional committees that oversee drilling.

“If federal and state regulations have not kept pace with this growing industry, we need to know before it creates a public health concern,” read a letter to committee leaders signed

by Representatives Carolyn Maloney, Maurice Hinchey and Jerrold Nadler.

Meanwhile, environmental regulators in Pennsylvania, where natural gas production has grown rapidly in recent years, are facing their own calls for increased scrutiny of radioactive material in drilling wastewater.

“No threat to Pennsylvania drinking water should be taken lightly; especially one involving radioactive material,” Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “Alarming information has been raised that must be fully investigated.”

In a letter to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and to the E.P.A., Mr. Casey noted that little testing for radioac-

tivity in drilling waste had been conducted in the last five years, a period when gas drilling activity increased sharply.

“These waters should be tested as soon as possible, continuing on a regular basis with full disclosure to the public,” he wrote.

Responding to concerns over possible contamination, the Pitts-

burgh Water and Sewer Authority said it would begin testing for radiation at its public drinking water intakes for the first time as a precautionary measure.

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

A Conspiracy With a Silver Lining

By WILLIAM D. COHAN

C

ommodity prices — for corn, wheat, soybeans, crude oil, gold and even farmland — have been going through the roof causes, primarily supply and demand pressures driven by fears about the unrest in the Middle East, the rise of consumerism in China and India, and the Fed’s $600 billion campaign to increase the money supply.

Explain the price of silver? In six months, the value of the precious metal increased nearly 80 percent, to $34 an ounce from around $19 an ounce. The last month alone, its price increased nearly 23 percent. This price action in silver market is reminiscent of the fortune-busting, roller-coaster ride enjoyed by the Hunt Brothers, Nelson Bunker and William Herbert, back in 1970s and early 1980s when they tried unsuccessfully to corner the market. When the Hunts started buying silver in 1973, the price of the metal was $1.95 an ounce. By early 1980, the brothers had driven the price up to $54 an ounce before the Federal Reserve intervened, changed the rules on speculative silver investments and the price plunged. The brothers later declared bankruptcy.

According to commenters on sites with names like Silverseek, 321Gold and Seeking Alpha — silver shot up in price after a whistleblower exposed a conspiracy to keep the price artificially low despite inflationary pressure of the Fed’s cheap money policy. (Some suspect the Fed itself was behind the effort to keep silver prices low, as a way to keep the dollar’s value artificially high.) Trying to unravel the mysterious rise in silver’s price is a conspiracy theorist’s dream, replete with powerful bankers, informants, suspicious car accidents and a now a squeeze on short sellers.

When JPMorgan Chase bought Bear Stearns in March 2008, it inherited Bear Stearns’ large bet the price of silver would fall. It added to that bet, and the bank HSBC got into the market heavily on the bear side. These actions “artificially depressed the price of silver dramatically downward,” according to a classaction lawsuit initiated by a Florida futures trader and filed against both banks in November in federal court in the Southern District of New York.

“The conspiracy was enormously successful, netting the defendants substantial illegal profits” billions of dollars between June 2008 and March 2010, according to the suit. JPMorgan and HSBC together “controlled over 85 percent the commercial net short positions” in silvers futures contracts at Comex, a Chicago-based exchange on which silver is traded, along with “25 percent of all open interest short positions” and a “a market share in excess of 9o percent of all precious metals derivative contracts, excluding gold.”

Trading in precious metals is regulated and closely monitored by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In September 2008, after receiving hundreds of complaints silver future prices were being manipulated downward by JPMorgan and HSBC, the commission’s enforcement division started an investigation. In November 2009, an informant, described in the law suit only as a former employee of Goldman Sachs and a 40-year industry veteran, approached the commission with how the silver traders at JPMorgan were bragging about all the money they were making “as a result of manipulation,” which entailed “flooding the market” with “short positions” every time the price of silver started to creep upward. The idea was by unloading its short positions like a timereleased capsule, JPMorgan’s traders were keeping the price of silver artificially low.

The informant Andrew Maguire, an independent precious metals trader in London. On Jan. 26, 2010, Maguire sent Bart Chilton, a member of the futures trading commission, an e-mail urging him to look into the silver trading that day. “It was a good example of how a single seller, when they hold such a concentrated position in the very small silver market can instigate a sell off at will”.

Feb. 3, 2010, Maguire gave the futures trading commission word about an impending “manipulation event” would occur two days later, when Labor Department’s non-farm payroll numbers be released.

He spelled out two trading scenarios. “Both scenarios spell an attempt by the two main short holders” — JPMorganChase and HSBC — “to illegally drive the market down and reap very large profits,” Maguire wrote in an e-mail to a trading-commission investigator.

Feb. 5, Maguire took a victory lap, writing in another e-mail to the trading commission “silver manipulation was a great success and played out EXACTLY to plan as predicted.” “I hope you took note of how and who added the short sales and am certain it is same concentrated shorts in full control since JPM took Bear Stearns position A serious amount of money was made and lost today as a result of CFTC’s allowing an illegal concentrated and manipulative position to continue.”

In March 2010, Maguire released his e-mails publicly, because commission’s enforcement arm was not taking swift enough action. He was unhappy over not being invited to a commission hearing on position limits scheduled for March 25. Then came the cloak and dagger element: the day after the hearing, Maguire was involved in a bizarre car accident in London. As he was at a gas station, a car came out of a side street and barreled into his car and two others; London police, using helicopters and chase cars, eventually nabbed the hit-and-run driver. Reports perpetrator given a slap on wrist inflamed onli-

ne crowds that had become captivated by Maguire’s odd story.

The class-action lawsuit contends that between March 2010 and November 2010, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC reduced their short positions in the silver market by 30 percent, causing the metal’s price to rise dramatically, but leaving a large short position. With the value of silver rising nearly every day, the two banks are caught in a “massive short squeeze,” costing them billions they made originally plus billions more. Whether these losses will show on the books of JPMorgan Chase and HSBC remains to be seen.

The conspiracy-minded claimed the Fed must have agreed to make JPMorgan and HSBC whole for losses the banks suffered when the price of silver rose above the artificially maintained low levels.

Two-and-a-half years later, Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s investigation is unresolved, and one commissioner — Bart Chilton — thinks after interviewing 32 people and reviewing 40,000 documents, there has been enough investigating and not enough prosecuting. “More than two years ago, the agency began an investigation into silver markets”.

I believe violations to the Commodity Exchange Act have taken place in silver markets and such violation should be prosecuted.”

Chilton said last week, that “one participant” in the silver market still controlled 35 percent of the silver market “enough to move prices,” and well above the 10 percent “position limits” commission has proposed to comply with Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Since that law’s passage the commodities exchanges have issued waivers permitting the ownership of silver positions above limits the C.F.T.C. has proposed, and were supposed to be in place by January of this year. Waivers remain in place, and big traders have not been penalized, much to Chilton’s frustration the mystery deepens: last Thursday, the price of silver fell $1.50 per ounce in less than an hour before recovering. “This was robbery at its most obvious and most vindictive,” wrote Richard Guthrie, a London-based trader, in an e-mail to Chilton. “How many investors lost money and positions to the financial benefit of an elite few?”

It’s getting hard to brush off Andrew Maguire’s claims as rantings of a rogue trader. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission should release the files from its investigation so the public can determine whether JPMorganChase and HSBC did anything illegal, with or without the help of the Fed. The commission should start enforcing the 10 percent threshold on silver positions it proposed to comply with Dodd-Frank law.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

13

EDUCATION 14

The San Juan Weeekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Teachers Wonder, Why the Scorn?

By TRIP GABRIEL

T

he jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her.

Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.

“You feel punched in the stomach,” said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees’ two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor’s plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights.

Ms. Parker, a second-year teacher making $36,000, fears that under the proposed legislation class sizes would rise and higher contributions to her benefits would knock her out of the middle class.

“I love teaching, but I have $26,000 of student debt,” she said. “I’m 30 years old, and I can’t save up enough for a down payment” for a house. Nor does she own a car. She is making plans to move to Colorado, where she could afford to keep teaching by living with her parents.

Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

Republican lawmakers in half a dozen states are pressing to unwind tenure and seniority protections in place for more than 50 years. Gov. Chris Christie’s dressing down of New Jersey teachers in town-hall-style meetings, accusing them of greed, has touched a populist vein and made him a national star.

Mayors are threatening mass layoffs, including in New York City and in Providence, R.I., where all 1,926 teachers were told last week they would lose their jobs — a largely symbolic gesture since most will be hired back.

Some experts question whether teaching, with its already high attrition

rate — more than 25 percent leave in the first three years — will attract high-quality recruits in the future.

“It’s hard to feel good about yourself when your governor and other people are telling you you’re doing a lousy job,” said Steve Derion, 32, who teaches American history in Manahawkin, N.J. “I’m sure there were worse times to be a teacher in our history — I know they had very little rights — but it feels like we’re going back toward that direction.”

Those pressing for teachers’ concessions insist the changes will improve schools.

“This is in no way, shape or form an attack on teachers; it is a comprehensive effort to reform a system,” said Tony Bennett, the superintendent of public instruction in Indiana, where demonstrators have also besieged the Capitol in opposition to bills supported by Dr. Bennett and Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican. The legislation would limit teachers’ collective bargaining to pay and benefits and allow principals to set class sizes and school hours and to lay off teachers based on job performance, not years of service.

Dr. Bennett said the state teachers’ union had distorted the legislation to create fear.

There are signs of a backlash in favor of teachers. A New York Times poll taken last week found that by nearly two to one — 60 to 33 percent — Americans opposed restricting collective bargaining for public employees. A similar majority — including more than half of Republicans — said the salaries and benefits of most public employees were “about right” or “too low.”

As for teachers’ mood, an annual poll sponsored by the MetLife Foundation found in 2009, before this year’s blast of opprobrium, that 59 percent were “very satisfied,” up from 40 percent in 1984. In interviews this week, even teachers facing layoffs or pay cuts said they felt a calling to be in the classroom.

“I put my heart and soul into teaching,” said Lindsay Vlachakis, 25, a high school math teacher in Madison. “When people attack teachers, they’re attacking me.”

Although crushing state budget deficits are the proximate cause of lawmakers’ pressure, a further justification for many of the proposed measures comes from the broad accountability movement, which aims to raise student achievement and sees teachers’ unions as often blocking the way.

Accountability, particularly as measured by student test scores, has brought sweeping changes to education and promises more, but many teachers feel the changes are imposed with scant input from classroom-level educators. Nearly 70 percent said in the MetLife survey that their voices were not heard in education

debates.

Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, said the decline in teachers’ status traced to the success of unions in paying teachers and granting job security based on their years of service, not ability.

“They are reaping a bitter harvest that they didn’t individually plant but their profession has planted over 50 years, going from a respected profession to a mass work force in which everyone is treated as if they are interchangeable, as in the steel mills of yesteryear,” Mr. Finn said.

Those who oppose the gathering momentum to evaluate teachers based in significant part on student test scores argue that it will drive good teachers from the neediest schools.

Anthony Cody, who taught middleschool science for 18 years and now mentors new teachers in the Oakland, Calif., school district, said many leave at the three-year mark for higher salaries and easier conditions elsewhere.

Oakland has many poor students and schools at the bottom on standardized tests — schools the federal Education Department identifies as candidates to be sweepingly overhauled by removing half their staffs.

“What we need in these schools is stability,” said Mr. Cody, 52, who writes a blog about teaching. “We need to convince people that if they invest their career in working with these challenging students, then we will reward them and appreciate them. We will not subject them to arbitrary humiliation in the newspaper. We will not require they be evaluated and paid based on test scores that often fluctuate greatly beyond the teacher’s control.”

Mr. Cody acknowledged that many of his younger colleagues, who have come of age in the era of test scores used to gauge progress and accountability — first for schools, and now increasingly for teachers — are not as resistant to the concept.

“I’m not too concerned or worried about that,” said Kevin Tougher, 31, who teaches third grade in Lake Grove, N.Y., where a new statewide evaluation system will rate teachers based 40 percent on their students’ test scores or comparable measures.

Last month Mr. Tougher was notified that because of his lack of seniority, he will be laid off, or “excessed,” this year under the state’s proposed cuts to school aid. A union activist, he believes seniority-based layoffs are fair.

“The seniority part, I get that,” said Mr. Tougher, who is single. “While it would be a bummer if I were excessed for next year, that’s just how things go sometimes.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

15

There’s a Canine Conspiracy! Television Reveals It!

Who’s the real master? Jill Zarin and her Chihuahua, Ginger, on “It’s Me or the Dog.”

By NEIL GENZLINGER

W

hat in blazes is wrong with this country’s dogs? Such a collection of neurotic, insecure, bitchy, bullying creatures hasn’t been seen since whenever the latest episode of “Real Housewives” was broadcast.

I do not own a dog and never have, but I do own a television, and from the evidence it emits, the whole danged species needs to go on a lengthy timeout. On the National Geographic Channel, Cesar Millan is now in his seventh season of grappling with ill-behaved mutts on his “Dog Whisperer.” On Saturday on Animal Planet, Victoria Stilwell returns for a third season of unprovoked barking and biting on “It’s Me or the Dog.” Even the Hallmark Channel got into the act this week; on Monday it rolled out a fresh incarnation of “Petkeeping With Marc Morrone,” which isn’t limited to problem dogs but certainly had plenty of them in the premiere.

Watch enough of these shows and you come to suspect that they are treating the symptoms of an epidemic, not the causes. For instance, a superficial analysis might suggest that Ginger, the Chihuahua in Saturday’s “Me or the Dog,” is unbearable because her owner, an Upper East Side caricature (and “Real Housewives of New York” alum) named Jill Zarin, has lost the ability to distinguish normal human-dog interactions from abnormal. (The episode becomes unwatchable about the fourth time Ginger is allowed to stick her doggie tongue up Ms. Zarin’s nostrils.) But Ginger isn’t yapping, biting and inappropriately lic-

king just because she happened to be paired with a permissive human. This kind of misbehavior takes generations of breeding to perfect.

The same is true of Phoebe, a recent “Dog Whisperer” poodle who attacked anything male on two legs; Sydney, a Jack Russell terrier whose hostility toward another dog puts her on Ms. Stilwell’s “Top 10 Difficult Dogs” list; Shayna Punim, a German shepherd in the “Petkeeping” premiere who can’t take a simple car trip without incident.

It’s tempting to write these cases off to reality television’s penchant for focusing on the absolute worst of a species, be it humans or animals, but apparently there is dog trouble all over the land, and multiple kinds of it. Start typing “dog behavior problems” into Google, and it helpfully offers you these suggestions: -dog behavior problems dominance -dog behavior problems anxiety -dog behavior problems biting -dog behavior problems chewing -dog behavior problems barking -dog behavior problems aggression -dog behavior problems urinating -dog behavior problems marking -dog behavior problems licking In contrast, start typing “dog behavior good” into your search box, and Google is baffled. “Dog behavior good bad,” it says, sounding like a desperate guess. No “dog behavior good rescuing Timmy from a well” here; apparently, since the invention of Google sometime in the last century, no one in the entire world has had occasion to inquire about good behavior by dogs. Because there hasn’t been any.

All our dog experts seem to be tied up trying to fix this mess one televised dog at a time, an impractical approach, given that according to a news release I just received promoting — no kidding — a weight-loss contest for pets, there are 77.5 million dogs in the United States. So it’s left to a nonexpert like myself to try to figure out the root causes of this orgy of misbehavior. It seems to me that it can all be traced to three familiar bugaboos: 1. THE MEDIA Specifically, television. Dogs, stuck in the house all day, probably watch more of it than kids do.

That was fine in the early days of the medium because the role models they would see were, basically, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, the two finest dogs in history.

Lassie never barked unless a tree had fallen on some family member eight miles away and certainly never required the kind of dog therapy loose in the land today. And it’s a good thing that TV’s Rin Tin Tin — a German shepherd, like the aforementioned Shayna — wasn’t around to see Mr. Morrone’s prescription for Shayna’s travel problems in “Petkeeping”: he suggested an “anxiety wrap,” a tight-fitting garment that supposedly has a soothing effect.

“An anxiety wrap?” Mr. Tin might say. “For riding in a car? Are you arfing kidding me? You want anxiety, try rescuing Rusty from 50 armed Apaches. I did that three times a day, and nobody ever wrapped me.”

Anyway, by the late ’60s those paragons were going or gone, and there were new dogs in town. The neurotic ScoobyDoo arrived in 1969; yes, the title beast would eventually help save the day, but what the dogs in the viewing audience noticed was that he could also, say, eat his master’s triple-decker sandwich and not be punished.

Then came the slobbery “Beethoven” movies, which turn up on TV a lot Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer, helps pets like Macy with behavioral issues.

because they’re family-friendly, and the even more slobbery “Turner & Hooch,” which turns up on TV a lot because it has lengthy scenes with Tom Hanks wearing nothing but black underpants. And now there’s Brian, the more-human-than-thehumans dog on “Family Guy.” It’s no wonder your postmodern mutt, after spending hours watching this kind of stuff, thinks there are no rules.

2. LIBERAL DEMOCRATS The “barking chain” scene in the 1961 film “101 Dalmatians” taught dogs how to spread news far and wide, and one of their first chances to do so was provided on April 27, 1964, by the nation’s No. 1 liberal Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson pulled his beagles, Him and Her, up on their hind legs by yanking their ears; a photograph of the president demonstrating the stunt with Him appeared far and wide. Him yipped, and dog lovers howled. (“White House Gets Protests on Dogs,” read a headline. “Telephone Callers Deplore Pulling Beagles’ Ears.”)

We can safely postulate that word of the ear pulling reached every dog in America within a few days and that retaliatory planning began almost immediately. Mid-’60s dogs were smart enough to realize that a direct attack on a nuclear power like the United States could not succeed; instead they chose a guerrilla campaign of accelerating misbehavior, calculated to produce within a few generations — i.e., now — dog anarchy.

3. OVERREGULATION Let’s state the unpleasant but obvious: the balance of power between dogs and humans shifted when we started ordering ourselves to clean up after the beasts. In New York that took place on Aug. 1, 1978; that’s when the city’s Canine Waste Law went into effect. One man interviewed that day called it “the stupidest thing in the history of the city,” but now it’s considered standard operating procedure — by both us and our dogs. Is it any surprise that dogs don’t obey us when they view us as their personal hygienists?

So that’s my guess as to what has given rise to the kinds of behavior now rampant on dog-whisperer TV: the confluence of bad role models, an image of subservience and a long-held grudge.

Possible solutions: play “Lassie” DVDs in a continuous loop, limit dog ownership to landowners with at least 10 acres and have President Obama issue one of those apologies for historical grievances that have become popular in recent years. It’s either that or get used to dog tongues in your nostrils and dog behaviorists every time you turn on the TV.

Wine

16

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Judging Cabernet’s Class of 2007 To Kalon Vineyard, a higher-end Napa cabernet. That Mondavi offered intense yet refined, sculptured red fruit flavors, less exuberant perhaps but more at home on the dinner table, and only 13.5 percent alcohol.

Of course, that wine came from a different universe, when the Mondavi family still owned the Robert Mondavi Winery, and different imperatives guided the winemaking. Vintage matters, but not nearly as much as the intent of the winemaker.

By ERIC ASIMOV

E

VEN in Napa Valley, where only the rare vintage is spoken of in less than superlatives, 2007 was considered nearly perfect for cabernet sauvignon. Wine Spectator rated it 99 on its 100-point scale, while other commentators, perhaps exhibiting more caution, used words like “splendid” and “extraordinary.”

While vintage can offer valuable insights to consumers, its importance is sometimes exaggerated. Great vintages do not necessarily make great wines, certainly not if the producer is not up to the task. Conversely, even in poor vintages, wines from great producers always have something interesting to say. And as in all matters of taste, evaluating vintages is often subjective. Yet of 2007 in Napa, few if any have dissented.

The widespread praise offered an ideal opportunity for the wine panel to appraise Napa cabernets. We tasted 20 bottles from the 2007 vintage, all under a $100 price cap. For the tasting Florence Fabricant and I were joined by the wifeand-husband team of Beth von Benz, a wine consultant, and Scott Mayger, the general manager of Telepan on the Upper West Side.

Many producers considered the 2007 growing season ideal, largely free of extreme heat and other threats, allowing them to harvest the grapes at what they judged to be the ideal point of ripeness.

Did the more moderate weather lead to wines that depart from the dense, extravagant style that has prevailed in Napa for more than a decade?

Yes and no. We did not find as many ultra-ripe, jammy wines as we have in past vintages, nor were we overwhelmed by oak as has sometimes been the case.

Instead, we found more freshness in the wines, and a more lively acidity. This was all to the good.

Yet we were disappointed to find so many uniform, monochromatic wines with little finesse. The fear of making wines that could possibly be termed “green” has led most Napa producers to forsake any semblance of the herbal flavors that were once integral to cabernet sauvignon wines. Instead of complexity, the rule seems to be all fruit, all the time, with power deemed preferable to elegance.

“Most seem made to fit a profile, in a commercially successful style,” Scott said.

It’s hard to argue with success, and no, this is not a new story. But it conti-

Tasting Report

nues to disappoint me, even as I know that some Napa producers are aiming for more subtlety and nuance. Admittedly, 20 bottles barely put a dent in the Napa selection. Perhaps I would have felt better if some of my annual favorite producers in this price range, like Corison and Frog’s Leap, had been in the blind tasting. Yet it was a representative sample of what consumers will find in the marketplace.

Even in these recessionary times, the $100 price cap ruled out many of the Napa glamour names. Cult cabernets were certainly out of bounds, as were estate-grown wines from many solid producers. At the same time, we did stumble upon some bottles from classic Napa names that had been discounted. We found the Georges de Latour Private Reserve from Beaulieu, one of Napa’s historic bottlings, for $90, down from $120, for example, and we got Beringer Vineyards Private Reserve, another $120 bottle, for $85.

Even so, our No. 1 wine was a $47 bottle from Faust, owned by the wine magnate Agustin Huneeus of Quintessa, a higher-end Napa producer, and Veramonte in Chile. It displayed not only the freshness of the vintage, but harmony, restraint and an underlying complexity.

At No. 2 was a very different sort of bottle, the Newton Unfiltered, which was certainly on the dense and concentrated side of the spectrum yet well balanced. It was perhaps not a wine to my personal taste, but I could not ignore its quality.

No. 3 was the Clos du Val, almost always a well-structured wine, made in a restrained style more typical of Napa 20 years ago.

Our No. 4 bottle, Covenant, is a kosher wine, and proves the point of Jeff

Morgan, a proprietor at Covenant and a wine writer, that kosher wines can be made without compromising on quality.

This wine was fresh and lively, reflecting the vintage, with plenty of power, but lacking a little structure and complexity.

At $95, it was one of the most expensive wines in the tasting, though not the most expensive wine in our top 10. That was the Keever at $97, our No. 10 bottle, a powerful, ultra-ripe wine that in its thick texture and sweet flavors showed more of the recent Napa profile than it did the 2007 vintage.

Neither the Beaulieu nor the Beringer made our top 10. The Beaulieu was dense, powerful and almost overwhelming, as if flavors had been layered on with a trowel, a far cry from the austerely elegant Georges de Latours of yore. The Beringer seemed fresh and in that sense reflected the vintage, yet was big and broad with little shape or finesse. Other big names that did not make our top 10 included the Cakebread Benchland Select ($99) and the Paul Hobbs ($65).

Even in a vintage of moderate weather like 2007, these are powerful wines.

Except for the Clos du Val, with its typically moderate level of alcohol at 13.5 percent, most of the others were 14.5 percent or higher. The Robert Mondavi, our No. 5 wine, topped out at 15.5 percent.

This especially gave me pause. The wine was inky black, concentrated and powerful, and if it did have a pleasing touch of mint among its flavors it also carried some heat from the alcohol. For $24, this is a pretty good value if you go for the power style.

Yet I couldn’t help thinking about this wine a few nights later, as I was eating lamb with a 1999 Mondavi Reserve

Faust Napa Valley, $47, ✩✩✩ Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Balanced, restrained and elegant with fresh flavors of red fruits and flowers.

Newton Napa Valley, $42, ✩✩ ½ Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Dense and concentrated yet not overbearing, with flavors of dark fruits and chocolates.

BEST VALUE

Clos du Val Napa Valley, $30, ✩✩ ½ Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Compact and well-structured with juicy fruit and good acidity.

Covenant Napa Valley, $95, ✩✩ Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Earthy aromas of flowers and red fruit; powerful and smooth but lacks structure and complexity.

Robert Mondavi Napa Valley, $24, ✩✩ Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Concentrated, inky black and tannic, with flavors of red fruit, smoke and mint, and a touch of heat from alcohol.

Shafer Napa Valley Stags Leap, $69, ✩✩ District One Point Five Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Classic Napa power cabernet, with dense, concentrated flavors and well-integrated oak.

Cade Napa Valley, $60, ✩✩ Napa Cuvée Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Big yet balanced and a touch soft, with aromas of flowers, berries and herbs.

Hess Napa Valley, $23, ✩✩ Allomi Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Big, rich, dense and thick, with sweet fruit flavors and plenty of oak.

Vineyard 29 Napa Valley Cru, $49, ** Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 All power, no finesse, with dense flavors of dark fruit and chocolate.

Keever Napa Valley, $97, ✩✩ Cabernet Sauvignon 2007 Dense and thick with sweet, smooth flavors of dark fruit and smoke.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

17

ART

María Elena Perales Pride of Puerto Rico By: Daniel Morales Pomales

I

f twenty 20 years is nothing, as said Gardel in his tango song, imagine 30 years working in a world so complex and discriminatory as the arts. María Elena Perales, despite all difficulties, has been very successful and recognized in our island and internationally.

The sculptor from caguas will celebrate a three-decade career with the unveiling of her “Gota de Lluvia”, a largescale fiber glass sculptural piece that will float on the pond in the Sculpture Garden Museum of Art of Puerto Rico in Santurce as the start of a year round celebration, which will be accompanied by other small-format exhibitions, lectures, and thepresentation of her second poetry book “Llanto de Luna” and a great closing in the month of November at the Museo de Arte de Caguas.

“The closure had to be in my city, in honor to my beloved mayor the late William Miranda Marin, past executive of Caguas, a great art lover who pioneered much of my work, for their sensitivity and support of my work throughout his years,” said Perales .

The artist loves silence for its creative process, as well as the beach and walking. The piece “Raindrop” was proposed two years ago to the Museum of Art, and in it the artist has combined various educational components to generate an interest in the issue of water in Puerto

Rico and worldwide.

“The museum’s educational unit has promoted discussions, workshops and conferences of the creative process and the importance of water to raise awareness that water is vital. Water is a vital element that is wasted in industrialized countries like ours.There is a preventive culture of care and time is running out.

For that we create to educate the various uses of water, how water affects our lives, religion in the spiritual and even as therapeutic, “Perales said in an interview with

The San Juan Weekly.

This great artist has experienced in many formats, techniques and materials, photography, screen printing, drawing and painting. Such iconic works as the Floral Clock Palmer Square, the Monument to the Indigenous Women, Spanish Heritage Monument, the Monument to the Soldier, adorn Caguas. Also many busts like Abelardo Díaz Morales at the school that bears his name, Solá Morales at the headquarters of the baseball players Criollos de Caguas, Luis M. Arcelay in the theater district of the same name and more.

But not only Caguas has María Elena creations but also Mayagüez, and recently Aguas Buenas with a triptych in a modern technique of metal and foam covered in concrete. The same is located on

the riviera banks in Aguas Buenas in the Recreational Park La Charca. The artist was inspired by the natural surroundings, beauty. That’s how a representation of the runoff of water, almond leaf and caves was created. It took some time to study to make each piece.

“They are beautiful pieces that would make themselves known because they have not been opened and will have their plate so that visitors learn from each of them”.

Another project that employs the artist is the Concrete Sculpture Biennial supported by the Municipality of Caguas, and that since 2004 coordinates with local and foreign delegations.

“Next year we go for the fifth edition

Continues on page 18

ART

18

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Comes from page 17 and hopefully all out and go to another level. This project was executed in Mexico Route of Friendship in 1968. When I visited I was impressed to see him and wanted to bring to my country for other artists to express themselves in that technique. We have been very successful and the project is permanent in every corner

that we do this. It is a unique project that does not exist in the world and we are privileged to have it every two years “.

Perales now is working on an installation at the University of Turabo, at which she hopes to soon become a resident artist, and is the only female artist that was part of one of the main halls. It will be the recreation room of the founder of the school Doña Ana G. Méndez.

“I strongly agree with her, she was a successful fighter and neither of us has made it easy. She in her area and I in art.

Time will represent you through objects, in the hands of the clock and other elements that develop the process.

Perales said she is humble and grateful to God for the opportunity to allow her art to be exposed. She longs to be repeated as public art projects, as were promoted by former Gov. Sila Calderon.

“Art in all its forms helps humans.

Violence envelops us. I am concerned the suicides and economic problems that sometimes end in attacks and negative contrasts in a society. It can support more participatory projects where the community is part of them and the citizens enjoy the pride of having part of everyday life. Art is necessary, is healing in every way, but they always cut the budget in art and culture. As a community we should oppose it. “

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

19

New York Times Editorials The Hollow Cry of ‘Broke’

W

e’re broke! We’re broke!” Speaker John Boehner said. “We’re broke in this state,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. “New Jersey’s broke,” Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a “looming bankruptcy,” Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan.

And states have to balance their budgets.

Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies.

The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is “

because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like Mr. Boehner and Mr. Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.

To cite just the latest example, House Republicans successfully pressured the Senate to approve a bill cutting $4 billion in spending just to keep the federal government from shutting down for the next two weeks. In a matter of days, the Senate will be forced to take up the House bill to make more than $61 billion in ruinous cuts over the next seven months, all under the pretext of “fiscal responsibility.” (At least the White House says it will be involved in the

next round.) Many Republican governors are employing the same tactic.

But now voters are starting to notice the effects of these cuts and to get angry at the ideological overreach. A New York Times/CBS News poll showed that Americans oppose ending bargaining rights for public unions by a majority of nearly two to one. And the poll sharply refutes the postReagan Republican mantra that the public invariably abhors all tax increases. Nearly twice as many people said they would prefer a tax increase to cutting benefits of public employees or to cutting spending on roads.

A Gallup poll last week showed that 61 percent of respondents nationwide reject Mr. Walker’s attempt to revoke collectivebargaining rights for public unions, including 41 percent of the Republicans polled.

Like the Times/CBS poll, Gallup found a mixed result about the overall popularity

of unions, suggesting that labor is on firm ground in defending its basic rights but still needs to negotiate with the public good in mind.

Before the union uprising, Wisconsin voters might not have noticed when Mr. Walker approved business tax cuts earlier this year that made his budget gap worse.

But now, with his cries of being “broke,” they should listen more closely. On Tuesday, he unveiled a budget that would cut aid to school districts and local governments by nearly $1 billion over two years, while preventing those jurisdictions from raising property taxes at all to make up for the loss.

Perhaps because of the economic downturn, voting among union households was sharply down last November, which may help explain some of the Republican gains. Mr. Walker and his fellow Republicans, may wind up turning that around next year.

This Is Just the Start

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

F

uture historians will long puzzle over how the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in protest over the confiscation of his fruit stand, managed to trigger popular uprisings across the Arab/Muslim world.

We know the big causes — tyranny, rising food prices, youth unemployment and social media. But since being in Egypt, I’ve been putting together my own back-ofthe-envelope guess list of what I’d call the “not-so-obvious forces” that fed this mass revolt. Here it is: THE OBAMA FACTOR Americans have never fully appreciated what a radical thing we did — in the eyes of the rest of the world — in electing an AfricanAmerican with the middle name Hussein as president. I’m convinced that listening to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech — not the words, but the man — were more than a few young Arabs who were saying to

themselves: “Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young.

I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m darkskinned. His middle name is Hussein.

My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.” I’d put that in my mix of forces fueling these revolts.

GOOGLE EARTH While Facebook has gotten all the face time in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, don’t forget Google Earth, which began roiling Bahraini politics in 2006. A big issue in Bahrain, particularly among Shiite men who want to get married and build homes, is the unequal distribution of land. On Nov. 27, 2006, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Bahrain, The Washington Post ran this report from there: “Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings and their children, said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens

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of thousands of mainly poor Shiites were squashed together in small, dense areas.

‘We are 17 people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,’ he said. ‘And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.’

Bahraini activists have encouraged people to take a look at the country on Google Earth, and they have set up a special user group whose members have access to more than 40 images of royal palaces.”

ISRAEL The Arab TV network Al Jazeera has a big team covering Israel today. Here are some of the stories they have been beaming into the Arab world: Israel’s previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had to resign because he was accused of illicitly taking envelopes stuffed with money from a Jewish-American backer. An Israeli court recently convicted Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav on two counts of rape, based on accusations by former employees. And just a few weeks ago, Israel, at the last second, rescinded the appointment of Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant as the army’s new chief of staff after Israeli environmentalists spurred a government investigation that concluded General Galant had seized public land near his home. (You can see his house on Google Maps!) This surely got a few laughs in Egypt where land sales to fat cats and cronies of the regime that have resulted in huge overnight profits have been the talk of Cairo this past year. When you live right next to a country that is bringing to justice its top leaders for corruption and you live in a country where many of the top leaders are corrupt, well, you notice.

THE BEIJING OLYMPICS China and Egypt were both great civilizations subjected to imperialism and were both dirt poor back in the 1950s, with China even poorer than Egypt, Edward Goldberg, who teaches business strategy, wrote in The Globalist. But, today, China has built the world’s second-largest economy, and Egypt is still living on foreign aid. What do you think young Egyptians thought when they watched the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics? China’s Olympics were another wake-up call — “in a way that America or the West could never be” — telling young Egyptians that something was very wrong with their country, argued Goldberg.

THE FAYYAD FACTOR Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad introduced a new form of government in the Arab world in the last three years, something I’ve dubbed “Fayyadism.” It said: judge me on my performance, on how I deliver government services and collect the garbage and create jobs — not simply on how I “resist” the West or Israel. Every Arab could relate to this. Chinese had to give up freedom but got economic growth and decent government in return. Arabs had to give up freedom and got the Arab-Israeli conflict and unemployment in return.

Add it all up and what does it say?

It says you have a very powerful convergence of forces driving a broad movement for change. It says we’re just at the start of something huge. And it says that if we don’t have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages all this change.

20 March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weeekly

LETTERS Where else?

“Progressive”

Existential Anomie

• Where else is Disney World the top choice for honeymooners?

• Where else is Harry Potter a favorite among adults, but not among children?

• Where else do people vote for politicians they hate?

• Where else does bureaucracy operate according to the principles of malignant tumors?

• Where else do men and women delight is tormenting each other to the extreme we’re number two on earth in domestic violence?

• Where else do police commit more crimes than they solve?

• Where else do Christian zealots not know the Ten Commandments?

• Where else are dogs sacred, but people expendable?

• Where else are children dressed up like fashion models, while parents look like gutter derelicts?

• Where else does everybody get the car a full cover, while buying two cars and holding on to one as a spare would be much cheaper because car theft is a virtual certainty?

• Where else is it thorough and consistent government policy to keep the population as dumb as possible?

• Where else is mooching on another country something to be proud of?

• Where else is an epidemic that’s snuffed 25,000 lives unimportant, while this year’s flu has everybody in a panic because it’s killed 25?

• Where else does a politician figure he’ll make a better impression in Barrio Obrero wearing a $4,000 suit?

• Where else is the flag lowered a month when a soap-opera star dies, but not when a freedom fighter does?

• Where else did people not notice the explosive spread of heterosexual AIDS because they were spooked over the Chupacabras.

• Where else is murder tolerable, but pornography not?

• Where else is it okay to kill people, but not fetuses?

• Where else do politicians recycle the same lies every four years because nobody remembers that long having been lied to?

• Where else are prison gangs allowed to control the penitentiaries because they do a better job at it?

• Where else do motorists never, ever signal turns, always block pedestrian walks at intersections for no reason at all and honk their horns like maniacs.

• Where else does loyalty to political party trump love of country?

• Where else do people routinely lie rather that admit they don’t know?

• Where else may condoms not be used even to save the lives of thousands?

Rosselló’s MANO DURA CONTRA EL CRIMEN has been replaced by Fortuño’s MANO DURA CONTRA LOS UNIVERSITARIOS. Crime can wait, riddance of the middle class won’t.

To Ex-Rep. Rolando Crespo: In Annie Hall (1977) Woody Allen’s curiosity is spiked into sniffing cocaine when he’s told it costs $2K an ounce. Only then he sneezes on the tray and blows it away. The stuff fills the lives of the idle rich. Legislators come to mind.

Old San Juan and Condado are dotted with cozy little night clubs open workday nights for politicians, who else has the time for that? In 1975 my good friend got back from Vietnam, he put his arm around my shoulder and uttered, “This afternoon we’re going to have the time of our lives, I’ve got a whole bag of perico with me.” Like he didn’t consider I might say no. I simply realized I didn’t want to do that. That beyond a beer or a joint reality is where it’s at.

You people lead empty lives because you don’t do anything you would feel good about, you’re just a gaggle of shameless parasites.

Saturday a thick-featured overweight “police agent” was giving a stale lecture at Plaza Las Américas. About kids using dope. He ran through the idiotic “watch signs,” loss of weight, change of mood, sleeplessness.

There was virtually no audience despite the many seats. I was there because my feet were killing me and he saw the scorn in my face and that drove him furious but he chose not to react.

If you’re enough of a moron not to have understood that substance abuse is the symptom and not the disease, I invite you to consider what was going on before the various drugs came along. Teens all over the U.S. wore black leather jackets and greasy manes and were stabbing each other to death with switchblades, as documented in contemporary films: Rebel Without Cause, The Young Savages, West Side Story and that famous one with Marlon Brando whose name I don’t remember just now. Simply consider what dope is, an anesthetic basically, to blot out an inferno of a life.

You start at the bottom, fix our garbage public schools, may big business do without their assembly-line fodder. Then at the top, dump our degenerate politicians, at least don’t be so stupid as to vote for them again in 2012.

The Fortuño maneuverings are much what Chancellor Adolph Hitler did in Germany in the early 30s. Realize the German electorate did not hand over absolute power to this shy-looking leader of what sounded like a pioneer ideology, imaginative and effervescent, much more than can be said for the penepeístas.

Democracy is inherently glitchy and the devilishly clever can certainly dismantle it under our noses. Reason why Thomas Jefferson warned that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

We still wield freedom of the media, when the police torture people and sexually assault young girls we find out about it. Don’t count on such a thing forever. n the mid-70s, when TV and Time magazine were abuzz that the Pinochet regime in Chile were murdering many thousands of young people in the sport stadiums of Santiago, at a dance I met a pretty Chilean exchange student. Oh, wow! I’d get a first-hand account. Only she looked at me like I was crazy. After all, she lived in Santiago. If such a thing were going on there, she’d certainly know about it, wouldn’t she?

Rocco Sastre, Ponce

Mariano Mart, Santurce

Agustín Manzano, Santurce

Ana Montes, Las Lomas

Aberration of a Legislature A decade ago we learned our lawmakers are thieves. They abused their prerogative by hiking their own salaries a whopping 50%.

And then they thumbed their noses at the public outcry. The NPP consequently lost the ensuing election amid strident PDP denunciation, no the populares didn’t reverse the affront once they got into Capitolio.

The last few months we’ve learned our solons are as well wife-batterers, cokeheads and bribe-takers. And reckless, does it make sense to compromise a hyperlucrative job just to fly to Las Vegas to see a Tito Trinidad fight in the flesh?

Meanwhile our laws turn out ever more unintelligent, partisan and oppressive.

Bob Harris, Condado

Drugs: the great scapegoat

Frágola Serpieri , Santurce

Venial Sins Tuesday the UPR Student Assembly voted overwhelmingly FOR continuance of the strike but AGAINST “paralyzing” the campus, meaning to barricade the gates or disrupt classes, precisely the sort of thing that happened Wednesday. Yes, those were mavericks, activists have lost control of themselves. Yet if you compare latest happenings with police rampaging throughout, those kids are still angels.

Eleuterio Serpieri, Santurce

Incipiency of a Tyrant

March 10 - 16, 2011

San Juan Weekly

Saying Goodbye

By LAURA FRASER

T

WELVE years ago, after 18 months of marriage, my husband left me unexpectedly, and when I could finally rouse myself to do anything, I booked a flight to Italy.

Every time I’d been there, I’d felt happier, more alive, and I hoped that by speaking another language I would become another person for a while, one whose heart was whole.

But when I reached Florence, I realized my sorrow had followed me. I walked aimlessly, unmoved by the ice-cream-colored Duomo, flirtatious waiters or the view from the Boboli Gardens; I had no appetite for fried artichokes or gelato.

I left for the island of Ischia, expecting to wait out the days, until my return flight, in a dark pensione or on a rocky beach. At breakfast the first morning, I noticed a man with chestnut curls and a beaked nose dining alone. When I asked the waitress a question about the island, he joined our conversation.

Soon we were heading out together, and slipping seamlessly from the formal “Lei” to the intimate “tu.”

He was a professor of the philosophy of aesthetics from Paris, a dozen years older than me, married with two boys. He spoke little English; I spoke even less French. So for the next three days, we talked in uncomplicated Italian. After all the hours I’d spent dissecting the emotions of my failed marriage, it was a relief to simply enjoy the swordfish, the sunset, the view. We ate, made love, swam, and when we finished, he said, “Let’s do it all over again.”

We parted on the fourth day at the train station in Naples, with me memorizing his face, feeling bereft and hopeful. I was sure I would never see him again but I was happy that he had managed to make me feel desired, to realize that however long it might take to mend my heart, there was a world of pleasure and conversation and moonlit swims awaiting me.

One chilly day that winter, at home, while I was in the midst of moving out of my husband’s house and refiguring my finances, a postcard arrived from Paris. “I couldn’t for-

get,” the Professor wrote. And neither could I. That spring, we met in Milan. Six months later, we met in London, and the next fall he flew to San Francisco. Over the next three years, we met in Turin, Morocco and Mexico, immersing ourselves in the food, the art — whatever was beautiful and sensual. Always keeping things simple and speaking Italian.

He remained married, and I had other boyfriends between our rendezvous, so we were each other’s secret, sometime lovers. I had no expectations — though I did fantasize that someday we’d be more permanently together, and even took classes in French. Friends thought my relationship with him was folly, a certain train wreck; for a newly single woman who’d been stung by betrayal, nothing good could come from a periodic liaison with a married man.

Yet for those years of slow healing, our unconventional relationship brought me pure, uncomplicated pleasure. The Professor was scrupulous in not making promises, but at the same time I knew he would always stitch in and out of my life, and that this stitching was slowly mending my heart. Whenever we’d part, he’d always say, as the Italians do, “Ci vediamo.” We’ll see each other.

On our third trip, in London, when we were walking past a cemetery, I had the dark thought that if something ever happened to him, I’d never know. When I asked if he’d let someone know about me, to contact me, he reacted in mock horror. “My dear, I’m not that old,” he said, and indeed he was just 50. But he promised.

On our last trip, in Oaxaca, Mexico, six years ago, the Professor was brimming with a new secret. He and his wife had finally divorced, and he had found someone he wanted to live with. He had always been the rogue, while I’d always pined for another long-term relationship. Now he wanted to settle down.

He caressed my back.

“I can’t be both your lover and the friend you tell about the women in your life,” I said.

He shrugged with his usual equanimity. No longer lovers, we spent our days ea-

21

ting spicy moles, wandering around markets, climbing ruins.

That trip didn’t end our connection.

When I was in Paris two years later, we met in a cafe, and felt the same frisson of delight.

He took me to lunch and showed me around before he had to pick up his son.

Four years passed, and we exchanged only birthday greetings. The day Barack Obama won the presidency, the Professor e-mailed me his congratulations. Then he told me his bad news. He had liver cancer, and the prognosis was grim.

I called him right away.

During our conversation, he expressed gratitude that he’d at least made it to India before developing the stomach pains that were the first warning sign. He asked if I had any plans to go to Europe. He also told me his good news: he was married, to yet a different woman he’d been seeing for a year, one who made him no longer want to have a secret life.

“My students must think I’m old and boring,” he said.

I congratulated him, genuinely glad that someone loved him and would take care of him during this difficult time.

I considered going to Paris, but hesitated. What would his new wife think of an old lover’s coming to visit? When I mentioned some dates I would be in Europe, he replied that he’d be in the hospital, “the least sexy place in the world,” and suggested I come later, when he was recovered from surgery. A month later he was still in the hospital, and this time he said sure, come, and gave me the room number.

When I knocked, the nurse opened the door and asked me to wait. In that brief flash, I glimpsed what he looked like now, and I was glad for the chance to collect myself. When I returned, he was on his feet, IV tube trailing, hugging me and telling me what a pleasure it was to see me. His curly locks were shorn, and he was all ribs and sunken cheeks, but he was there.

We chatted for a couple of hours, and I returned a second day. He told me I looked the same, and I said he looked handsome with a beard — small stretches to remind us of our younger, sexier selves. I talked about going to St. Petersburg and seeing the Poussin paintings at the Hermitage — one of the artists he

modern love was passionate about — and reminisced about our travels, but he waved away the topic. “I think that part of my life is over,” he said.

So we spoke of ordinary things. He showed me photos of his wedding and children. I described a funny art exhibition I’d seen at the Pompidou and thanked him for teaching me so much about how to experience art warmly.

I was cheerful, maybe too cheerful. But he laughed at my stories and then caught himself laughing. “This is the first time I’ve forgotten I’m sick,” he said, marveling. “You make me feel good, like myself.”

He thanked me for making a special trip.

“Any trip to Paris is special,” I said.

He held my hand. “Some relationships, cara, are important for life.”

He asked if I were seeing anyone, if I were in love, and I told him that I have bad luck with men. Seeing him, hearing his vibrant voice, I wondered if I were still single because he had been in my life for so long, and in my heart. At least I’d never met another man I loved as much.

He said he was looking forward to going home soon. The cancer was inoperable, but these days it’s treated like a chronic disease.

“Like AIDS,” I said, wanting to believe it.

“Brava,” he said.

I KISSED him on each cheek and reminded him that he always said we never knew when or where we were going to see each other again.

“Spero che ci vediamo,” he said. I hope we’ll see each other again.

“Ci vediamo,” I said, glad that was our usual way of saying goodbye.

Three weeks later, I received an e-mail message from a friend of the Professor’s telling me he had died. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” he wrote. Thus passes the glory of the world.

Reading the message, I felt bereft, as I had at the train station in Naples, saying goodbye when we first parted. But while I knew I’d miss him, our relationship had been, in its odd way, enough. I had never been his one and only, but he had been constant, if not faithful.

He had reminded me that I could still experience la bella vita, that I could be desired, that I could embrace something less than perfection and, most important, that I could love.

Kitchen

22

March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Salad Dressings: Hold the Guilt

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

A

t the recent Worlds of Healthy Flavors conference, sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Culinary Institute of America, two prominent researchers called for an end to the use of the term “low-fat.”

Dr. Ronald Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, and Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, have been involved in numerous studies measuring the effects of dietary habits on health. Few of those studies, they noted, have turned up reliable associations between one’s total intake of dietary fat and such diseases as cancer and heart disease.

Nor have they turned up meaningful associations between total fat intake and obesity.

As most of us now know, it is the type of fat that matters most to health. A diet in which saturated fats are replaced by polyunsaturated fats, found mostly in plants,

nuts and seafood, and monounsaturated fats, present in olive oil, may help protect against heart disease.

On the other hand, trans fats, created during the hydrogenation process, seem to increase heart disease risk. And saturated fats — found mostly in meat and dairy products, and in coconut and palm oils — raise blood levels of L.D.L., or “bad” cholesterol, also a risk factor for heart disease.

Scientists have been saying as much for years. But somehow we remain preoccupied with low-fat foods and diets, which are often high in sugar, refined flour and other simple carbohydrates, as well as in sodium, as salt is often added to low-fat foods to improve the flavor.

This week we’re going to try something different. Salad dressings by their nature are high in fat — but the ones we’re offering this week are high in the right fats.

The nutrient values tell the tale: instead of total fat, this week they are broken down into polyunsaturated, monounsaturated and saturated fats.

Green Goddess Dressing

G

reen Goddess is a California classic. It makes a great dip for crudités and a wonderful dressing for robust lettuces like romaine hearts, but it’s too thick and intense for delicate spring mixes.

Although I’ve made the anchovies optional, I recommend them because they add depth to the flavor. If salt is an issue for you, leave them out.

1 cup parsley leaves 1 cup packed watercress or spinach leaves, stemmed 2 tablespoons tarragon leaves, rinsed 3 tablespoons minced chives 1 garlic clove, roughly chopped 2 anchovy fillets, preferably salt-packed 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon Champagne vinegar or sherry vinegar 1/2 cup canola oil or grapeseed oil 1/2 cup mayonnaise, preferably homemade (see note) Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper 1. In a blender, combine the parsley, watercress or spinach, tarragon, chives, garlic, anchovies, lemon juice, vinegar and canola or grapeseed oil.

Blend until smooth, about two minutes. Add the mayonnaise, and blend again until smooth.

Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Note: To make your own

mayonnaise, beat an egg yolk in a bowl.

Wrap a damp dishtowel around the base of the bowl so that it will not move around on your work surface as you whisk. Drop by drop, whisk in 1/4 cup of canola or grapeseed oil. When the mixture looks emulsified and stable, add another 1/4 cup of oil (canola, grapeseed or olive oil) in a slow stream.

Season to taste with salt and, if you wish, a drop of lemon juice.

Yield: Makes a little more than 1 1/2 cups.

Advance preparation: This dressing will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator but tastes best when freshly made.

Nutritional information per 2 tablespoons: 155 calories; 1 gram saturated fat; 5 grams polyunsaturated fat; 10 grams monounsaturated fat; 12 milligrams cholesterol; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 grams dietary fiber; 33 milligrams sodium (does not include anchovies or salt to taste); 1 gram protein

March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

23

Kitchen

A Skinny Clam That’s Big With Chefs

By FLORENCE FABRICANT

U

NTIL recently, the long, narrow razor clam was easier to find on a beach than in a restaurant. Except in Asian places, it rarely made the cut.

But in the quest by New York chefs for unusual ingredients, razor clams are now being scooped up.

At Strip House, the executive chef John Schenk steams them with bacon and garlic. He said he loved the “fantastic look of them.”

It’s a matter of taste for Harold Dieterle, who serves chopped razor clams with Chiang Mai sausage in a congee with a duck egg at his Thai-style restaurant, Kin Shop. It’s the most popular item on his menu. “I think they add sweetness to the dish,” he said.

If diners ever had an aversion

to the wormlike creature in the shell, they’re overcoming it. The clams are “definitely trendy and people seem interested in trying them,” said Shaunna Sargent, the executive chef at Corsino, who tosses them with spaghetti alla chitarra.

When Jonathan Benno, the executive chef at Lincoln, took razor clams with cavatelli off the menu for a change of pace a few weeks ago, he said diners asked that they be brought back.

The reason for the common name of the Eastern razor clam (Ensis directus) is obvious. The shell looks like an oldfashioned straight razor. Empty, fragile shells are often scattered on the beaches of the Northeast. (There is a Western razor clam, larger with a more oval shell.) But if you’re not a seagull, collecting them can be a challenge.

“They burrow deep and they move fast,” said Skip Bennett, who runs Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury, Mass., and gathers wild razor clams as a sideline, selling thousands of pounds a month. He said razor clams were the most prolific shellfish in Duxbury Bay. “Duxbury is to razor clams what Ipswich is to steamers,” he said. They are temporarily unavailable from Duxbury due to tidal conditions, but Long Island razor clams are in New York markets now.

Nonetheless, Colin Mather rarely sells them at his Seafood Shop in Wainscott, N.Y. “When it comes to eating clams, there are other options,” he said “These are not the most attractive things in the world. And in seafood, eye appeal is buy appeal.”

Joseph Carlin, an associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, who is writing a book on clams, said, “There is little mention of the clams in print.” In fact, in his research he could not find a single recipe.

Still, they are popular among Chinese, Thais, Japanese and Koreans, and are grilled for tapas in Spain and are prized in Italy.

Francesca Bortolotto Possati, a Venetian who owns the Bauer Hotel in her native city, said that winter is the season for the smallest and best razor clams from the lagoon, often as slender as a pencil.

“Later they are bigger,” she said.

“We prepare both kinds very, very simply, just broiled in the oven with maybe a little olive oil, garlic and parsley.”

She added: “And even though Venetians will put pasta with anything,

3/4 cup dry white wine 2 tablespoons sesame oil Juice of 4 limes 2 tablespoons honey 1 1/2 tablespoons sriracha sauce, more to taste 1 tablespoon sesame seeds Black pepper 2 scallions, sliced thin Crusty bread for serving.

Razor Clam Ceviche Time: 20 minutes plus 3 hours’ chilling 1 pound razor clams, rinsed and scrubbed 1 pink grapefruit, peeled, segmented, juice reserved 1 teaspoon pink peppercorns 12 fresh mint leaves, slivered 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil Salt Round tortilla chips.

1. Use a paring knife to gently pry apart clam shells and then cut meat away, discarding any gritty dark parts and a half-inch of the dark, hard siphon.

Cut meat into half-inch pieces. Place in a bowl. Dice grapefruit segments and add them to the bowl with reserved juice, pink peppercorns, mint and olive oil. Fold together and refrigerate 3 hours.

2. Season clam mixture with salt to taste. Serve in appetizer portions with chips, or drain well and pile onto chips to make canapés.

Yield: 4 appetizer servings, or 24 canapés.

they’re less popular with pasta because they’re so good alone.”

In New York, however, chefs often serve them in pasta dishes. But April Bloomfield at John Dory Oyster Bar, Dave Pasternack at Esca and Laurent Saillard at Ici in Brooklyn serve them lightly marinated in ceviche. At Mary’s Fish Camp in Greenwich Village, and Brooklyn Fish Camp in Park Slope, Mary Redding steams them and zaps them with honey and bold sriracha.

A shopping tip: the thinner the better. Though the shells usually gape a bit, they should nearly close when touched.

Razor clams are much more perishable than hard clams, but their shelf life can be extended by steaming them for use in salads later.

Ms. Sargent of Corsino is one chef who freezes the clams for a few hours to make the meat easier to remove and more tender. Regardless of whether they are raw or frozen, a paring knife is all that is needed to shuck them. Be sure to scrub the shells first in running water to remove any sand or grit.

In addition to stores in Chinatown, razor clams are increasingly showing up at Citarella, Eataly and at Agata & Valentina, where they are especially slender. In Greenmarkets, seafood stands like Seatuck sell them, as will Blue Moon when it returns in April. Prices are about $4 to $10 a pound, with 12 to 18 clams in a pound, depending on size.

Razor clams will always be unusual, but with more demand and the advent of warmer weather, they should become more common.

Sweet and Spicy Razor Clams Adapted from Mary’s Fish Camp, Manhattan Time: 30 minutes 1/4 cup soy or peanut oil 1 large shallot, sliced thin Kosher salt 4 cloves garlic, slivered 24razor clams, 1 1/2 to 2 pounds, rinsed and scrubbed

1. Pour oil in a small saucepan over mediumhigh heat. When hot, lightly brown a piece of shallot, add the rest and fry until golden brown. Drain shallots, place on paper towel and season with salt. Set aside.

Pour oil from pan through a strainer into a large sauté pan. Add garlic and sauté on medium until golden.

Add clams and wine; after a minute, turn clams. Cover and steam until clams open, about 5 minutes. Transfer clams to soup plates, draining juices back into pan.

2. Whisk sesame oil, lime juice, honey, sriracha and sesame seeds into pan. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Adjust sriracha as desired. Bring to a simmer and pour over clams. Scatter scallions and fried shallots on top. Serve with crusty bread.

Yield: 3 to 6 servings.

Kitchen

24

March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Rib Roast of Beef

By AMANDA HESSER

C

ooking beef to the right doneness, especially a wildly expensive cut like rib roast, while also tending to guests, ranks with kitchen anxieties like unmolding a tarte Tatin or killing a lobster. But Ann Seranne, a food consultant and the author of more than a dozen cookbooks, solved this problem back in the 1960s. Craig Claiborne wrote that her technique “is so basic, so easily applied and so eminently satisfactory in its results, the astonishing thing is it is not universally known.” As it still isn’t, I will reprint it here once more. Please tell all your friends the news, so that rib roast can finally have its no-knead-bread moment.

Seranne instructed us to bring the meat to room temperature, pat it with a mixture of flour, salt and pepper, put it in a 500-degree oven for an amount of time determined by the weight of the beef (there’s a chart below), then turn off the heat and leave the meat in the oven for two hours, “long enough,” she told Claiborne, “for a game of golf or an appointment at the hairdresser.”

While the roast’s convenience is worthy of reverence, another remarkable part of this recipe is the coarse and salty crust that develops from the flour baking into the top layer of fat and crisping it like fried pork rind.

I knew that the chef I would give this recipe to would be nonplussed by its simplicity — at first glance, it seems

utterly boring — so I gave it to someone whose food is anything but plain: Harold Dieterle, the chef and owner at Kin Shop, a new contemporary Thai restaurant, and at Perilla, both in Manhattan. I was curious what Dieterle would do with a dish redolent of Continental dinner-party fare.

Dieterle, who had never heard of rubbing flour into a raw piece of meat, called the recipe “crazy.” But like all who try it, he, too, was a convert: “The salt will pull out the moisture and give it a nice crunch, but the flour took it to another level.”

For his recipe, Dieterle wanted a coarser crust and applied it to a prime, aged rib-eye — what he calls “a big hunk of Fred Flintstone steak.” He uses Creekstone Farms beef from Arkansas City, Kan., one of the few suppliers of U.S.D.A.-certified premium Black Angus beef. Food-politics junkies, avert your eyes: Dieterle is anti-grass-fed, calling the claim “1,000 percent bogus.” I leave the beef selection up to you. Grass- or cornfed, you need a rib-eye, and you need to grill it. Dieterle has you slather the meat with a lemon-and-garlic butter and then let it rest. Next, you cover the top of the rib-eye with a panko-and-herb crust and broil it until crisp — as crisp as a flourdusted rib roast. And that’s all.

It’s extraordinarily good for such an easy recipe. The only thing missing is the stress relief — you have to be sure to swing away from your guests and take the rib-eye out just as the meat reaches 130 on a meat thermometer. But I know you’ll do that effortlessly.

Rib Roast of Beef

By ANN SERANNE

T

his recipe appeared in The Times in an article by Craig Claiborne.

Recipe adapted from Ann Seranne, a former editor of Gourmet.

One 2- to 4-rib roast of beef, weighing 4½ to 12 pounds Flour Salt Freshly ground black pepper.

1. Remove the roast from the refrigerator 2½ to 4 hours before cooking.

2. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.

3. Place the roast in an open, shallow roasting pan, fat side up. Sprinkle with a little flour, and rub the flour into the fat lightly. Season all over with salt and pepper.

4. Put the roast in the preheated oven and roast according to the roasting chart below, timing the minutes exactly.

When cooking time is finished, turn off the oven. Do not open the door at any time. Allow the roast to remain in the oven until oven is lukewarm, or about two hours. The roast will still have a crunchy brown outside and an internal heat suitable for serving as long as 4 hours after removing from the oven.

Makes about 2 servings per rib.

Roasting Chart: No. of Ribs Weight Without Short Ribs Roasting Time at 500 Degrees 2 4½ to 5 lbs. 25 to 30 mins.

3 8 to 9 lbs. 40 to 45 mins.

4 11 to 12 lbs. 55 to 60 mins.

NOTE: Make sure your oven temperature is accurate before following the time chart. If you have leftovers, which I doubt you will, slice the meat thinly and serve it cold with a sauce of mayonnaise, mustard and horseradish in a ratio of four to one to one.

Grilled Prime, Dry-Aged Rib-Eye Steak With Savory Crust

B

y Harold Dieterle, the chef and owner of Kin Shop and Perilla in Manhattan.

For the herb butter: 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

1 teaspoon grated lemon zest 1 teaspoon minced chives 1 teaspoon minced garlic Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste For the savory crust: 1⁄3 cup panko (or other) dry bread crumbs 1 tablespoon chopped savory, thyme or marjoram 1 tablespoon melted unsalted butter Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste For the steak: One 30- to 34-ounce prime, dry-aged rib-eye steak, brought to room temperature Kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

1. Make the herb butter: In a small bowl, mash together the butter, lemon zest, chives, and garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Chill until needed.

2. Make the savory bread crumbs: Combine the panko, savory (or other herb) and butter in a small bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Stir until thoroughly blended.

3. Heat your grill to medium high (notes for doing this on the stove top follow the recipe). Season

both sides of the steak generously with salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Lay the steak on the hot grill and sear both sides, 5 to 8 minutes on each side for medium rare; adjust the time according to how you like your steak done. Transfer the steak to a cutting board, spread the top with the herb butter and let rest, uncovered, for 10 minutes.

4. Set an oven rack 6 inches from the broiler, then heat the broiler. Cover the top of the steak with the savory bread crumbs. Place the steak on a heatproof dish and set it under the broiler until the bread crumbs are golden brown, about 2 minutes. Transfer to a cutting board and let sit for a minute, then slice and serve.

Serves 2.

NOTE: If you would like to cook this on the stove instead of the grill, heat the oven to 425 degrees. Place a large cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat and turn on your stove fan. Sear the seasoned rib-eye for 3 to 4 minutes on each side, then transfer the pan to the oven to finish cooking, 3 to 6 minutes. Then transfer the steak to a cutting board to rest as in Step 3 above, and continue with the recipe.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

25

The Fall of the Inca Empire T

he Incas lost their empire against 150 Spaniards because there were many circumstances that worked against them; here we will explain you what happen. You may think the Spaniards arrival was the reason for their destruction, but it’s not true. Long before the Spaniards arrival, the Indians were inside a spiral of violence and fight for power that put them into a self-destructive path.

The hard truth is that their empire was about to collapse by itself. Responsible for this crime was the king Huayna Capac. He let the society corrupt and didn’t do anything to solve the growing problems. After his death the fight for power complicated the future of the entire Kingdom.

Huayna Capac was responsible for the decadence of the empire. The Inca culture was based in their community work; they worked for the community and the community shared everything.

Huayna Capac broke this balance by allowing local landlords. The result was the standard citizen started to feel more as slave than citizen, the feeling for revolution begin.

The elite force of warriors named (Los Orejones) were the symbol of war power, virility and honor. With Huayna Capac they became lazy and weak, so the rest of the army followed their bad example. The weak armies damaged the health of the empire, resulting in revolutions in provinces on the borders of the empire.

Huayna Capac had two sons that

were competing for the throne. The first son was Huascar; born in Cusco and a good politician but weak. The second son was Atahualpa; he was merciless and tyranical. The two brothers took part in the most dramatic and crucial moment of the Incas history.

If the empire was unstable when Huayna Capac was in power, imagine when he died; civil war began. A war after a king die was normal, because the Incas didn’t have a ruler succession method like in Europe, where the first son will inherit the kingdom. The succession method was base on the strongest candidate, with the biggest power among the society. The competitors would fight for the throne and the winner will become king.

Atahualpa, second son of Huayna Capac won the war and killed Huascar.

But it wasn’t enough for him, he decided to kill all of Huascar’s family. He ordered the execution of women and children in horrible ways. All executions were in public, in the main plaza of Cusco city. It was a moment when the white armored soldiers arrived.

From the north of the country came news of a group of foreigners attacking the kingdom. They were the Spaniards. Then, Atahualpa send scouts to find out who were these estranges people. The information the scouts brought back to Atahualpa was wrong. The scouts told Atahualpa that they were gods and he believed it. That was simply the Incas history most cru-

cial moment, when the destiny of the entire empire will change.

The scouts told Atahualpa the foreigners have white faces and magic animals. And one of them looks like the supreme god Wiracocha from Inca mythology. Atahualpa was curious about the god Wiracocha, that’s why he didn’t attack them, Instead he sent a messenger to setup a peaceful meeting.

When the Spaniards found out about the invitation, they got scared.

They thought that Atahualpa wants to kill them. So the Spaniards prepared an ambush for Atahualpa. The ambush was a success, they took hostage Atahualpa and during the fight they killed 5000 warriors that were protecting Atahualpa.

The Inca weapons were no match against the firearms of the Spaniards.

But, in battle the warriors outnumber,

Continues on page 26

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March 10 - 16, 2011

over the country was easy. The regular people were grateful to be free from such a merciless ruler. Plus the Spaniards use the help from several local tribe armies that fight against the Inca empire army.

Comes from page 25 the Spaniards. At the beginning the Indians were afraid of horses, but soon they learn how to stop them. Before a fight, they make holes in the battlefield obligating the horse to slow down.

Then, few warriors hold the horse from the tale and other warriors attack the rider.

During the Spanish invasion, the Spaniards have contact with many people. Such contact was a harmful circumstance that helps the Incas empire collapse. The Spaniards brought with

them sicknesses like smallpox and influenza. These sicknesses spread out around all the empire, killing hundreds of thousands.

The population before the Spanish arrival was 9 million people. One hundred years after the Spanish invasion the Incas population drops down to 600,000. More than 8 million people die, by the direct or indirect hands of the Spaniards. Few people know, but it probably was one of the biggest genocides of human history.

After the Spaniards kidnap and kill the last king Atahualpa, taking

The San Juan Weekly

Soon they will realize their big mistake.

The Spaniards learn how to conquer indigenous civilizations with the Aztecs in Mexico. They use the ingenuity of the local tribes to fight and destroy each other. After the Spaniards kill the last king Atahualpa, they manipulate the election of the next king. He was a simple puppet under Spaniard control.

It’s sad to finally understand the wonderful Incas culture was destroyed from its inside, from sickness outbreaks and the general dissolution of the government. The Spaniards couldn’t have chosen a better time to strike.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

27

Rebels in Libya Win Battle but Fail to Loosen Qaddafi’s Grip

By KAREEM FAHIM and ROBERT F. WORTH

F

rom the feeble cover of sand dunes, under assault from a warplane overhead and heavy artillery from a hill, rebels in this strategic oil city repelled an attack by hundreds of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s fighters on Wednesday. The daylong battle was the first major incursion by the colonel’s forces in the rebel-held east of the country since the Libyan uprising began.

The battle began at daybreak, when government fighters stormed the airport and the area around the city’s oil refinery.

By the early afternoon, hundreds of men from this city, wielding Kalashnikov rifles and knives — joined by confederates from neighboring cities with heavier artillery — fought Colonel Qaddafi’s men, who were backed by air power and mortars.

But as night fell, the government fighters were on the run and the rebels were celebrating in Brega and all along the road north to Benghazi, the seat of rebel power, where fireworks lighted up the sky.

The attack seemed to spearhead a broader effort by the government of Colonel Qaddafi to reassert control over strategic oil assets in the eastern part of the country, which have been seized by rebel forces. And what appeared to be a victory by the rebels continued a string of recent successes in beating back those attacks, as they did in the western city of Zawiyah earlier this week.

But the rebels have not been able to shake the colonel’s hold on power.

That quandary was apparent as the fighters celebrated their victory in a Brega square: the warplane reappeared and attacked the gathering.

“Yes, they won,” said Iman Bugaighis, a spokeswoman for the rebel governing authority, which asked Western nations to conduct airstrikes against Colonel Qaddafi’s strongholds on Wednesday. “We don’t know how long it will last. He’s getting stronger.”

Eastern Libya, where opposition

fighters forced out Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists 10 days ago, remains chaotic. Rumors come and go, with fears of fresh airstrikes and advances by pro-government forces, followed by bold but so far empty talk of a final assault on Colonel Qaddafi’s Tripoli stronghold. The military here is leaderless, the towns governed by ad hoc councils.

The battle of Brega was a ragged affair. There were no orders, no officers, no plans: most of the men said they had simply jumped in cars to defend their freedom after hearing that government loyalists, whom the rebels call mercenaries, had begun a dawn raid on Brega.

Fighters carried every kind of weapon. Some manned big antiaircraft guns, wearing black military berets and saluting as they rode past. Others drove beat-up old taxis, clutching rifles, pistols, anything they could find, even butcher knives.

“We fought them barefoot,” said Erhallem Jedallah, a burly man who wore crossed belts of ammunition across his shoulders. “So with these weapons we can defeat Qaddafi.”

He was reassembling a big black antiaircraft gun — taken from a military supply depot — at a dusty checkpoint on the road to Brega. At his feet was a plastic crate full of gasoline bombs in soda bottles and a half-eaten piece of bread. Inside the gatehouse next to him were stacks of rocket launchers and boxes of ammunition.

“Victory or death!” the men around him shouted.

If the opposition lacks a plan for victory, Colonel Qaddafi’s strategy is equally murky. His militiamen, traveling in 50 allterrain vehicles, attacked at dawn, and later took dozens of local people hostage at the city’s university, using them as human shields, witnesses said. Fighter planes bombed the area, leaving craters and shrapnel in a road near the university. The town has an oil and gas company and pipelines, and a small airport that might be a useful staging point.

But the attack, which left at least nine

people dead and scores wounded, appeared to have succeeded only in further outraging people. “This man is a butcher!” shouted Imraja Saeed, who stood outside Brega’s university at dusk on Wednesday. “His soldiers ran away disgraced. If they tried to land their planes here, we would kill them.”

In Tripoli, Colonel Qaddafi spent much of the day delivering a rambling and defiant speech in which he renewed accusations that Islamist forces outside Libya were responsible for the uprising.

But in Brega, his forces simply found citizens and workers, said Lameen al-Thabah, 30, a resident. “They are regular people.

They are not Al Qaeda. He is a liar.”

Ali Muhammad Saleh, 23, lying in a hospital in the nearby town of Ajdabiya on Wednesday afternoon with gunshot wounds in the thigh and leg, said the attack started at about 5 or 6 a.m. “The mercenaries came in cars from the airport,” he said.

“They shot at us with heavy artillery and guns, it seemed randomly. Three of my cousins were hit while walking down the street, unarmed,” he said. “I wasn’t fighting, I was trying to help the wounded. They shot me from the back.”

Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, said he joined the antigovernment fighters on the dunes at about 11 a.m., as they came under heavy shelling from the university. At least twice while he was with the fighters, a warplane — possibly a French Mirage — swooped low and dropped bombs. Bullets whistled past the fighters, and mortar shells landed around them, or flew past into the sea.

Nearby, a group of spectators cheered the fighters on, and made sure they were fed. “They brought out hot tea,” Mr. Bouckaert said. “They had rice and chicken. There were water bottles all along the road.”

Ambulances idled nearby, waiting for injured people.

By 3 p.m., Mr. Bouckaert said, the battle had turned, as the rebels pointed the antiaircraft weapons not at the sky but toward the university. Working in small groups, they cut off the university from the rest of the city.

“There was no kind of organizational command,” Mr. Bouckaert said. “They didn’t even have binoculars.”

All day the roads were clogged with fighters racing to Brega, and ambulances speeding in the other direction, sirens blaring.

At a hospital in a town east of the fighting, screaming broke out as an ambulance arrived and doctors loaded bloodied fighters onto gurneys. Here, too, no one was in charge: dozens of television cameramen and reporters crowded into a surgery ward in their filthy boots. Relatives shouted, doctors pushed past. One of the wounded men cried out in pain, his thigh slashed open by a bullet.

Nurses stripped off his sweaty clothes.

Cameras clicked and flashed.

Among the dead was Hassan Ahmed Mokhtar, who doctors said was a government soldier. He was dressed in green fatigues, wore a gray T-shirt and had a ribbon of gauze that a nurse wrapped around his toe.

In his pocket, doctors found a set of keys, a one-dinar bill and his identification card, which said he was born in 1969, on New Year’s Day. It also said that Mr. Mokhtar was born in Niger, which confirmed for everyone there that mercenaries were attacking them.

But that was far from clear.

Even after the fighting appeared to be over, at about 5:30 p.m., the government fighter plane swooped down for a final sortie, unleashing two bombs or missiles that exploded near the university’s main gate.

Men stood near the craters afterward, filled with fury and disbelief.

“Is it possible to kill people like this and then say, ‘The Libyan people love me’?” said a man who gave his name as Qassim.

“He is crazy! He should be admitted!”

As dusk fell, the anguish gave way to relief. Colonel Qaddafi’s fighters and his warplane had retreated. A long line of rebel cars and pickup trucks began driving back east, their occupants shouting and whooping as they went. The heavy thud-thud of celebratory antiaircraft fire rang out, and tracers lit up the clear blue evening sky. The men defending eastern Libya had won. For now.

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

The Lands Autocracy Won’t Quit

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

L

et the Middle East and North Africa be buffeted by populist discontent over repressive governments. Here in Lenin’s former territory, across the expanse of the old Soviet Union, rulers with iron fists still have the upper hand.

Their endurance serves as a sobering counterpoint for anyone presuming that the overthrow of a tyrannical regime by a broad-based movement is inevitably followed by vibrant democracy.

The long-serving president of the former Soviet republic of Belarus, for example, won another term in December with 80 percent of the vote, then took great offense when the results were called shamefully implausible by his opponents.

(They have not been heard from since.)

Over in Kazakhstan, the even longer-serving president has had himself coroneted with the formal title of “national leader.”

The strongest of the post-Soviet strongmen, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, is actually a comparative newcomer, having reigned unchallenged for a mere decade now.

Nearly two decades ago, the collapse of Soviet Communism offered the promise that power would soon be wielded differently in this region: The newly independent former Soviet republics, sprung from the shackles of totalitarianism, would embrace free elections, multiple political parties and a vigorously independent media.

But those hopes now seem premature, or perhaps naïve. In the 1990’s, the Soviet breakup sowed chaos — most notably in Russia — and a corps of autocrats arose in response, pledging stability and economic growth. The brand of democracy that is advanced in the West emerged discredited in many of these countries.

And so even as upheavals in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world have garnered attention across the former Soviet Union, the region’s leaders express confidence that they are not under threat.

“In the past, such a scenario was harbored for us, and now attempts to implement it are even more likely,” Mr. Putin’s protégé, President Dmitri A. Medvedev, warned last week. “But such a scenario is not going to happen.”

The wilting of the democracy movement was reflected in the arrest of several Russian opposition leaders at a small rally in Moscow on Dec. 31 — one of the regular protests scheduled to highlight the 31st article of Russia’s Constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly.

There was no public outcry over the arrests, and people went about with their lives. Tunisia, it was not.

The same opposition politicians, now out of jail, returned on Jan. 31, hoping that an inspiring new example — Egypt — would prove galvanizing, and Triumphal

Square in Moscow would have the feel of Tahrir Square in Cairo.

“We are all watching what is happening in Egypt,” Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, told the crowd.

“They have had 30 years of the dictator Mubarak, who is a thief and corrupt,” he said. “How is he really any different than our guy?”

People shouted, “Russia without Putin!” But once again, society did not join in. It did not appear that more than 1,000 people attended.

What’s more, many were not particularly young. That helps to explain why such uprisings seem to have had a harder time taking root. Populations in Russia and many other former Soviet republics are aging, in contrast to those in the Middle East. Here, there are fewer people to carry out youthful acts of rebellion, whether on the streets or on Facebook and Twitter.

The older generation grew up under Soviet rule, which was so tightly controlled that today’s autocracies feel like an improvement. They also enjoy more economic freedom today.

Even in the six former Soviet republics that have Muslim majorities, the events in the Middle East have not had significant repercussions.

If anything, the violence has strengthened the hand of the autocrats in the short term because it has caused oil prices to spike, benefiting the economies of petro-states like Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

The current crop of post-Soviet leaders has also skillfully played upon fears of instability and misery in the wake of the 1990’s, knowing that when times are tough, people often prefer authoritarian order to cacophonous democracy.

A talk show on the Echo of Moscow radio station, which is something akin to the NPR of Russia, chewed over the question of why protesters had flooded the streets of Middle Eastern capitals and not Moscow. “Our people endure, and will patiently endure, suffering,” said Georgi Mirsky, a well-known political analyst.

“Because Soviet Man is still alive — that’s the thing! The mentality of the people (or at least a considerable number of them) has not changed enough for them to develop a taste for freedom.”

There are, of course, exceptions. The Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — have joined the European Union and embraced Western mores. But they were always outliers within the Soviet Union, and only became part of it when Stalin seized them during World War II. Even the so-called color revolutions over the last decade in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, which were widely viewed as a repudiation of authoritarianism, have since fallen flat.

In Ukraine, a new president was elected last year after a backlash against the Orange Revolution, and he is pursuing a

Putin-style crackdown on the opposition.

A revolt in Kyrgyzstan last year ousted a ruler who had ousted a predecessor.

As a result, politicians in Kyrgyzstan’s neighbors in Central Asia now maintain that they need heavily centralized rule to avoid Kyrgyzstan’s fate.

“We have to feed our people, then we can create conditions where our people can become involved in politics,” said Nurlan Uteshev, a Kazakh from his country’s ruling party.

Mr. Putin, Russia’s prime minister and former (and perhaps future) president, regularly cites the example of neighboring Ukraine. “We must not in any way allow the Ukrainization of political life in Russia,” Mr. Putin once warned.

For a time, Georgia seemed at the forefront of a democratic wave. But in 2007, President Mikheil Saakashvili, a close American ally, violently suppressed his opposition. Now, his rivals characterize him as no better than Mr. Putin.

Mr. Saakashvili’s supporters defend him by contending that he will not try to stay in power when his term expires in 2013. They say he has made enormous stri-

des in modernizing Georgia, adding that it is unrealistic to expect a country long immersed in the Soviet system to be transformed overnight.

That is a common refrain. Janez Lenarcic, a diplomat who heads democracy promotion for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, has the taxing job of trying to persuade these countries to loosen the reins.

“The notion of stability plays an important role here,” Mr. Lenarcic said. “They say, ‘We need more time, we need to get there at our own pace.’ We respond that long-term stability will come only with strong democratic institutions, not with personalities, because personalities are not around forever.”

He said he remained optimistic, despite the stagnation. And perhaps views are evolving. A recent poll of Russians asked if they preferred order (even at the expense of their rights) or democracy (even if it gives rise to destructive elements). Order won, 56 percent to 23 percent.

That may not sound encouraging, but a decade ago the spread was 81 percent to 9 percent.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

29

Piracy’s Price Rises

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

A

t some point, Thomas Jefferson realized, you just can’t do business with pirates any more.

For years, the infant American government, along with many others, had accepted the humiliating practice of paying tribute — essentially mob-style protection fees — to a handful of rulers in the Barbary states so that American ships crossing the Mediterranean would not get hijacked. But in 1801, Tripoli’s pasha, Yusuf Karamanli, tried to jack up his prices. Jefferson said no. And when the strongman turned his pirates loose on American ships, Jefferson sent in the Navy to bombard Tripoli, starting a war that eventually brought the Barbary states to their knees. Rampant piracy went to sleep for nearly 200 years.

The question now is: Are we nearing another enough-is-enough moment with pirates?

Somali pirates shot and killed four American hostages. A single hostage intentionally killed by these pirates had been almost unheard of; four dead was unprecedented. Until now, the first thing that came to mind about Somalia’s buccaneers was that they were brash and mercurial. Just a few weeks ago they let go some Sri Lankan fishermen after they essentially said, “You’re poor, like us.”

They were seen as a nuisance, albeit an expensive one, but not a lethal threat.

Exactly what happened is still murky. Pirates in the Arabian Sea had hijacked a sailboat skippered by a retired couple from California, and when the American Navy closed in, the pirates got twitchy. Navy Seals rushed aboard but it was too late. It’s still not clear why the pirates would want to kill the hostages when their business model, which has raked in more than $100 million in the past few years, is based on ransoming captives alive.

“Of course, I do not know what the U.S. will do in response to this latest atrocity,” said Frank Lambert, a professor at Purdue who is an expert on the Barbary pirates. But, he said, “Jefferson advocated an armed response and eventually war against Tripoli for far less provocation.”

For years now, Somali pirates with fiberglass skiffs and salt-rusted Kalashnikovs have been commandeering ships along one of the most congested shipping routes in the world — the Gulf of Aden, a vital conduit for Middle East oil to Europe and the United States. More than 50 vessels are now held captive, from Thai fishing trawlers to European supertankers, with more than 800 hostages. Those numbers grow each year.

But the international response has been limited, partly because the most pro-

mising remedies are intensely complicated and risky. Western powers, including the United States, have sent warships to cruise Somalia’s coast and discourage attacks. When a vessel is hijacked, ship owners cough up a ransom, nowadays in the neighborhood of $5 million, and most of that cost gets passed to the end user — consumers. Until recently, most hostages would emerge unharmed, albeit skinny and pale from being locked in a filthy room. The average time in captivity is around six months.

But recently the pirates have been getting more vicious; reports have emerged of beatings, of being hung upside down, even of being forced at gunpoint to join in raids. And now the pirates have gunned down four Americans.

“I think there’s going to be some type of retaliation,” said a European diplomat in Nairobi, Kenya, who trades ideas on anti-piracy strategies with other diplomats and was instructed not to speak publicly about the issues. “I could see the Americans going after the pirate bosses, the organizers, maybe even blockade some of the ports that they use,” he speculated. “I don’t think the Americans are going to invade Somalia, because of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they can use local allies.” Another obvious possibility would be American Special Forces, who have killed terrorism suspects in Somalia.

The American government isn’t revealing its plans but officials suggest — as long as they are not quoted by name — that the killings of the four Americans could be a game-changer. “We get it,” said one State Department official. “We get the need to recalibrate.”

Any course of action, however, will confront two huge obstacles: the immensity of the sea and the depth of chaos in Somalia.

The pirates used to stick relatively close to Somalia’s shores. But now, using “mother ships” — hijacked vessels that serve as floating bases — they attack ships more than 1,000 miles away. Sometimes that puts them closer to India than to home. The red zone now covers more than one million square miles of water, an area naval officers say is impossible to control.

Piracy Inc. is a sprawling operation on land, too. It offers work to tens of thousands of Somalis — middle-managers, translators, bookkeepers, mechanics, gunsmiths, guards, boat builders, women who sell tea to pirates, others who sell them goats. In one of the poorest lands on earth, piracy isn’t just a business; it’s a lifeline.

And this gets to the real problem.

“The root cause is state failure,” the American official said.

Somalia’s central government collapsed more than 20 years ago, and now its landscape includes droughts, warlords, fighters allied to Al Qaeda, and malnutrition, suffering and death on a scale unseen just about anywhere else.

The United States and other Western powers are pouring millions of dollars into Somalia’s transitional government, an appointed body with little legitimacy on the ground, in the hope, perhaps vain, that it can rebuild the world’s most failed state and create an economy based on something like fishing or livestock. Young men then might be able to earn a living doing something other than sticking up ships.

But the transitional government has been divided, feckless and corrupt. Islamist rebels control much of the country.

Few Somalis think the nation will stop being a war zone any time soon.

The shipping industry seems to know this.

“Until things change on land, you have to come down very hard on them at sea,” said Cyrus Mody, manager of the International Maritime Bureau in London.

Shipping companies are frustrated, he said, because while many pirates are apprehended at sea by foreign navies, the vast majority are typically released unless they are caught in the act of a hijacking a ship — which is a very narrow window because once pirates control a vessel, it’s extremely dangerous to intervene.

“The laws have to be amended,” Mr. Mody said. “Why would a skiff be 800 miles off Somalia with a rocket-propelled grenade, a ladder and extra barrels of fuel? What are they doing? Fishing? These people need to be arrested and prosecuted.”

The last resort is military action.

Many people ask: Why not storm ashore

and attack the pirate bases? These dens are well known. I even visited one last year and met a pirate boss who was using millions of dollars in ransoms to build a land-based army that at first glance looked more disciplined and better equipped than Somalia’s national army.

But the military option would not be pretty. The 800 or so captured seamen could be used as human shields. And no Western country has shown an appetite to send troops to Somalia, not after the Black Hawk Down fiasco of 1993, when ragtag Somali militiamen downed two American helicopters and killed 18 elite American troops. And a military attack could easily backfire. “They might kill a few pirates, but more would certainly spring up to replace them,” said Bronwyn Bruton, who wrote a widely discussed essay on Somalia. “The replacements would probably be even angrier and more violent.” In her essay, she advised the international community to essentially pull out and let Somalis sort out their problems on their own.

She added that collateral damage from a raid could be severe and “a lot of civilian casualties could actually wind up aggravating a much bigger security threat to the U.S. — terrorism.”

So it seems that Jefferson may have had an easier piracy problem to solve.

“I can offer a couple thoughts based on the U.S.’s dealing with pirates more than 200 years ago,” Mr. Lambert said. “If the U.S. response is a vigorous military response, it is likely to be difficult, costly, and prolonged” — a reference to the war that followed bombardment of the coast.

But, he warned, “If it is a continuation of the present policy (whatever that is), it is almost a certainty that we will see more or perhaps escalated atrocities. ‘’

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How to Lose a Country Gracefully

By BILL KELLER

A

s a reporter, I covered two of the greatest losers of the last century.

The superlative “greatest” applies both to the scale of the loss — Mikhail Gorbachev lost Russia and all of its colonies, F. W. de Klerk lost the richest country in Africa — and to the manner in which they lost it.

Our hearts understandably thrill to the courage of those who stand up to power — from Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square and all the streets that now teem with the young and freedom-hungry. But there is another heroism, scarce and undervalued, that accrues to those who know how to stand down.

What Gorbachev and de Klerk did was not always pretty, and neither man is much celebrated in his own country these days. But each relinquished the power of an abusive elite without subjecting his country to a civil bloodbath. Afterward, they did not flee to the comfort of Swiss bank accounts.

On the contrary, they managed a feat that is almost unthinkable in most of today’s erupting autocracies: after succumbing to democracy, they contributed to its legitimacy by becoming candidates for high office — and losing, fair and square. De Klerk, the last white president of a South Africa that oppressed blacks for centuries, actually pressed the flesh and pleaded for votes in black townships, professing a kind of civic kinship I think he genuinely felt. De Klerk and Gorbachev were triumphant partners in their own defeats, and thus in their countries’ victories.

It is always tricky comparing one country’s experience with another’s, but in the examples of these great losers there are some broad lessons for all the countries that are now convulsed by the revolutionary spirit — and for those of us who watch

and assess them, not to mention those who bankroll and arm them.

Freedom is a slippery slope.

Both Gorbachev and de Klerk began as reformers — that is, politicians devoted to making a dreadful system less dreadful, not to actually abolishing it.

Perhaps because of the pressure exerted by years of international boycotts and decades of domestic insurgency, de Klerk was quicker than Gorbachev to recognize that his ruling party’s life project — a South Africa carved into a commonwealth of separate and independent nations, poor black ones and prosperous white ones — was cruelly absurd and ungovernable. By the time I arrived in 1992, he was already dragging his own party and some diehard white separatists into a raucous convention of factions, races and tribes to write a new constitution; white rule was clearly ending, and the only question was how ugly the end would be. Gorbachev, however, thought he was saving the Communist Party, right up to the day that party stalwarts tried to overthrow him.

Those regimes along the Mediterranean rim that are trying to hold back an angry tide by shuffling the cabinet or promising so-called reforms — Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia — may buy themselves some time, but revolutions have a way of overrunning reformers.

A little glasnost is a dangerous thing.

The regimes that have sent their thugs against the press and tried to unplug the Internet are right to fear the media. I’ve cringed under the truncheons of Iran’s official vigilantes, and I worry every day for the safety of the journalists we’ve deployed in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and elsewhere. But I understand why journalists are targets.

Watching how the seep of information stirred ordinary Russians from a paralyzing

fear was one of the true joys of covering Moscow’s spring. The Cold War voice of Radio Liberty, the underground copies of Solzhenitsyn and especially Gorbachev’s own attempts to deputize the Russian press by letting it expose corruption and incompetence — they all chipped away at the invincibility of the Soviet Union. Today it is Al Jazeera; WikiLeaked cables about the extravagant lifestyles of the ruling elites; and social media that are the fuel of popular insurgency. This is how the unhappy learn that their complaints are justified and that they have company. And with their vast reach and immediacy, Facebook and Twitter are not only sources of information but also organizing tools — samizdat on steroids.

Some of your best allies are in your jails.

Gorbachev freed Andrei Sakharov from exile; de Klerk released Nelson Mandela. Both leaders then enlisted their liberated adversaries as negotiating partners, buying some credibility at home and abroad.

These partnerships inevitably fell victim to mistrust, but they helped assure that the end of the old order was managed rather than catastrophic.

Armies are people, too.

We tend to think of armies as instruments. But they are also constituencies with families to feed, jobs to protect, a stake in the future, a yearning for respect. If a leader can command his army only with threats of summary execution or by holding family members hostage, as Libya’s desperate despot, Muammar el-Qaddafi, is reported to have done, you can safely bet his days are numbered.

One of the smartest things de Klerk did to prevent the civil war many feared in South Africa was to negotiate job security for the apartheid-era army. And one of the smartest things Nelson Mandela did was

accede to this demand, so that when he became the first president of free South Africa, he inherited a military that regarded him as their paymaster.

One man’s dead nuisance is another’s martyr.

It is not a coincidence that the surge points of the current political unrest tend to be funerals, as they were in South Africa and several restive Soviet republics. From the massacre in Sharpeville to the protesters crushed under the tank treads of a rogue army unit in Soviet Lithuania, from the persecuted fruit vendor who immolated himself in Tunisia to the crowds strafed in Libya, the dead live on as evidence of a regime’s cruelty. And few cultures cherish their martyrs as devoutly as Islam does.

Winning is the easy part.

Congratulations, you ousted the tyrant, you won an election, your inaugural address stirred the hearts of your people.

Now here’s your giant goodie bag of festering misery — Egypt! — where the army runs the private sector, the mullahs may or may not be spoiling to impose shariah law, the tourists have been scared off, poverty and unemployment are rife and any day the score-settling will begin.

Today, Russia and South Africa are disillusioned democracies. Wretched poverty, crime and bad governance bedevil South Africa. Russia is corrupt and intolerant of political dissent, sometimes brutally so. Yet each country has grown bigger middle classes, expanded individual liberties and mostly kept its armies at peace. And if the Russians or South Africans run out of patience with their imperfect leaders, they have some hope of remedies other than the streets.

Gorbachev turned 80 earlier this month, and de Klerk will be 75 soon. Happy birthday to both, and here’s to those who make history by gracefully getting out of its way.

Russians Say Damaged Cooling Pump Is Cause of Delay in Starting Iranian Reactor

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

R

ussia explained why fuel is being removed from a nuclear reactor in Iran, delaying plans to start up the giant plant this month. The Russian account, the first official rationale, came after experts last week offered theories of the failure ranging from a startup glitch to foul play.

In a statement, Russia’s state nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, which is building the reactor in Bushehr, Iran, said it found damage to one of the reactor’s four main cooling pumps. That breakdown, it said, necessitated removal of the fuel core and an inspection of the reactor and its fuel assemblies to make sure they harbored no metal particles or chips. The detection of metal shards would prompt a thorough cleaning and, according to one official, a star-

tup delay of up to two months.

Michael L. Corradini, a nuclear engineer at the University of Wisconsin, said that metallic debris whirling through a reactor’s cooling water posed no danger but that it would act as an abrasive that caused wear and tear, shortening the reactor’s life.

“It’s an operational issue,” he said in an interview. But while not suggesting an impact on safety, Dr. Corradini called the breakdown of the pump “not an ordinary occurrence at all.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran told inspectors that it was planning to unload nuclear fuel from the reactor in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf. Iran gave no explanation.

For years, Tehran has hailed the reactor as a showcase of its peaceful nuclear intentions and has pointed to its impending

startup as a sign of quickening progress.

Bushehr is Iran’s first nuclear power plant.

Iran has previously admitted that the Stuxnet computer virus infected the Bushehr reactor, and computer experts last week debated whether the computer worm was responsible for the latest problem.

The Russian explanation seems far more prosaic, although experts cautioned that the full capabilities of the Stuxnet virus remained unclear.

The Russian statement said the trouble arose as pressure mounted in the reactor during tests. The pump vibrated and joints broke, the statement said. As a result, metal shards smaller than three millimeters — or less than a tenth of an inch — could have shot into cooling pipes and lodged in fuel assemblies.

“The joints broke down under condi-

tions of high vibration and pulsing pressure,” the statement said.

“If metal particles are found on the fuel assemblies,” it added, “they will be washed, the body of the reactor cleaned, and after this the fuel will again be loaded into the reactor.”

The statement said the failed pump dated to the 1970s, when West Germans began building the reactor. The Russians, who took over in 1995, have said for years that integrating the old German equipment posed more challenges than anticipated.

An article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper, cited an unidentified Russian official as saying that in the worst case, if metal shards were found in the fuel assemblies, the delay would amount to no more than two months.

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FASHION & BEAUTY

The Red Carpet

By ERIC WILSON

S

imple and minimalist won out over the usual ruffles and plunging necklines on the Oscars red carpet on Sunday night, a sign that actresses are either tuning in to the runways or paying more attention to the fashion police than they like to let on.

The commentators on E! were practically ready to call it a night after the first dress, a tomato-red Calvin Klein design worn by Jennifer Lawrence that looked about as complicated as a one-piece bathing suit.

“She set the bar so high,” said Giuliana Rancic, one of the few on the red carpet who missed the minimalism memo. (She was wearing a monstrously poufy dress by Christian Siriano that looked as if she had sat on a tuffet and brought it along for the night.)

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been

such a surprise that so many women were wearing dresses that were, well, as plain and flat as the carpet beneath their feet. The best-received looks from the Golden Globes in January, or at least the most memorable, were the sleek and backless dresses in pop colors worn by Claire Danes and Emma Stone (also by Calvin Klein). And the Oscars aren’t exactly known for pushing the envelope any further than whatever the last actress was able to get away with in public.

There was a bit of a sparkle trend happening, to the point that some of the gowns looked like they might be more appropriate for competitive ice skating, like Mandy Moore’s gold beaded dress with an illusion neckline, by Monique Lhuillier, or Hilary Swank in silver sequins and frothy feathers from Gucci. Gwyneth Paltrow tried to combine the trends in sparkly gold Calvin Klein, but even its designer, Francisco

Costa, has his off days. More evocative of the barely adorned direction were Michelle Williams in Chanel and Amy Adams in L’Wren Scott, but neither got it just right. In the race to dress actors

for the Academy Awards, which repre sent millions of dollars worth of free publicity for fashion houses, Chanel

Continues on page 32

FASHION & BEAUTY

Comes from page 31 has typically stood out by purposefully dressing only one nominee.

So you would think that Ms. Williams could have come up with something a little more lively than a blahsy white T-shirt dress covered in white beading. (A colleague remarked that it read on television like a pilled sweater.) The problem with Ms. Adams’s sleeveless beaded navy column wasn’t the high neckline; it was the way she marred the look with a necklace that sat on top like a product placement.

It is fairly obvious, while watching the news crawler that runs across the bottom of the screen during E!’s red carpet coverage, that viewers by now are well aware of the stakes involved in dressing stars. “Hailee Steinfeld is wearing a custom Marchesa dress, Ferragamo shoes & clutch ...

Thierry Guetta is wearing Dolce & Gabbana ... Jennifer Lawrence is wearing Calvin Klein Collection, Jimmy Choo shoes, Judith Leiber bag ...” They begin to read like commodities on a stock ticker: “Valentino +1.25% ... Chanel

32March 10 - 16, 2011

-4.06% ... Dior -2.5%” Meanwhile, you got the sense that more options had been considered to manage Natalie Portman’s “baby bump” throughout the awards season than to reduce the federal deficit. On Sunday, Roger Ebert was moved to tweet: “I did the Red Carpet for years, but wouldn’t have occurred to me to discuss ‘the growth of Natalie’s bump.’ ” Oh Roger, it’s a red carpet dream!

When Ms. Portman finally arrived in a fairly plain, flowing purple Rodarte gown with minimal embellishment along the neckline, it was a bit anticlimactic. She looked great, but you kind of wanted her to work that bump like Snooki does.

The missteps this year were mostly unexpected, largely because of who made them. Nicole Kidman’s complicated white gown, with embroidered sashes meeting in the front, looked like the front of a train coming down the red carpet. Look out! And Mila Kunis, in lavender tiers of lace

by Elie Saab, finally opted for a sexy dress, but this one was too revealing.

Both Sandra Bullock and Anne

Hathaway wore strapless red dresses (by Vera Wang and Valentino, respectively) but they looked a little dated.

There were a few funny moments, thanks to Ryan Seacrest, who seems to have finally found a happy medium between talking about fashion and substance. Regarding Melissa Leo’s lace gown inset with mirrored gold beads, perhaps not recognizing he

San Juan Weekly

could be misinterpreted, Mr. Seacrest said, “It’s reflective — I can see myself in it.” And complimenting Helena Bonham Carter for not, for once, making a spectacle of herself, he elicited a stunning response.

“Well, I thought it would be nice to celebrate film, rather than fashion,” she said.

Wrong party, lady.

The San Juan Weekly

C

arolina Ovalle Arango, better known as “CAROLINA LA O” is a Colombian singer of salsa and tropical music, born in Manila on April 12, 1979, coffee capital of Colombia, graduated from the External University of Colombia (Bogotá) Business Administration in the year 2002.

Since its inception with Alchemy ‘La Sonora del XXI’ in 1995, at an early age demonstrated her talents in tropical music, recording three albums selling more than one and half million copies around the world, became her critical respect, and affection that since her launch as a solo artist in 2000 has been added to through hits like ‘El último beso’, ‘Dulce Veneno’, Yo soy la rumba y la candela pura’ and others.

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March 10 - 16, 2011

Now the album that Carolina La O decided to take a new direction in her career debut solo signing with Warner Music (USA) in 2000 and described in this study as one of the best singers taking the awards for Artist of the Carnival of Barranquilla and her la Feria en Cali. In 2001 came her second solo album, Dulce Veneno which cemented her name as a first-class performer. This production achieved sales of more than 100,000 units and get: Premios TV y Novelas (Colombia) / Revelation Tropical Artist Premios Tu Música (Puerto Rico), and multiple nominations for Premios Lo Nuestro and the Billboard Awards Latin Music Artist and Female Tropical Song of the Year.

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34 With her third album titled 2003, the interpreter Carolina La O gets a big step in her career under the tutelage of Kike Santander, participates as one of the leading figures in the tribute to Tito Puente and converted 2004 in the Latino image for two consecutive years of Budweiser, one of the largest brewers in the United States. Carolina La O continued with a new ingredient, her television debut with reality show on Telemundo “Protagonistas de la Fama VIP” in 2005 where fans followed her participation to the end.

Carolina released of ‘Mi Fuego’ in 2006, production in which she returns to her roots and fuses the folk rhythms of her country with the tropical flavor of her career. As in her latest productions, as a singer through songs such as the ‘Enterito corazon’ , ‘Bailandome’ ‘Rozandome’, and ‘Yo te busque’ included in this production that demonstrated sensitivity as a composer. The same year he became one of the leading figures of the Carnaval de la Calle 8 in Miami, the Latino Festival in Toronto Events and more representative of the Latino community in the United States.

For 2008, the company Peer Southern Productions takes on the

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

challenge to record Grandes Exitos de la Salsa, with special guests to former colleagues Alquimia, in a production called Reunion with the Gemelos album best of the genre, leading her to develop a spectacular concert tour across the United States, Colombia and Peru with a musical production performed between Miami and Puerto Rico which included the participation of renowned producer, Charlie Donato and Ramon Sanchez, who managed to recreate themselves for this album hits like ‘Azucar Negra’, ‘Cucala’, ‘Ojos Chinos’ and ‘Ochun con Chango’ among other songs and the award for Artist of the Year Tropical Star Awards 2009.

With two nominations for Female Tropical Artist of the Year 2010 at the Premio Lo Nuestro y Billboard Latin music through thei song “Ultimo Beso” Carolina’s return celebrating 15 years of experience through Carolina’s recording live through a magical night of celebration, a holiday concert filled with color and flavor in their new album recorded live during this presentation at the Metropol Theatre in her native Colombia Bogota, late last year and which collects the best of 15 years of experience in CD/ DVD.

During 2010, Colombian singer, remained the leader in the popularity charts at the top ranking U.S., reaching # 5 nationally, # 1 in Puerto Rico, # 1 in Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru, ‘Eso es este amor’ and ‘El Ultimo Beso’ songs that are part of album” Carolina La O Live. “ She was also back to her country Colombia aboard Hospital

Ship “Comfort” as a member of the humanitarian mission that the American squad held in the town of Covenas and surrounding communities, from August 8 to 11, She performed aboard a ship for its nearly 900 crew and the other in the main square of town both accompanied by the Band of the U.S. Air Force and part of the original musicians of her group.

Carolina La O was part of the tribute “Salsa: A Tribute to El Gran Combo”, in commemoration of 48 years of Salsa during the month of October, in the musical production of Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, the Colombian performer recorded the song “Menu” with Edgar Daniel and NG-2 with accompanying musical director Roselyn Pabón, the Symphony Orchestra of the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico and the musical director, Isidro Infante on piano.

The Colombian artist followed the 2010 nominee for the second consecutive year in the category “Tropical Female Artist of the Year at the Premios Lo Nuestro, in one of the major categories of the 2011 version. Now he wants to record an album with her husband, former MDO Didier Hernandez

Biarritz Ballet at the Casals Festival

B

iarritz Ballet at the Casals Festival This has been a sensational event accomplished as part of the current Casals Festival. Thierry Malandain is both director and choreographer. Biarritz in southern France, almost in the borderline with Spain has certainly placed the ballet in France in an avant guard level. Malandain follows the similar venue as Berjart and many others.

Malandain has taken two popular works in the Spanish Ballet repertory to be transferred to the urging artistic prevailing demands of ballet dancing. “Giselle” has been placed in an insane hospital as a paranoic; swans are done by male dancers. Perhaps, in the future, we might be watching “Sleeping Beauty” as a drug addict being risen from her sleep by an F.B.I. agent.

Thus, “Carmen” and “El Amor Brujo”, that we knew as two Spanish Flamenco milestones: step out on the stage in a different slant; no heelwork, no castanets, no Spanish mantillas.

The hair rising coreography in “Carmen” involving the traditional characters, Don José, the bullfighter, even the bull itself are latent conveyors of the tragedy; but, this time in the search of a congenial outcome which is latent in the whole group; whatever death pervades the work. As a matter os fact, Mandalain did not consider Bizets Music; he substituded that rambling music for the Romantic music of Schubert’s String Quartet, known as “Death and the Maiden”.

Carmen as an unstable provocative and sensual seducer, captivates Don José temporarily, attaining an intensive seduction in an exhilarating pas-de-deuxin in a hair rising choreographyc Language that can only be expressed in the pertaining body language approach and technical dexterity of contemporary ballet. In this almost nude love-making scene, reaches the highest point of inspiration.

In our local ballet, we have had two versions of “Carmen”. First one was done by Ramón Molina, the resident choreographer of Ballet de San Juan. In his version, ominous death pervades his piece. More recently, the same company brought Carmen to the local ambiance of a Puerto Rican Cigar factory, as

another example of bringing to the present, a ballet classic.

“El Amor Brujo”, by Manuel de Falla, is the less regional composer of Spain. Malandain has done a monument transfer; however , retaining the witch-craft motivation of the original plot. Candelas, the gypsy, is hunted by her former suitor Carmelo. Candelas, is condemned to remain single as long as she is hunted by the ghost of Carmelo.

The Ritual Fire Dance, is the turning point of the ballet. The exhilarating choreography goes beyond the boundaries of expertise. When the end comes with the last stroke of the music, awe and stupefaction remains. Such is the overwhelming atmosphere created. The classic training of the dancers is rooted to the present slant of interpretation from head to feet they are magnificent. Just to judge the inherent control of the “plié” and “ballon” when jumping with a noise less landing is just remarkable.

The popular “coplas” sung by the mezzo compromise the central plot of the ballet “Lo mismo que el fuego pasa, lo mismito el quiere, le huyes y te persigue, le llamas y se echa a correr”.

The Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maximiano Valdés, was magnificent; De Fallas music score never sounded so brilliant. Congratulations Festival Casals for such a treat.

By Max González

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

35

Go Easy on Yourself, New Wave of Research Urges

By TARA PARKER-POPE

D

o you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and family?

That simple question is the basis for a burgeoning new area of psychological research called self-compassion — how kindly people view themselves. People who find it easy to be supportive and understanding to others, it turns out, often score surprisingly low on self-compassion tests, berating themselves for perceived failures like being overweight or not exercising.

The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of selfcompassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggest that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight.

This idea does seem at odds with the advice dispensed by many doctors and self-help books, which suggest that willpower and self-discipline are the keys to better health. But Kristin Neff, a pioneer in the field, says selfcompassion is not to be confused with self-indulgence or lower standards.

“I found in my research that the biggest reason people aren’t more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they’ll become self-indulgent,” said Dr. Neff, an associate professor of human development at the University of Texas at Austin. “They believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. Most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be.”

Imagine your reaction to a child struggling in school or eating too much junk food. Many parents would offer support, like tutoring or making an effort to find healthful foods the child will enjoy. But when adults find themselves in a similar situation — struggling at work, or overeating and gaining weight — many fall into a cycle of self-criticism and negativity. That leaves them feeling even less motiva-

ted to change.

“Self-compassion is really conducive to motivation,” Dr. Neff said. “The reason you don’t let your children eat five big tubs of ice cream is because you care about them.

With self-compassion, if you care about yourself, you do what’s healthy for you rather than what’s harmful to you.”

Dr. Neff, whose book, “Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind,” is being published next month by William Morrow, has developed a self-compassion scale: 26 statements meant to determine how often people are kind to themselves, and whether they recognize that ups and downs are simply part of life.

A positive response to the statement “I’m disapproving and judgmental about my own flaws and inadequacies,” for example, suggests lack of self-compassion. “When I feel inadequate in some way, I try to remind myself that feelings of inadequacy are shared by most people” suggests the opposite.

For those low on the scale, Dr. Neff suggests a set of exercises — like writing yourself a letter of support, just as you might to a friend you are concerned about. Listing your best and worst traits, reminding yourself that nobody is perfect and thinking of steps you might take to help you feel better about yourself are also recommended.

Other exercises include meditation and “compassion breaks,” which involve repeating mantras like “I’m going to be kind to myself in this moment.”

If this all sounds a bit too warm and fuzzy, like the Al Franken character Stuart Smalley (“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me”), there is science to back it up. A 2007 study by researchers at Wake Forest University suggested that even a minor self-compassion intervention could influence eating habits. As part of the study, 84 female college students were asked to take part in what they thought was a food-tasting experiment.

At the beginning of the study, the women were asked to eat doughnuts.

One group, however, was given a lesson in self-compassion with the food. “I hope you won’t be hard on yourself,”

the instructor said. “Everyone in the study eats this stuff, so I don’t think there’s any reason to feel real bad about it.”

Later the women were asked to taste-test candies from large bowls. The researchers found that women who were regular dieters or had guilt feelings about forbidden foods ate less after hearing the instructor’s reassurance. Those not given that message ate more.

The hypothesis is that the women who felt bad about the doughnuts ended up engaging in “emotional” eating.

The women who gave themselves permission to enjoy the sweets didn’t overeat.

“Self-compassion is the missing ingredient in every diet and weight-loss plan,” said Jean Fain, a psychotherapist and teaching associate at Harvard Medical School who wrote the new book “The Self-Compassion Diet” (Sounds True publishing). “Most plans revolve around self-discipline, deprivation and neglect.”

Dr. Neff says that the field is still new and that she is just starting a controlled study to determine whether teaching self-compassion actually leads to lower stress, depression and anxiety and more happiness and life satisfaction.

“The problem is that it’s hard to unlearn habits of a lifetime,” she said. “People have to actively and consciously develop the habit of self-compassion.”

Fewer Patients Getting Blood Infections

By DENISE GRADY

B

loodstream infections caused by tubes inserted into major blood vessels of intensive care patients showed a big drop from 2001 to 2009, government researchers said.

But the researchers also reported unacceptably high rates of the same type of infections in other hospital wards and in people receiving dialysis for kidney failure.

The illnesses, called central-line infections, can be serious, with death rates of 12 percent to 25 percent. Central lines are tubes that are usually placed in the large veins of the neck or chest to deliver medicines and nutrition.

Infections in these lines are common, but also largely preventable. Bacteria like staphylococcus can be warded off with simple measures like washing hands, wearing sterile gowns and drapes, and following the proper techniques for inserting and maintaining the lines.

The estimated number of central-line infections in intensive care units fell to 18,000 in 2009 from 43,000 in 2001, a 58 per-

cent drop, according to a report published online Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts attributed much of the progress to campaigns aimed at improving techniques for managing the lines in intensive care units, where they are most commonly used.

The figures mean that in 2009, such measures prevented 3,000 to 6,000 deaths and saved $414 million. Assuming the decrease in central-line infections was steady from 2001 to 2009, as many as 27,000 lives might have been saved at a cost savings of $1.8 billion.

The numbers are rough estimates. The 2001 figure of 43,000 infections, for instance, could have been as low as 27,000 and as high as 67,000.

Even so, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C., called the drop in infections in intensive care units “very substantial progress.” But, he said in a telephone news briefing, the infections still occurred far too often, affecting 80,000 patients a year and killing at least 10,000 of them.

About 350,000 patients a day receive dialysis in the United States. In 2008, about

37,000 of them suffered central-line infections, Dr. Frieden said, adding that the infections are the leading cause of hospital stays and death in people on dialysis.

He said the issue was especially important because the number of people on dialysis is expected to double in the next decade because of increased rates of kidney failure linked to diabetes and the aging of the population.

One way to cut down on infections in people with kidney failure is to avoid using a central line for dialysis. It is preferable for such patients to have an operation that connects an artery and a vein, forming a structure known as a fistula that can be used for dialysis.

Fistulas have about one-sixth the risk of infection as a central line. Needles are inserted into the fistula for each treatment and removed when the treatment is done, unlike central lines, which stay in the blood vessel and emerge through the skin, posing a constant risk of infection.

Despite the widespread recognition that fistulas are safer, about 80 percent of dialysis patients in the United States start

treatment with a central line. Because the surgery to create a fistula must be completed six weeks or more before dialysis starts, doctors must anticipate kidney failure and perform the procedure well ahead of time.

Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, a medical epidemiologist at the C.D.C. and one of the authors of the new report, said that hospital wards outside of intensive care units needed to adopt hygiene techniques for inserting central lines.

Some hospitals have already made those improvements. Dr. Neil Fishman, an infectious disease specialist and the director of health care epidemiology and infection prevention at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, said that at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, practices first put into place in intensive care were extended to other wards.

In 2005, there were 40 to 50 centralline bloodstream infections at the hospital every month, Dr. Fishman said. “That was our peak,” he said. “In 2011, we have zero to two every month. That took a lot of work from a lot of people, and a lot of dedication.”

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The San Juan Weekly

For Tendon Pain, Think Beyond the Needle

By JANE E. BRODY

T

wo time-honored remedies for injured tendons seem to be falling on their faces in well-designed clinical trials.

The first, corticosteroid injections into the injured tendon, has been shown to provide only short-term relief, sometimes with poorer long-term results than doing nothing at all.

The second, resting the injured joint, is supposed to prevent matters from getting worse. But it may also fail to make them any better.

Rather, working the joint in a way that doesn’t aggravate the injury but strengthens supporting tissues and stimulates blood flow to the painful area may promote healing faster than “a tincture of time.”

And researchers (supported by my own experience with an injured tendon, as well as that of a friend) suggest that some counterintuitive remedies may work just as well or better.

A review of 41 “high-quality” studies involving 2,672 patients, published in November in The Lancet, revealed only shortlived benefit from corticosteroid injections.

For the very common problem of tennis elbow, injections of platelet-rich plasma derived from patients’ own blood had better long-term results.

Still, the authors, from the University of Queensland and Griffith University in Australia, emphasized the need for more and better clinical research to determine which among the many suggested remedies works best for treating different tendons.

My own problem was precipitated one autumn by eight days of pulling a heavy suitcase through six airports. My shoulder hurt nearly all the time (not a happy circumstance for a daily swimmer), and trying to retrieve something even slightly behind me produced a stabbing pain. Diagnosis: tendinitis and arthritis. Treatment: rest and physical therapy.

Two months of physical therapy did help somewhat, as did avoiding motions that caused acute pain. The therapist had some useful tips on adjusting my swimming stroke to minimize stress on the tendon while the injury gradually began to heal.

The following spring, although I still had some pain and feared a relapse, I attacked my garden with a vengeance. Much to my surprise, I was able to do heavy-duty digging and lugging without shoulder pain.

Could the intense workout and perhaps the increased blood flow to my shoulder have enhanced my recovery? A friend, Richard Erde, had an instructive experience.

An avid tennis player at 70, he began having twinges in his right shoulder while playing. Soon, simple motions like slipping out of a shirt sleeve caused serious pain. The diagnosis, based on a physical exam, was injury of the tendon that attaches the biceps muscle of his upper arm to the bones of the

take a long time to heal — many months, even a year or more. They can be frustrating and often costly, especially for professional athletes and physically active people like me and Mr. Erde.

In a commentary accompanying the Lancet report, Alexander Scott and Karim M. Khan of the University of British Columbia noted that although “corticosteroid injection does not impair recovery of shoulder tendinopathy, patients should be advised that evidence for even short-term benefits at the shoulder is limited.” Like the Australian reviewers, the commentators concluded that “specific exercise therapy might produce more cures at 6 and 12 months than one or more corticosteroid injections.”

Treatments to Try

Now the question is: What kind of physical therapy gives the best results?

Most therapists prescribe eccentric exercises, which involve muscle contractions as shoulder’s rotator cuff. the muscle fibers lengthen (for example, He was advised to see a rheumatolo- when a hand-held weight is lowered from gist, who declined to do a corticosteroid in- the waist to the thigh). Eccentric exercises jection and instead recommended physical must be performed in a controlled manner; therapy and rest. uncontrolled eccentric contractions are a “I stopped playing tennis for a month, and it didn’t help at all,” Mr. Erde told me. “The physical therapist found I had very poor range of motion and had me do a variety of exercises, which improved my flexibility and reduced the pain somewhat.”

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR After two months, he stopped the therapy.

Then several weeks ago, after wator many avid runners, side stitching the Australian Open, he thought he should do more to strengthen his arm and ches can be a maddening proshoulder muscles and decided to try plablem: the cramplike spasms ying tennis more vigorously. “The pain star- set in suddenly and can ruin a good ted to drop off dramatically,” he said, “and workout. While no one knows their in just 10 days the pain had eased more than precise cause, many experts believe 90 percent.” a side stitch occurs when the diaphragm — which is vital to breaA Frustrating Injury Tendinopathies, as these injuries are thing — is overworked during a called, are particularly vexing orthopedic vigorous run and begins to spasm. problems that remain poorly understood Runners who develop stitches are despite their frequency. “Tendinitis” is a commonly advised to slow down misnomer: rarely are there signs of infla- and take deep, controlled breaths. mmation, which no doubt accounts for the But a new theory suggests that lack of lasting improvement with steroid it may not be the diaphragm that’s shots and anti-inflammatory drugs. They responsible for the pain, and that may relieve pain temporarily, but don’t cure poor posture could be a culprit. In the problem.

The underlying pathology of tendi- one recent study, researchers used nopathies is still a mystery. Even when pa- a device to measure muscle activitients recover, their tendons may continue to ty as people were experiencing side look awful, say therapists who do imaging stitches. They found no evidence of studies. Without a better understanding of increased activity or spasms in the the actual causes of tendon pain, it’s hard diaphragm area during the onset of to develop rational treatments, and even the stitches. best specialists may be reduced to trial and Last year, the same team puerror. What works best for one tendon — or blished a separate study in The Joone patient — may do little or nothing for urnal of Science and Medicine in another.

Most tendinopathies are precipitated Sport. They found that those who by overuse and commonly afflict overzealo- regularly slouched or hunched their us athletes, amateur and professional alike. backs were more likely to experienWith or without treatment, they usually ce side stitches, and the poorer their

common cause of injuries like groin pulls or hamstring strains.

Marilyn Moffat, professor of physical therapy at New York University and president of the World Confederation for Physical Therapy, prefers “very protective” isometric exercises, at least at the outset of treatment until the tendon injury begins to heal. These exercises involve no movement at all, allowing muscles to contract without producing pain. For example, in treating shoulder tendinopathy, she said in an interview, the patient would push the fists against a wall with upper arms against the body and elbows bent at 90 degrees.

In another exercise, the patient sits holding one end of a dense elastic TheraBand in each hand and, with thumbs up, upper arms at the sides and elbows bent at 90 degrees, tries to pull the hands apart.

“The stronger the shoulder muscles are when the tendinopathy calms down, the better shape the shoulder is in to take over movement without further injury,” Dr. Moffat said. “You don’t want the muscles to weaken, which is what happens when you rest and do nothing. That leaves you vulnerable to further injury.”

Side Stitches? Change Your Posture

F

posture, the more severe their stitches in exercise.

One explanation is that poor running form may affect nerves that run from the upper back to the abdomen. Another is that hunching increases friction on the peritoneum, a membrane that surrounds the abdominal cavity. This could also explain why controlled breathing seems to help relieve stitches: drawing deep breaths fills the lungs and improves posture.

Improving running posture may help relieve stitches.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

37

Can Exercise Keep You Young?

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

W

e know physical activity is beneficial but even so, Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics was startled to discover exercise kept a strain of mice from becoming gray prematurely.

Shiny fur was least of benefits in new research of Sciences, exercise reduced or eliminated almost every detrimental effect of aging in mice that had been genetically programmed to grow old at an accelerated pace.

Dr. Tarnopolsky used lab rodents that carry a genetic mutation affecting how well their bodies repair malfunctioning mitochondria, which are tiny organelles within cells. Mitochondria combine oxygen and nutrients to create fuel for cells — they are microscopic power generators.

Mitochrondria have own DNA, distinct from cell’s own genetic material, and multiply on own. Mitochondria can accumulate small genetic mutations, which under normal circumstances are corrected by specialized repair systems within cell. As we age, the number of mutations begins to outstrip the system’s ability to make repairs, and mitochondria start malfunctioning and dying.

Scientists consider loss of mitochondria to be underlying cause of aging in mammals. As mitochondria falter, cells they fuel wither or die. Muscles shrink, brain volume drops, hair falls out or loses its

pigmentation, and soon enough we are, in appearance and beneath the surface, old.

Mice used lacked primary mitochondrial repair mechanism, so developed malfunctioning mitochondria early in lives, as early as 3 months of age, human equivalent of age 20. By 8 months, or early 60s in human terms, animals were extremely frail and decrepit, with spindly muscles, shrunken brains, enlarged hearts, shriveled gonads and patchy, graying fur. Listless, they barely moved around cages. All were dead before reaching a year of age.

Except the mice that exercised.

Half of mice were allowed to run on a wheel for 45 minutes three times a week, beginning at 3 months. Rodent runners were required to maintain a fairly brisk pace, Dr. Tarnopolsky said: “It was about like a person running a 50- or 55-minute 10K.” (A 10K race is 6.2 miles.) The mice continued this regimen for five months.

At 8 months their sedentary lab mates were bald, frail and dying, running rats remained youthful. They had full pelts of dark fur, no salt-and-pepper shadings. They maintained all of their muscle mass and brain volume. Their gonads were normal, as were their hearts. They could balance on narrow rods, the showoffs.

They still harbored the mutation that affected mitochondrial repair they had more mitochondria and far fewer with mutations than sedentary mice. At 1 year, none of exercising mice died of natural causes.

The researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the impact that exercise had on the animals’ aging process, Dr. Tarnopolsky said. He and his colleagues had expected to find that exercise would affect mitochondrial health in muscles, including the heart, since past research had shown a connection. They had not expected that it would affect every tissue and bodily system studied.

Other studies, including a number from Dr. Tarnopolsky’s own lab, have also found that exercise affects the course of aging, but none has shown such a comprehensive effect. And precisely how exercise alters the aging process remains unknown.

In this experiment, running resulted in an upsurge in the rodents’ production of a protein known as PGC-1alpha, which regulates genes involved in metabolism and energy creation, including mitochondrial function. Exercise also sparked the repair of malfunctioning mitochondria through a mechanism outside the known repair pathway; in these mutant mice, that pathway didn’t exist, but their mitochondria were nonetheless being repaired.

Dr. Tarnopolsky is currently overseeing a number of experiments that he expects will help to elucidate the specific physiological mechanisms. But for now, he said, the lesson of his experiment and dozens like it is unambiguous. “Exercise alters the course of aging,” he said.

Although in this experiment, the acti-

vity was aerobic and strenuous, Dr. Tarnopolsky is not convinced that either is absolutely necessary for benefits. Studies of older humans have shown that weightlifting can improve mitochondrial health, he said, as can moderate endurance exercise. Although there is probably a threshold amount of exercise that is necessary to affect physiological aging, Dr. Tarnopolsky said, “anything is better than nothing.” If you haven’t been active in the past, he continued, start walking five minutes a day, then begin to increase your activity level.

The potential benefits have attractions even for the young. While Dr. Tarnopolsky, a lifelong athlete, noted with satisfaction that active, aged mice kept their hair, his younger graduate students were far more interested in the animals’ robust gonads.

Their testicles and ovaries hadn’t shrunk, unlike those of sedentary elderly mice.

Dr. Tarnopolsky’s students were impressed. “I think they all exercise now”.

38 March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Prostate Guideline Causes Many Needless Biopsies

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

C

urrent guidelines for the early detection of prostate cancer recommend a biopsy for men whose P.S.A. rises rapidly, no matter what the initial level. But a new study says that the practice does not help patients find aggressive cancers and results in many unnecessary biopsies.

P.S.A., or prostate-specific antigen, rises with age, and what is considered normal varies. In general, a level under

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4 nanograms per milliliter is considered safe. But even with a normal reading, an increase of 0.35 nanograms per year is widely believed to be high enough to require a biopsy.

Researchers examined the records of 5,519 men with a base-line P.S.A. under 3. They followed them for seven years with yearly tests and a biopsy if the level rose above 4.

They also analyzed P.S.A. velocity — the rate of change in readings from year to year. But after adjusting for age, base-line P.S.A. and other factors, they found little evidence that ordering a biopsy for men whose velocity was greater than 0.35 helped find prostate cancer. And it was particularly useless in uncovering the most aggressive types of cancer, the ones most important to treat.

The researchers, writing in the March 16 issue of The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, concluded that using P.S.A. velocity for prostate cancer detection is ineffective, that it leads to unnecessary biopsies and that references to it should be removed from professional guidelines and policy statements.

Andrew J. Vickers, the lead author, drew an analogy: A basketball player’s height, he said, is important to his ability to play, and it correlates very closely with his shoe size.

But once you know his height, his shoe size is irrelevant to judging his value as a player.

Similarly, it is easy to demonstrate a statistical relationship between sharp rises in P.S.A. and cancer, but the correlation reveals no more information than is already available with a P.S.A. reading, a digital examination and a family history. It is irrelevant in deciding whether a biopsy is needed.

Not all experts agree. Dr. Anthony V. D’Amico, a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard, said that the methodology of Dr. Vickers’s study was sound, but that the data gathered was almost certainly flawed.

The problem, Dr. D’Amico said, is that many factors that have nothing to do with prostate cancer can cause a rapid increase in prostate-specific antigen. Sexual activity, riding on a bicycle or on horseback, a recent colonoscopy, a bladder or prostate infection, even variations in the ways laboratories perform the test can radically affect the readings.

“It may well be that the high velocity in your case is not important,” he said. “But before you reach that conclusion, I would get a repeat P.S.A.” If there is still a spike after eliminating those other possible causes, he continued, a biopsy should be the next step.

Dr. Vickers, a researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, agreed that prostate cancer was only one of many reasons for a high P.S.A. “A doctor sees a high P.S.A. and says, ‘Could this be cancer or some other reason?’ ” he said. “Well, the thought was that P.S.A. velocity could help you think this through” — that measuring the rate of change would be decisive.

But in practice, Dr. Vickers said, it does not work. If he had strictly applied the guidelines to the men in his study, he said, one in every seven would have required a biopsy.

This would mean millions of American men would need biopsies, he said, with almost none revealing a cancer.

Dr. Vickers and his colleagues acknowledged that there might be better methods of calculating P.S.A. velocity that could lead to more accurate predictions, and that some effect might have been found if the patients had been followed for more than seven years.

But at this point, he is firmly against biopsies on the basis of velocity alone. “If your P.S.A. is in the normal range, you shouldn’t get a biopsy,” he said. “Changes or spikes in P.S.A. are not something to worry about if your P.S.A. is still normal.”

F.D.A. Orders Prescription Cold Drugs Pulled From Market

By ANDREW POLLACK

T

he Food and Drug Administration ordered the removal from the market of more than 500 prescription drugs used to treat colds, coughs and allergies because the medications had never gone through a federal review of their safety and effectiveness.

“We don’t know what’s in them, whether they work properly or how they are made,’’ Deborah Autor, the director of the office of compliance in the F.D.A.’s drug division, said in a telephone news conference on Wednesday morning.

But Ms. Autor said the agency did not believe the action would have a significant impact on patients and doctors because there were plenty of cold and allergy medicines available that have received F.D.A. approval. F.D.A. officials said they did not know how many patients were taking the drugs that would be removed from the market.

But most patients are believed to use over-the-counter cold medications, rather than prescription drugs, and none of those are affected by Wednesday’s action.

In 2008, the F.D.A. issued an advisory that over-thecounter cold medicines should not be used by children under 2 years of age because they could have dangerous side effects and there was little evidence they worked.

Since then, agency officials said, many manufacturers of such drugs have relabeled their products to advise that they are not to be used by children under 4. F.D.A. officials said on Wednesday that they believed the over-the-counter cold and allergy remedies that remain on the shelves were

safe if used as directed.

The action on cold medicines is the latest in a campaign by the F.D.A. to remove unapproved drugs from the market. Many have been marketed since before the 1962 federal law that required drugs to undergo agency review for safety and effectiveness. The F.D.A. said many physicians were unaware that they were prescribing drugs that had never been approved.

Since 2006 the agency has removed 16 other classes of unapproved drugs from the market. But the cold, cough and allergy class is the largest action by far in terms of the number of drugs covered.

The drugs include Cardec, Lodrane, Organidin and Pediahist. Some 27 different ingredients are covered by the drugs on the list. Most of the products are believed to be made in the United States, the officials said.

The agency has posted further information, including a list of the drugs covered, on its Web site.

F.D.A. officials said they became concerned because some of the ingredients were the same as those in the overthe-counter drugs that posed potential risks for young children. And some of the prescription drugs on the list were being prescribed to children as young as 1 month old.

The agency said there had been some reports of problems from the drugs, such as drowsiness, sedation and irritability, but data were not complete.

The F.D.A. tested six of the drugs that were extendedrelease products, meaning they were supposed to release their active ingredients gradually over eight to 12 hours.

Three of them released 85 percent of its ingredients in only 30 minutes, Ms. Autor said. Another released only 25 percent of its active ingredients over the entire time period.

The manufacturers of the listed drugs have 90 days to stop manufacturing and 180 days to stop distribution.

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March 10 - 16, 2011

39 SCIENCE / TECH

Dinosaur-Hunting Hobbyist Makes Fresh Tracks for Paleontology

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

L

ast week, Mike Taylor identified a new dinosaur called Brontomerus mcintoshi, a sauropod with uncommonly large, powerful thighs.

It is the second dinosaur he’s named in five years and his 13th paleontology publication.

That would be impressive though not unusual for a hard-working full-time paleontologist. But Mike Taylor is a 42-year-old British computer programmer who writes code for a living in a quaint English village called Ruardean.

Hunting for dinosaurs is just a hobby, albeit one he pursues seriously.

One day 10 years ago, while reading a paleontology paper on a long plane trip, he had an epiphany.

“I thought, well, blimey, I could do better than that,” he said. “And then I decided, why shouldn’t I? What’s stopping me?”

His childhood interest in dinosaurs was rekindled in 2000 and he got hold of classic books like “The Dinosaur Heresies,” “The Complete Dinosaur” and the “Dinosaur Encyclopedia.” He amassed a collection of paleontology journals and studied them with the intensity of a graduate student.

Dr. Taylor, whose numerous papers earned him a formal Ph.D. in paleontology in 2009 from the Uni-

versity of Portsmouth, is not alone in his love for dinosaurs. The public has long had a fascination for the magnificent creatures that lived millions of years ago, some dwarfing elephants in size.

“There are many dino fan boys out there,” Dr. Taylor said. “And I was just another one of them.”

His latest discovery, Brontomerus mcintoshi, is named after John McIntosh, one other such “fan boy.”

Dr. McIntosh spent his career as a physics professor at Wesleyan. But he spent his spare hours poring over bones in museums around the world.

And when he retired 20 years ago, he devoted himself to the study of sauropods, the order of large, planteating dinosaurs that Dr. Taylor also favors.

Over the course of more than

30 years, Dr. McIntosh made major contributions to the field, writing many papers and several books. In 1979, he helped prove that paleontologists had mounted the wrong head on a sauropod named Apatosaurus.

“Even a minor paleontologist can make a major contribution,” Dr. Taylor said.

Other scientific disciplines, like physics and genetics, require fancy equipment, large labs and major funding. Although paleontology has come to depend more and more on CT scans and even molecular analyses, it still has plenty of room for the time-honored pursuit of puzzling through bones and piecing them together.

“You just need a decent camera, a little time and money to travel to museums, some experience, a good eye,” said Nicholas Longrich, a paleontologist at Yale. “It’s still hard — not just anybody can do it — but the barrier to entry is a lot lower than for other fields.”

Dr. Taylor has never participated in an excavation, instead choosing to study the scores of unnamed fossils that are collecting dust in the basements of museums. He takes pictures from many angles and makes detailed measurements that he studies.

“Given the limited time I have available for paleo, conferences and museum visits are more important,” he said.

His first discovery, a bone be-

longing to an elephant-size herbivorous dinosaur called Xenoposeidon, was excavated in the early 1890s. It was acquired by the Natural History Museum in London, and remained unidentified until Dr. Taylor began studying it.

And the dinosaur he recently named was found at a site in Utah in 1995 and housed in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, unidentified.

“Our museums are chock-full of things that have never been studied, or explained at all,” said Mathew Wedel, a paleontologist and anatomist at Western University of Health Sciences and Dr. Taylor’s co-author on the Brontomerus paper.

He and Dr. Taylor became pen pals 10 years ago, when Dr. Taylor sent him an e-mail about one of his publications.

Then they began brainstorming and sharing ideas. The two are now best friends, and usually meet about once a year at paleontology conferences and museums to collaborate.

Although Dr. Wedel is employed in paleontology full time, he sees great benefits to working with Dr. Taylor, who provides a fresh perspective.

“There was no such thing as the professional scientist at one time,” he said. “Along the way we lost something, and it’s this idea that anybody can contribute to human knowledge.”

Child’s Remains Reveal Ice Age Burial Practices

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

A

rchaeologists have discovered the remains of a child cremated in central Alaska about 11,500 years ago. They are the earliest known human remains from the North American Subarctic and Arctic region.

The fragments were found in a fire pit in an ancient dwelling and provide new insight into the burial practices of ice age people. The findings appear in the current issue of the journal Science.

Although only about 20 percent of the child’s remains was recovered, leaving the sex unknown, the researchers discovered teeth that indicate the child was about 3 years old.

The oval fire pit in the home also appears to have been a cooking hearth, based on remains of salmon and other small animals in the

area. After the child died, he or she was placed face up in the pit and cremated. The pit and the home were most likely never used again.

“We can infer that they probably abandoned the house when the child was cremated,” said Ben A. Potter an archaeologist at the University of Alaska and the study’s lead author.

“It was the final layer, and there’s nothing to indicate that they stirred around the fire anymore.”

It isn’t clear how many people lived in the home, but given the child’s age, there were probably adult women acting as caretakers, Dr. Potter said.

Prior research has indicated that people in the area hunted large game, but the new findings suggest that smaller animals were also a part of the diet.

Dr. Potter and his colleagues now hope to

retrieve DNA samples from the child’s remains and investigate genetic links to other ancient and living communities.

SCIENCE / TECH 40 March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Where Call Reception Fades for Pilot Whales

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

P

ilot whales are highly social creatures that communicate extensively with one another through tonal calls.

But their ability to make calls is severely diminished when they dive deeper than about 260 feet, researchers report in The Proceedings of The Royal Society B. Until this point, as the whales dive deeper, their calls grow louder, but beyond this the calls become softer.

The whales often dive nearly 3,000 feet deep in order to capture their favorite prey — a large, calo-

rie-rich squid.

“If they want to be heard by other whales at the surface, you would expect that they would increase their volume, but that is not the case,” said Frants Jensen a biologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and the study’s lead author.

Dr. Jensen and his colleagues attached tags to 12 short-finned pilot whales off the Canary Islands and logged the sound, depth and orientation of the animals. Despite the impairment due to depth, the whales continued to produce tonal calls at lower volumes until they reached about 2,600 feet.

The researchers believe that at such depths the lungs of the whales collapse, severely reducing their air volume and restricting their ability to generate sound.

Still, the whales find their cohorts when they reach the surface.

“They manage to find their social group after each dive,” Dr. Jensen said. “It’s a highly effective social system.”

One issue of concern, though, is the presence of motorized vessels, like whale-watching boats, that may mask the low-volume calls the whales make, the researchers report.

In a Marine Worm’s Eyes, the Theory of Evolution

By CARL ZIMMER

C

harles Darwin considered the evolution of the human eye one of the toughest problems his theory had to explain. In “On the Origin of Species,” he wrote that the idea that natural selection could produce such an intricate organ “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”

But Darwin dispelled that seeming absurdity by laying out a series of steps by which the evolution could take place. Making this sequence all the more plausible was the fact that some of the transitional forms Darwin described actually existed in living invertebrates.

Now, a team of American and European researchers report that they have discovered an eye that could represent the first step in this evolution. They have found, in effect, a swimming eyeball.

“This is in no way the ancestor of the human eye, but it’s the first time we have had a model of it,” said Yale Passamaneck, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii. He and his colleagues report the discovery in the online journal EvoDevo.

The researchers made the dis-

covery while studying a species of brachiopods, or lamp shells, which live in shells but are marine worms unrelated to mollusks like clams and oysters. Lamp shells have existed for over half a billion years, but their biology has long remained a mystery — including the simple question of whether they can see.

Four-day-old lamp shell larvae, for example, have puzzling dark spots on either side of the front end of their bodies. Recently, Carsten Lüter, a biologist at the Berlin Museum of Natural History, and his colleagues dissected the eyespots of some lamp shell larvae.

They discovered that each spot was actually a pair of neurons, one for capturing light and one containing pigment. The neurons connected to a brainlike clump of neurons inside the larva.

Their anatomy suggested the spots were simple eyes. So Dr. Lüter and his colleagues contacted Dr. Passamaneck and his colleagues at the University of Hawaii, who are experts on the genes for animal photoreceptors. The Hawaii researchers discovered that, indeed, photoreceptor genes were active in the dark spots.

But to be thorough, Dr. Passamaneck checked to see if the photoreceptor genes were active at other stages. “I thought, ‘I’m just going to eliminate that possibility,’ ” he said.

Just the opposite happened.

Dr. Passamaneck discovered that the genes were active much earlier, just 36 hours after fertilization, when the lamp shell embryo was merely a cup-shaped mass of a few hundred cells.

Dr. Passamaneck was baffled.

“There are no neurons at that stage,” he said. Nevertheless, it was clear that the outer surface of the cup was covered with photoreceptors.

To see if the embryos were doing something with the light, Dr. Passamaneck and his colleagues put a light on one side of a dish of embryos. The lamp shell embryo is covered with tiny beating hairs, which it uses to swim in a spiral pattern. Dr. Passamaneck found that after 20 minutes, twice as many embryos would end up on the illuminated side of the dish as on the dark side.

Dr. Passamaneck and his colleagues hypothesize that the cells can detect the direction of light becau-

se it is blocked in some directions by the embryo’s yolk. It can then use this information to change the rhythm of its hair.

It is possible, Dr. Passamaneck said, that in the course of evolution, our own eyes started out as swimming eyeballs. Only later did the job of catching light get relegated to only some cells, which could send signals to their neighbors. And only much later did these specialist cells relay signals to brains.

Todd Oakley of the University of California, Santa Barbara, an expert on the evolution of vision, called the results “tantalizing.” But he cautioned that just because the photoreceptor gene was active in the early embryo, that did not necessarily mean that the lamp shells were able to see. “Other possible photoreceptive mechanisms should also be ruled out,” Dr. Oakley said.

“Correlation does not mean causation.”

Dr. Passamaneck is making plans for these sorts of studies.

For now, though, he remains a bit stunned at what he has stumbled across.

“It’s like Yogi Berra said,” he said. “You can observe a lot by watching.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

41 SCIENCE / TECH

Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks

By JOHN MARKOFF

H

ewlett-Packard researchers have proposed a fundamental rethinking of the modern computer for the coming era of nanoelectronics — a marriage of memory and computing power that could drastically limit the energy used by computers.

Today the microprocessor is in the center of the computing universe, and information is moved, at heavy energy cost, first to be used in computation and then stored. The new approach would be to marry processing to memory to cut down transportation of data and reduce energy use.

The semiconductor industry has long warned about a set of impending bottlenecks described as “the wall,” a point in time where more than five decades of progress in continuously shrinking the size of transistors used in computation will end. If progress stops it will not only slow the rate of consumer electronics innovation, but also end the exponential increase in the speed of the world’s most powerful supercomputers — 1,000 times faster each decade.

However, in an article published in IEEE Computer in January, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, a HewlettPackard electrical engineer, offers a radical alternative to today’s computer designs that would permit new designs for consumer electronics products as well as the next generation of supercomputers, known as exascale processors.

Today, computers constantly shuttle data back and forth among faster and slower memories. The systems keep frequently used data close to the processor and then move it to slower and more permanent storage when it is no longer needed for the ongoing calculations.

In this approach, the microprocessor is in the center of the computing universe, but in terms of energy costs, moving the information, first to be computed upon and then stored, dwarfs the energy used in the actual computing operation.

Moreover, the problem is rapidly worsening because the amount of data consumed by computers is growing even more quickly than the increase in computer performance.

“What’s going to be the killer app 10 years from now?” asked Dr. Ranganathan. “It’s fairly clear it’s going to be about data; that’s not rocket science. In the future every piece of storage on the planet will come with a built-in computer.”

To distinguish the new type of computing from today’s designs, he said that systems will be based on memory chips he calls “nanostores” as distinct from today’s microprocessors. They will be hybrids, threedimensional systems in which lower-level circuits will be based on a nanoelectronic technology called the memristor, which Hewlett-Packard is developing to store data. The nanostore chips will have a multistory design, and computing circuits made with conventional silicon will sit directly on top of the memory to process the data, with minimal energy costs.

Within seven years or so, experts estimate that one such chip might store a trillion bytes of memory (about 220 high-definition digital movies) in addition

to containing 128 processors, Dr. Ranganathan wrote.

If these devices become ubiquitous, it would radically reduce the amount of information that would need to be shuttled back and forth in future data processing schemes.

For years, computer architects have been saying that a big new idea in computing was needed. Indeed, as transistors have continued to shrink, rather than continuing to innovate, computer designers have simply adopted a so-called “multicore” approach, where multiple processors are added as more chip real estate became available.

The absence of a major breakthrough was referred to in a remarkable confrontation that took place two years ago during Hot Chips, an annual computer design conference held each summer at Stanford University.

John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford and a computer design expert, stood before a panel of some of the world’s best computer designers and challenged them to present one fundamentally new idea. He was effectively greeted with silence.

“What is your one big idea?” he asked the panel.

“I believe that the next big idea is going to come from someone who is considerably younger than the average age of the people in this room.”

Dr. Ranganathan, who was 36 at the time, was there. He said that he took Dr. Hennessy’s criticism as an inspiration for his work and he believes that nanostore chip design is an example of the kind of big idea that has been missing.

It is not just Dr. Hennessy who has been warning about the end the era of rapidly increasing computer performance. In 2008, Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency assembled a panel of the nation’s best supercomputer experts and asked them to think about ways in which it might be possible to reach an exascale computer — a supercomputer capable of executing one quintillion mathematical calculations in a second, about 1,000 times faster than today’s fastest systems.

The panel, which was led by Peter Kogge, a University of Notre Dame supercomputer designer, came back with pessimistic conclusions. “Will the next decade see the same kind of spectacular progress as the last two did?” he wrote in the January issue of IEEE Spectrum. “Alas, no.” He added: “The party isn’t over, but the police have arrived and the music has been turned way down.”

One reason is computing’s enormous energy appetite. A 10-petaflop supercomputer — scheduled to be built by I.B.M. next year — will consume 15 megawatts of power, roughly the electricity consumed by a city of 15,000 homes. An exascale computer, built with today’s microprocessors, would require 1.6 gigawatts.

That would be roughly one and half times the amount of electricity produced by a nuclear power plant.

The panel did, however, support Dr. Ranganathan’s memory-centric approach. It found that the energy cost of a single calculation was about 70 picojoules (a picojoule is one millionth of one millionth of a joule. The energy needed to keep a 100-watt bulb lit for an hour is 360,000 joules). However, when the energy costs of

moving the data needed to do a single calculation — moving 200 bits of data in and out of memory multiple times — the real energy cost of a single calculation might be anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 picojoules.

A range of other technologies are being explored to allow the continued growth of computing power, including ways to build electronic switches smaller than 10 nanometers — thought to be the minimum size for current chip-making techniques.

Last month, for example, researchers at Harvard and Mitre Corporation reported the development of nanoprocessor “tiles” based on electronic switches fabricated from ultrathin germanium-silicon wires.

I.B.M. researchers have been pursuing so-called phase-change memories based on the ability to use an electric current to switch a material from a crystalline to an amorphous state and back again. This technology was commercialized by Samsung last year. More recently, I.B.M. researchers have said that they are excited about the possibility of using carbon nanotubes as an a partial step to build hybrid systems that straddle the nanoelectronic and microelectronic worlds.

Veteran computer designers note that whichever technology wins, the idea of moving computer processing closer to memory has been around for some time, and it may simply be the arrival of nanoscale electronics that finally makes the new architecture possible.

An early effort was called iRAM, in a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, during the late 1990s. Today pressure for memory-oriented computing is coming both from computing challenges posed by smartphones and from the data center, said Christoforos Kozyrakis, a Stanford University computer scientist who worked on the iRAM project in graduate school.

SCIENCE / TECH 42 March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Space Tourism May Mean One Giant Leap for Researchers

By KENNETH CHANG

I

f all goes as planned, within a couple of years, tourists will be rocketing into space aboard a Virgin Galactic space plane — paying $200,000 for about four minutes of weightlessness — before coming back down for a landing on a New Mexico runway.

Sitting in the next seat could be a scientist working on a research experiment.

Science, perhaps even more than tourism, could turn out to be big business for Virgin and other companies that are aiming to provide short rides above the 62-mile altitude that marks the official entry into outer space, eventually on a daily basis.

A $200,000 ticket is prohibitively expensive except for a small slice of the wealthy, but compared with the millions of dollars that government agencies like NASA typically spend to get experiments into space, “it’s revolutionary,” said S. Alan Stern, an associate vice president of the Southwest Research Institute’s space sciences and engineering division in Boulder, Colo.

He is a spirited evangelist for the science possibilities of what is known in aerospace circles as suborbital travel. Just as important as the lower cost, scientists will be able to get their experiments to space more quickly and more often, Dr. Stern said.

“We’re really at the edge of something transformational,” he added.

Dr. Stern’s institute announced Monday that it has signed a contract and paid the deposit to send two of its scientists up in Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle. Southwest also intends to buy six more seats — $1.6 million in tickets over all.

That follows an announcement on Thursday that Southwest is buying six seats from another suborbital company, XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., which has been charging $95,000 a seat for tourists. XCOR’s Lynx space plane carries just two people — the pilot and the paying passenger — so each flight will carry an experiment and an institute scientist.

“We have built, on our own dime, three payloads,” Dr. Stern said. “We’re buying tickets, before there is a government program from suborbital providers, for our own people to fly with those experiments.”

One of the Southwest experiments will look at how loose soil and rocks like those that cover asteroids behave. Another will fly an ultraviolet telescope that flew on the space shuttle Discovery in 1997. The third is a biomedical harness to measure heartbeat, blood pressure and other physical parameters of the scientist during flight.

When the experiments will get to space has not been set. Neither company has yet announced when commercial flights will begin, but eventually SpaceShipTwo could fly once or twice a day, and the Lynx is designed for up to four flights a day.

Virgin has already performed unpowered glide tests for the six-passenger SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America in New Mexico and will begin powered ones soon. XCOR may begin flight tests of the Lynx later this year.

Two other companies — Blue Origin, created by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. com, and Armadillo Aerospace — are also developing spacecraft for the tourist business. Another company, Masten Space Systems Inc., is developing a suborbital vehicle that will carry only payloads, not people.

Even if only some of these companies succeed, the prospect is that in a few years, hundreds of suborbital flights could be taking off every year. Dr. Stern predicted that even though a single flight would offer only a few minutes of weightlessness, the cumulative time of the suborbital experiments could quickly overtake that of the International Space Station, which has been in orbit for more than a decade.

NASA will be flying automated scientific payloads on Masten and Armadillo rockets this year, and the agency will provide more opportunities for researchers in future years, although it has not offered to buy seats for people to accompany their experiments.

For scientists, that could finally provide them ready access to space.

“It’s almost impossible to get research on the space station at the moment,” said Mark Shelhamer, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University medical school who would like to study people’s balance and other motor sensory abilities before and after suborbital flights.

On Earth, gravity is the dominant force, and many common processes — the way that water boils, for instance, and that a flame burns — behave much differently without it. But many of the theories describing how physics should work in weightlessness

have not been tested in detail.

Scientists currently have a few options for investigating weightlessness. They can drop the experiment from a tall tower, which provides a couple of seconds of zero gravity before it goes splat on the ground.

They can send the experiment up in an airplane that flies an arcing trajectory known as a parabola, which provides up to half a minute of apparent weightlessness. Or they can get something to the International Space Station, where the pull of gravity is continuously absent.

The suborbital flights will offer an opportunity that falls between the parabolic plane flights and the space station.

The new commercial vehicles are essentially rocket-powered projectiles that arc upward and then fall back down, never coming close to the 17,500-miles-per-hour velocity needed to achieve orbit. At the top of the arc, passengers float for a few minutes.

The suborbital flights will also let atmospheric scientists explore in detail the Earth’s middle atmosphere, extending from about 30 to 50 miles above the surface, which cannot be easily observed from Earth or satellites. Biologists also hope to study how people, who rely on gravity to tell which way is up, respond to the rapid gyrations of gravity during a suborbital flight.

Reflecting the interest in the science community, more than 300 people are registered to attend a conference this week at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, organized by Dr. Stern, to discuss suborbital research. Researchers, Dr. Stern said, “vote with their feet. They go to these meetings.”

At the conference, the suborbital companies will provide updates on their progress, and scientists will talk about what types of research will be possible.

The Southwest Research Institute is the first paying science customer for Virgin, which already has deposits from more

than 400 would-be space tourists. George T. Whitesides, chief executive, said that science and technology development could turn into a big market. “We think that many new applications and studies will flourish with such access — access which does not exist today,” he said.

Mr. Whitesides said that the science experiments would generally fly separately from the tourists, although it might be possible for researchers with unobtrusive biology experiments to ride on a tourist flight.

“We would of course not mix the two categories on the same flight if we thought that one would negatively impact the other,” he said.

Not all the experiments require the scientist as passenger. Blue Origin, for example, has selected three scientific payloads that will fly on unmanned test flights of its New Shepard vehicle. One of the Blue Origin scientists is Joshua Colwell, a professor of physics at the University of Central Florida, who wants to understand how dust grains in the early solar system stuck together through low-speed collisions and grew in size to five-mile-wide planetesimals, which then combined into planets.

In 1995, Dr. Colwell applied to NASA to fly his experiment on the space shuttle, and it flew twice, in 1998 and 2001, but he has not been able to get follow-up research off the ground since then.

For Dr. Colwell’s experiments, which require only a few minutes of weightlessness, the suborbital flights would work just as well as a much more expensive shuttle flight. And he hopes to be able to fly them perhaps several times a year instead of once every several years. Blue Origin declined to say when the test flights might occur.

Another of the Blue Origin researchers, Steven H. Collicott of Purdue University, is looking at how surface tension — the force that causes raindrops to roll up into beads on leaves — pulls liquids in space. Without gravity, these so-called capillary effects are the dominant forces on liquids.

Dr. Collicott, who has collaborated on experiments on the space station, said the suborbital flights will be a complement to the station, not a replacement.

“I think that first off, they really are two vastly different opportunities,” he said.

On the station, “the ability of running an experiment hour after hour after hour is the ultimate. On these new suborbital rockets, we might get three minutes, but it’s a lot cheaper. It’s a lot quicker.”

He said his Blue Origin experiment, financed by the National Science Foundation, cost $20,000. He has also has a couple of smaller, shoebox-size experiments built by undergraduates for less than $1,000. Those are slated to fly on developmental flights by Masten and Armadillo.

“It’s a nice, really great addition to the facilities available for research,” Dr. Collicott said.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

43 SCIENCE / TECH

Lasers Rise as Threat to Retinas

By CHRISTINE NEGRONI

S

o far, the reports have been scattered and anecdotal. But eye doctors around the world are warning that recent cases of teenagers who suffered eye damage while playing with high-powered green laser pointers are likely to be just the first of many.

“I am certain that this is the beginning of a trend,” said Dr. Martin Schmid, a Swiss ophthalmologist who reported one such case last September in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The pointers, which have also been implicated in a ninefold increase over five years in reports of lasers’ being aimed at airplanes, are easier than ever to order online, doctors say — even though they are 10 to 20 times as powerful as the legal limit set by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the American Academy of Ophthalmology, a spokeswoman said the group was unaware of any increase in eye injuries caused by lasers. But doctors interviewed for this article said they were shocked by the easy availability of highpowered lasers.

Not long ago a high school student went to see Dr. Robert G. Josephberg, a retina specialist at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, N.Y., complaining of a blind spot in his left eye. The boy, who did not want to be identified, said the injury occurred when a friend waved a green laser pointer in front of his face.(Whether it will heal completely is uncertain.)

Dr. Josephberg said that at first he doubted the story. “I didn’t believe that a green laser was out there that could cause the damage,” he said.

But it turned out the laser put out 50 milliwatts of power, 10 times the F.D.A. limit. And as he investigated his patient’s case, Dr. Josephberg went online and bought a 100-milliwatt pointer for $28. He could hardly believe how easy it was.

“I kept waiting for the error message telling me I could not complete the purchase,” he said.

Like household lights, lasers are measured in watts, but the similarity ends there. A 100-watt incandescent bulb produces about five watts of visible light; the fivemilliwatt laser is only one-thousandth as powerful. But because the light from a bulb is diffuse and a laser beam is concentrated, the effect of five milliwatts on the eye is 10,000 times as intense, according to Samuel M. Goldwasser, a laser expert and author of the online guide Sam’s Laser FAQ. Dr. Jerald A. Bovino of the American Retina Foundation says the way the eye focuses can also intensify the laser.

“It is going to the fovea, the center of the retina,” he said. The darker pigment in the fovea absorbs the light as heat, quickly raising the temperature of the retina the same way a black car seat gets hot as it absorbs the sun.

Dr. Kimia Ziahosseini of the St. Paul’s Eye Unit at Royal Liverpool University Hospital in England says the dangers are so acute that even the F.D.A.’s five-milliwatt

limit is too high.

“Laser pointers available for sale to general public should be less than one milliwatt,” she said. “Anything more than this puts people at risk by the criminally minded or those who are unaware of the risks.”

In a consumer update in December, the F.D.A. said it was aware that illegal laser pointers were being sold and warned that “a higher-powered laser gives you less time to look away before injury can occur, and as power increases, eye damage may happen in a microsecond.”

Daniel Hewett, a health promotion officer at the agency, said by e-mail, “There are many noncompliant products available for purchase from retailers, importers and, of course, via the Internet.” He noted that the agency had seized products from Wicked Lasers, an online store based in Hong Kong.

Steve Liu, chief executive of Wicked Lasers, said in an interview that its products did not violate the F.D.A. restrictions because those over the five-milliwatt limit were not called pointers.

Moreover, he added, “we make it extremely clear on our Web pages that these lasers are not only eye hazards but fire hazards.” And he said the company would begin offering laser safety lessons to its customers before online checkout.

Several laser experts say the enforcement of regulations is already insufficient and ineffective. “It’s a whole can of worms,” Dr. Goldwasser said, recalling that he recently received a 100-milliwatt laser

as a gift from Wicked Lasers. To rein in all the hazardous products out there — from virtual stores to flea markets — would be impossible, he said.

And any talk of restricting availability is certain to meet resistance from the large community of laser enthusiasts, including those who use them professionally (like contractors and astronomers) and hobbyists like 18-year-old Alex Triano of Staten Island.

Since middle school, with his parents’ permission, Mr. Triano has been building lasers in his home, wearing safety goggles.

“You learn so much in a hobby like this: electronics, soldering, physics,” he said.

“And you learn about light, you learn about optics. You also learn a lot of mechanical things.”

The laser injuries Dr. Shepard Bryan has seen at his practice in Mesa, Ariz., involved red lasers, which laser fans like Mr. Triano consider passé. Green is more easily perceived by the eye and the beam is visible along its path.

But green lasers are also more dangerous. Green is more easily absorbed by the retina than red, so it requires less exposure to cause damage. (Dr. Bryan’s cases involved an 11-year-old girl who focused on the light as part of an endurance game and a young man who also looked directly into the pointer.)

“Right now I haven’t seen an epidemic of injuries,” Dr. Bryan said, but he added that the potential was there. “In the hands of children it’s a very scary proposition.”

Eastern Cougar Is Declared Extinct, With an Asterisk

By FELICITY BARRINGER

S

even decades after the last reported sighting of the eastern cougar, the federal Fish and Wildlife Service declared it extinct Wednesday and recommended that it be removed from the nation’s endangered species list.

There’s one wrinkle, though: it may not be extinct, exactly.

Scientists are moving toward the conclusion that the eastern cougar was erroneously classified as a separate subspecies in the first place. As a result of a genetic study conducted in 2000, most biologists now believe there is no real difference between the western and eastern branches of the cougar family.

Either way, the “eastern” cougar as such is no longer with us. Any recent sightings in the cougar’s historic range, which stretched from eastern Ontario and Michigan eastward to Maine and southward to Georgia, Tennessee and Missouri, were actually sightings of its relatives, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.

“It’s extinct,” said Mark McCollough, a wildlife biologist with the agency’s offices in Maine, referring to the official determination by his agency.

“But it’s not?” he was asked.

“But it’s not,” he confirmed. “It may well return to part of its range.”

Cougar populations from the West are following the eastward migration of the coyote, Dr. McCollough said, and some have settled in the Dakotas. At least one breeding pair is now in Nebraska, he added.

The reclusive cougars — also called pumas, catamounts, mountain lions and, perhaps most fittingly, “ghost cats” — came under siege in the eastern United States starting in the 1700s, when they were hunted by European settlers. States put bounties on the cats with the goal of protecting livestock, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

“There was a general attitude back in the late 1700s and early 1800s that any predator was a bad predator and some were created worse than others and cougars were among the worst,” Dr. McCollough said.

The last confirmed eastern cougar was trapped in the late 1930s, the agency said.

Martin Miller, the chief of the endangered species division in the service’s Northeastern office, said that many sightings had been reported since then, but that virtually all of those cats were determined either to be from the West or to be South American pumas that were bought as pets and then released. The eastern cougar was listed as an endangered species in 1973.

Mr. Miller said in an interview that no regulations or restrictions were ever imposed in an effort to help the eastern cougar recover, although a recovery plan drafted

in 1982 “held out hope, expressed the possibility that a population still existed in remote areas.”

Also as a result of genetic research, Dr. McCollough said, the Florida panther, which is under protection under the Endangered Species Act, might eventually be reclassified as a distinct segment of the larger cougar family.

A handful of other species on the endangered species list are presumed to be extinct and may eventually be recommended for delisting, including the Bachman’s warbler and the little Mariana fruit bat, the agency says.

A 2008 report to Congress by the Fish and Wildlife Service said that of more than 1,200 species protected under the Endangered Species Act, 19 were presumed extinct.

PEOPLE

44 March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Ivonne Coll, ‘Still that Girl’ By: Daniel Morales Pomales

I

vonne Coll is a veteran actress, vedette, comedian and singer and even away from her land for employment purposes, has never failed to be Puerto Rican. This summer we can see her in the new series on ABC Family, Switched At Birth.

The series starring Vanessa Marano and Katie Leclerc, who play two teenage girls who discover that they were accidentally swapped at the hospital when they were newborns. One of them grows in a wealthy family with a father, mother and brother, and another who lost her hearing at an early age due to meningitis, grows with a single mother in a working class neighborhood. Things reach their most critical point when both families get together and struggle to learn to live together for the sake of the girls. The cast also includes D.W. Moffett, Lea Thompson, Lucas Grabeel and Constance Marie.

“I play the grandmother of one of the girls.

My daughter Regina (Constance Marie) is a beautician. I identifies with this story, because my mom was a beautician and the scenery of Regina’s house has a great similarity to my home. It brought back great memories, “Ivonne said in an interview with The San Juan Weekly during a recent visit to the island The artist has also appeared on the series Pacific Blue, Crisis Center, An American Family, The Bold and the Beautiful, Chicago Hope, Malibu Shores, NYPD Blue, LA Law and Under Cover.

Ivonne Coll began in the late ‘60s as a model and represented Puerto Rico at the 1967 Miss Universe pageant held in Miami Florida. Two years later as assistant to Lucecita Benítez & Chucho Avellanet, and perform her first show as a singer at the legendary Club 8 puertas of Old San Juan, entitled Ivonne Coll ... y tu cantas? Good reviews led to jobs at different nightclubs and singing in television shows.

Amid the turmoil created by the popularity of Iris Chacon, entrepreneur Rafael Perez Perry opened the doors for Channel 11 to lead my own program, a girl named Ivonne Coll, which in turn opened the door to record my first record.

In the 70’s I moved to Los Angeles where I took courses in drama, dance, voice and mime at the Academy of Stage and Cinema Arts. I was recruited to participate in the movie The Godfather II, starring Al Pacino and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, where I played Amanda, singer at a club in Havana.

By 1979, after having studied and worked in California, she moved to New York where she performed in Off Broadway and Broadway, studied at the HB Studios, Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg Institute, etc.

Despite keeping busy in New York, the artist was not completely disasociated from Puerto Rico. In the early 80’s she was invited to work in plays such as La verdadera historiade Pedro Navaja (1981), Frenzy, Paper Flowers and Orinoco. She also starred with Raul Davila in the movie big party and starred in WAPA TV comedy Cuqui: A woman like you (1988), produced

by Migdalia Mercado, also starring Myrna de Casenave, Marian Pabon, Miguel Angel Lugo, Lugo Kidany Edgardo Rubio, Edmundo Rivera Alvarez and Vanessa Vigoreaux Echevarría, among others.

In the summer of 2002 she starred in Puerto Rico Coll Kisses of fire (playwright Roberto Ramos-Perea was honored in Spain for the play).

“My last job here was Bodas de Sangre at Bellas Artes de Caguas for students. I love this work and it encouraged me a lot. There is a pending work Carmen Junco offered me to do ‘Los Soles Truncos’ with Dean Zayas. And I was fascinated to make ‘Tiempo Muerto’. I have a project that I want ‘La Adoracion de la abuela’

by Jose Rivera, “said Yvonne, who is still active with stage and television. In the last 15 to 20 years she has served as an instructor of professional acting in Los Angeles California, to film actors.

On the possibility of re-establishing in Puerto Rico, the artist explained that she would love, but has been in America for reasons of unions in labor and benefits that guarantee them.

“I miss the island, the landscapes, the color of the sea, the clouds, the green ... I live in concrete all the time and breathe pollution, so every

time I go to Puerto Rico it makes me want to stay. Like I say that I regret every time I see that there is extreme confusion, the colonial ... No conversation here that does not end in politics, everybody protests, complains, but the system is anti-worker and anti people. Some people dislike my opinion that I do not live here, but I think I come because I am Puerto Rican and that no one can take away from me, “she said.

“One way to stay connected to Puerto Rico is listening to music, although she admits, s he does not know the new interpreters of tropical music, which is her favorite genre.

I know the old artists: Hector Lavoe, El Gran Combo ... The reggaeton is sometimes see on television and I do not like much because it is sexual or demeaning to women and Latinos.

I was curious to see in an interview with a reggaeton performer who was given a rate of pump and said ‘I do not like her, that’s old. “ I’m thinking ‘these are our roots “, that is the essence of Puerto Rico, our culture? What went through the mind of that guy? I love Manny Manuel and of course our beloved Lucecita. I have a lot of music in it, and the Christmas party I did at home, I invited some Puerto Rican friends and when she goes singing everybody says, ‘Shut up, you’re listening to the diva. “ I love Banco Popular special when it, “recalls with nostalgia Ivonne Coll.

“I wanted to take this opportunity to give my best thanks to members of Puerto Rico Filmmakers Film Festival and the International Short Film Festival 2008 in Puerto Rico for giving me the prize of” Best Actress in a Short Film National film by De Pura Cepa “of Puerto Rican filmmaker and director, Javier Colón. It was a while ago .... I know, but since I could never do it personally, I do now,” in The San Juan Weekly, for better late than never, “she concluded.

March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

45

PEOPLE

Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist

By NATALIE ANGIER

T

he Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.

On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prizeworthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.

Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went

on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

Ms. Portman is one of a handful of high-profile actors who happen to have serious scientific credentials — awards, degrees, patents and theorems in their name.

Hedy Lamarr, the actress habitually regarded as “that most beautiful woman in Hollywood,” was a rocket scientist on the side, inventing and patenting a torpedo guidance technique she called “frequency hopping,” which thwarted efforts to jam the signals that kept the missiles on track.

Danica McKellar, who has appeared on such shows as “The Wonder Years,” “The West Wing,” “NYPD Blue” and “Young Justice,” graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she helped devise a mathematical proof for certain properties of magnetic fields — a theorem that bears her name along with those of her collaborators. She also writes popular books about math with clever PG-13 titles like “Math Doesn’t Suck” and “Kiss My Math.”

As a teenager in the 1990s, Mayim Bialik starred in the title role of the hit kid-com “Blossom.” Now she appears in another hit sitcom aimed at slightly older kids, “The Big Bang Theory,” playing the adorably frumpy-nerdy Amy Farrah Fowler, a neurobiologist and sometime love interest for the adorably nerdy germophobic physicist Sheldon Cooper. The actress is pleased with her new role. After all, Dr. Bialik has a Ph.D. from U.C.L.A. in ... neurobiology. “I tell people, I am a neuroscientist, and I play one on TV,” said Dr. Bialik.

That relatively few screen stars have a scientific back story may seem surprising, given the immense popularity of the science fiction

genre and evergreen narrative devices like the mad scientist, not to mention all the doctor shows and “CSI” spinoffs. Yet most actors who take on techie parts, tackling scripts that may be written with the help of scientific consultants, freely admit they simply mouth the lines without necessarily understanding their sense.

Leonard Nimoy, who played the most famous TV scientist of all time, Mr. Spock, came from an arts and theater background and in real life is nothing like his character. Yet he told me that because Mr. Spock and “Star Trek” have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-topeer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, “Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.”

Acting and science may simply appeal to very different personalities. If you’re eager for attention, fans and face recognition, scientific research is not for you. With few exceptions, even the most illustrious researchers in the world are utterly unknown to the wider public, an obscurity captured brilliantly in an Onion spoof about “the reckless throngs of photographers that relentlessly hound America’s top scientists.”

“Just because I’m a scientist,” one string theorist complained in the article, “doesn’t mean I have to completely surrender my privacy.”

Moreover, if extreme good looks

score you big points in a screen career, they can detract from being taken seriously in science.

Hedy Lamarr complained bitterly that people would look at her face and assume there was nothing behind it. Perhaps it was a case of projection. “When you see a very beautiful face, it’s stunning, and you yourself become stupefied,” said Lisa Heiserman Perkins, who has completed a documentary about Lamarr. “So you project your own stupidity onto the person you’re looking at.”

For her part, Dr. Bialik doesn’t see science and show business as being entirely immiscible liquids.

In both cases, she said, “a large ego is necessary.” Everybody’s a pastry chef serving up humble pie. It’s humbling to audition for parts, and, said Dr. Bialik, “there’s nothing like being a graduate student to bring you to tears.”

Still, she loved the research, on the brain chemistry of patients with a genetic condition called PraderWilli syndrome, and she loved being “hooded” for her doctorate while she was “very, very pregnant” with her second child. “Better pregnant and getting a doctorate,” she said, “than pregnant at your high school graduation.”

If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just showing up.

Whether as a student in her class or a research assistant in her lab, said Dr. Baird, who is now an associate professor of psychology at Vassar, “Natalie never once asked for an extension or to be excused from her responsibilities.”

If she was scheduled to appear on the Letterman show, for example, she would finish her paper early.

“She’s sincerely confident and has a good grasp of her strengths and weaknesses,” said Dr. Baird, and she is wise beyond her years. “One of things she said was: ‘It’s weird that there are so many people at Harvard who do amazing things outside the classroom. It just so happens that people like to watch what I do.’ ” You can be a scientist, but if you want your name in lights, you’d better play one on TV.

PEOPLE

46 March 10 - 16, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

My Unhealthy Diet? It Got Me This Far

By HENRY ALFORD

S

OMETIMES I can’t believe what my 82-year-old mother has been eating.

Living now in a retirement home in Durham, N.C., she told me she recently had cherry cobbler for breakfast. Apparently she’d had French toast stuffed with bananas and Nutella for lunch the day before, and after lunch had gone to dessert theater (“You know, like dinner theater, but with desserts”), where she’d gobbled down a lot of cookies. “So when they served cherry cobbler for dessert that night in the dining room, I thought, I better take this back to my room and eat it tomorrow. For breakfast.”

Nancy Cardozo shares a house with her friend Aileen Ward in New Milford, Conn.; both are writers in their 90s. “We eat everything we like,” Ms. Cardozo said. “Any kinds of eggs, blini, any good red or beluga caviar with crème fraîche, cheesecake, chocolate soufflé with whipped cream, crème brûlée, filet mignon, pasta with pesto. Aileen drinks Lillet, and I’m vodka and tonic. We drink as much as we can.”

The cartoonist Mort Gerberg, now in his late 70s, went to a bat mitzvah in Denver last year for his great-niece. “Usually at these things they have a table with desserts or chocolate, but at this one they had a sour cream table,” Mr. Gerberg said.

“They had all these cockamamie things to put on the sour cream: candies, chocolate.

I had heaping portions. It was thrilling.

And all I could think was, where are the potatoes?”

It’s a common belief that life as we know it ends in old age. Gone are the little joys that make existence worthwhile — béarnaise sauce, pancetta, cake batter

— all subsumed under a banner reading, “Doctor’s Orders.” For older people, the irony of eating is that your metabolism slows down, so you need less food, but your body needs just as many nutrients, if not more.

Declining health and the voices of authority only dampen the proceedings further. The latest dietary guidelines from the federal government recommend that people older than 51 (along with AfricanAmericans, children and adults with hypertension, diabetes or chronic kidney disease) eat only 1,500 milligrams of salt a day. Everyone else can have 2,300.

Constantly badgered by the medical establishment, family and friends to adopt a healthier approach to food, the older gourmand soldiers on anyway.

Why? For my mother, it’s the thrill of transgression.

“I’m a sneaky eater,” she told me.

“Inside me is a very naughty girl. I like to eat in the privacy of my own room — sticking my spoon deep into the jar of Mrs. Richardson’s caramel sauce so it sticks straight up, maybe sprinkling a little salt on it — and not telling anyone.”

For others, eating well is a way to keep traditions alive. Mary Pyland, 92, of Abilene, Tex., was raised on a ranch. “We had a fried chicken dinner every Sunday,” said Ms. Pyland, who ran a cosmetics store until she was 84. “I lost my husband 16 years ago, and I try to keep up everything we always did. Honey, I just had fried chicken with cream gravy and biscuits and mashed potatoes for dinner last night. And I made a caramel pie that was just about the best thing you ever put your lips around.”

One trope that comes up often in conversations with older gourmands is

that eating what they want is, at their age, a right or privilege. For some of these privileged or righteous folks, it’s a question of not curbing one’s impulses.

Larry Garfield, 95, of Key Biscayne, Fla., worked in the carpet industry until he was 83. Asked why he recently ate a rare calf’s liver with mashed potatoes at Joe Allen’s restaurant in Miami Beach (even though he shouldn’t have, given his diabetes), Mr. Garfield said: “You ever walked down the street and seen a pretty girl and thought, ‘Mm! That’s for me!’?

Well, I looked at the menu and thought, ‘Mm! That’s for me!’ ” For other righteous or privileged folk, eating is a reward. Barbara Hillary, who reached the South Pole in January at age 79, making her the first AfricanAmerican woman on record to stand on both poles, said she ate too much milk chocolate during the trip. “If I had frozen to death down there, wouldn’t it be sad if I’d gone to hell without getting what I want?” she said.

In some cases, this same right or privilege seems to stem from having lived an exalted life. Nancy Cardozo and Aileen Ward met at Isadora Duncan’s school on Nantucket when they were 14. Ms. Cardozo said: “We did Duncan dancing. We flitted on the grass in little Greek dresses.”

Both went on to lead vivid lives.

Ms. Cardozo wrote fiction and poetry for the New Yorker in the 1940s and ’50s; Ms. Ward won the National Book Award in 1964 for her biography of Keats, and used to car-pool with Vladimir Nabokov when she taught at Wellesley.

Now, despite some technical difficulties (“There are chewing problems,” Ms. Cardozo said. “That doesn’t sound very attractive, does it?”), they eat luxuriant foods, albeit in small portions. “It feels like entitlement,” Ms. Cardozo explai-

ned. “We deserve it because it’s the way we’ve always lived, and we don’t want to change.”

It’s the rare gourmand who, after 60 or so, doesn’t alter the way he or she eats, even in some tiny way. Mr. Garfield, unchanged in his alimentary ways even though he’s had his gallbladder and prostate removed and had a quintuple bypass in 1992, said, not without satisfaction, “The main thing to understand about the people who have constantly warned me about what I eat is that I’m here and they’re not.”

More common is the older gourmand who makes small adjustments. Ms. Hillary, the polar explorer, said, “I read more labels now, and try to reduce the foods that are chemistry sets.” Mr. Gerberg, the sour-cream enthusiast, said: “I eat much more slowly these days. I chew my food. Chewing food is important. My wife swallows food, like a snake.”

Some dietary adjustments come from outside sources: Ms. Pyland, in Abilene, said, “My little cousin Mary Kay Place, the actress, is always telling me not to eat stuff, but then she’ll eat it right off of my plate.”

Or consider Bobby Seale. A founder of the Black Panthers, he wrote a barbecue cookbook in 1988. Now 75, Mr. Seale cooks and eats “Bobbyque” 10 times a year. His lust for animal fat once caused his colleague Huey Newton to ask, when served some food Mr. Seale had made, “Hey, Bobby, how’d you get ham hocks in this chili?” But because he had a heart attack 10 years ago, Mr. Seale now takes precautions that make him sound like someone preparing to smoke an electronic cigarette.

“Now I used smoked turkey parts instead of ham hocks,” he said. “And I do a jalapeño corn bread with Cheddar cheese and crushed bacon bits that’s low sodium. I wash each piece of bacon — there’s loose salt in the fat. Then I microwave the bacon.”

In the end, older gourmands — their doctors’ orders and their bodies’ demands ringing in their ears — are each responsible for themselves.

“Everything is a matrix that you function inside of,” Mr. Seale said.

“There’s about 10 miles of atmosphere at the Equator, and five miles at the poles.

That’s the matrix we all survive within.

You apply your knowledge to that, and figure out how to survive. I’m limited to six ounces of beef that’s 95 percent lean every day. That’s my matrix. But when I barbecue, I want that flavor to go right down to the bone. Down to the bone!”

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

47

Puerto Rico’s Biosphere Reserve at

Gilligan’s Island P

uerto Rico is perhaps one of the nicest places in the Caribbean to visit for a long term holiday. But sometimes it is nice to get away from civilization and enjoy a little bit of island paradise. Gilligan’s Island can help you do that. Located near Guanica, the island is actually part of a biosphere reserve. It is a popular place for people to visit on weekends since it is the perfect place to go swimming and snorkeling.

Of course, the Gilligan’s Island from the 1960s television

show was not real at all, but rather was part of a film set in one of the many film studios in Hollywood.

However, the TV series did spawn romantic images of deserted tropical islands and it is this illustration that Gilligan’s Island in Puerto Rico, off the coast of Guanica, closely resembles. Though the island does have several small structures, these have been constructed for the convenience of those visiting the island and they provide basic, necessary services such as changing rooms and restrooms. Other

than this, the island is largely uninhabited by man and instead emphasis has been put on carefully preserving the natural habitat on Gilligan’s Island. The island forms part of the Guanica Biosphere Reserve which is some 4000 hectares in size. It can be easily reached by ferry for a small fee and is the perfect place to go snorkeling, swimming and sunbathing.

Most of the activities on the island take place in one of the many mangrove cays that can be found on the island. Here the water is clear and the sand is white. There is also a cool current which runs through the mangrove canals, so you can cool off quite easily by just

taking a swim. If you head a little further inland you will discover beautiful subtropical dry forest and blissful peace and tranquility.

Some tourism companies will try to make extra money by offering you a tour of the island which you may take if you wish; but if you simply want to swim and snorkel this tour is completely unnecessary. A ferry is available from behind the Copamarina Hotel at Guanica and it will make the trip for a relatively low fee. So for a great Caribbean Island getaway, make sure that you include a trip to Gilligan’s Island the next time you visit Puerto Rico.

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The San Juan Weekly

Comes from page 47

Highlights of Gilligan’s Island

S

oft white sands and crystal clear turquoise waters.

Beautiful scenery of the mangroves, and Guanica coastline.

Picnic facilities The beach at Gilligan’s Island is usually quiet and without crowds during the weekdays. On the weekends, especially on holidays like Easter it it becoming a popular spot in Guanica.

Even in a busy day at the Gilligan’s Island you can walk around the island and still find your own spot if you seek tranquility.

Great snorkeling around the reefs, the waters at Gilligan’s are crystal clear. Bring your own snorkeling equipment or rent / buy at the main island in Guanica or nearby towns.

Great for bird watching and nature lovers.

If you own a sailboat, this is a great place to park your boat and enjoy the scenery, the clear waters and get the perfect tan.

Getting to Gilligan’s Island - From San Juan to Gilligan’s Island, Guanica - Take Highway 52 to the town of Ponce. Then head west (now called Porta del Sol) on Road 2

and south on Route 116 to the town of Guanica. Then take Road #333. Following the turn to Copamarina Beach Resort make a right and park your car.

There is a small ferry that runs quite often and the cost for a roundtrip ticket is only $4. Boats leave run from Tuesday through Sunday from 8am to 5pm. For more information call 787-821-5706

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

49

The French Alps Sans Skis

By SETH SHERWOOD

J

UST in front of me, a skier jumped from a helicopter and sped down the treacherous slope, zigzagging wildly as he dodged boulders and soared over moguls. Then, suddenly, catastrophe struck. Unable to see an approaching cliff, he shot off its edge into a free fall.

This is why I don’t ski, I thought to myself as I sipped my mojito and turned away from the extreme-sports videos on the overhead television. The cozy confines of the woodbeamed L’Équipe bar in Courchevel, a ski village high in the French Alps, was a far more agreeable spot to appreciate the Alpine lifestyle than in the bone-shattering temperatures on the icy slopes outside.

Around the timbered town, twilight was settling and the bars were coming alive with D.J.-spun music, live bands, crackling fires and fondue. Parka-clad strollers admired works by Miró and Modigliani in galleries before heading off to dine at some of the nation’s finest restaurants. Who needed skis and poles when confronted with the best aprèsski scene in France?

For many, the French Alps are so fully associated with winter sports that it’s hard to imagine visiting them without buying a lift ticket. Chamonix and Mont Blanc are legends. Grenoble hosted the Winter Olympics in 1968, and Albertville followed suit in 1992. Annecy is a finalist for the spot in 2018. And when the first winter snowfall arrives, a blizzard of ski-mania blankets the region as enthusiasts pull their gear out of cellars and rent half-timbered chalets.

But the Alps also hold myriad allures for those who don’t feel compelled to careen down frozen sheets of ice and snow in a padded outfit. These same cities and villages hide timeworn streets, colorful literary history, world-class art collections, sublime eating experiences and some of the most decadent night life in Europe. And the snowy season is the perfect time to indulge in them. From the Venetian Carnival in Annecy (held from March 18 to 20 this year) to the glittery international party season in Courchevel, winter brings out the region’s natural beauty and beguiling personality. Better still, thanks to efficient train and bus systems, slaloming between destinations — and through some breathtaking Alpine landscapes — doesn’t risk any broken limbs.

After a nearly four-hour train journey from Paris, I stepped into the streets of Annecy, which seemed to have sprung from a medieval storybook. Narrow passageways spread out in all directions, lined by stony churches and town houses, some gray and Gothic, some painted in sherbet hues. Canals and waterways, rushing with cold mountain water, cut through the town, which is sometimes called “the Venice of the Alps.” From a hilltop in the center, a cre-

nellated fortress known as the Château-Musée lorded over the landscape, backed by snow-covered summits.

On this Tuesday morning in January, a scene worthy of a Gallic Norman Rockwell was playing out: swans floated in the canals, old women with shopping caddies and bundled-up throngs crossed small bridges, wishing one another “bonjour” with steamy breath before heading to bakeries smelling of warm baguettes. A postman pedaled a yellow bicycle over the cobblestones and past the town’s most famous street, Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Though born in Geneva, the autobiographer and philosopher grew up in Annecy, where he found abundant material — romantic, sexual, scandalous — for his celebrated “Confessions.” In 1728 the 16-year-old Rousseau arrived on the slender street that bears his name and became the ward of one Madame de Warens, an aristocrat 12 years his senior.

“I had imagined a sour-faced pious old lady,” he wrote in his autobiography. But “I saw a gracefully molded face, beautiful blue eyes filled with sweetness, a shining skin, the shape of an enchanting figure.”

He called her “maman.” She found him small jobs in Annecy, encouraged his musical education — and then became his lover when he was just out of his teens. The affair lasted several years until Rousseau, jealous that she had a fling with another man, took off for Paris and began a writing career that included an erotically charged best-selling novel, a pastoral opera and “The Social Contract,” his treatise on individualism and the relationship between citizens and governments. De Warens eventually fell into poverty and died broke.

Today Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains one of the loveliest in the town. As I strolled past stone mansions, clarinet scales drifted into the clear, cold air from the windows of a conservatory, and in a storefront a young violin maker stood in a pile of wood shavings, patiently restoring a 19thcentury specimen.

“Rousseau was the tutor to the kids in a family of nobles in this building,” said the craftsman, Gregory Carmantrand.

The majestic house where Rousseau took his music lessons when he was younger (No. 13) still stands across from the very white St.-Pierre Cathedral where he played flute.

Inside, sheltered from the noonday chill, an organist practiced hymns on the 2,000-pipe instrument, filling the vaulted space with haunting tones.

On Rue Ste.-Claire, an open-air produce market — dating back as far as the 12th century — was in full swing. Steam rose from piles of heated frankfurters and sauerkraut at a stand selling Alsatian choucroute garnie. A nearby table was laden with dry sausage that

combined pork with meat from a Noah’s Ark of animals: bull, boar, duck, deer, ostrich. Regional cheeses, from tiny, pungent white discs of St.-Marcellin to huge wheels of golden cheeses from Savoy, were piled at adjacent stalls.

“We call this one the prince of cheese,” declared Dominique Villard as she offered a firm, earthy hunk of Beaufort.

The cheese worship reached its zenith that night as I followed hungry hordes into the bright dining rooms of the rustic Le Freti restaurant to pay homage to fromage, notably fondue, the Alps’ celebrated winter comfort food.

Brandishing long three-pronged forks, the crowd looked like a band of gleeful devils roasting their victims as they skewered bread chunks, gherkins and smoked meats that they dunked into cauldrons of molten cheese.

I ordered a traditional Fondue Savoyarde, a combination of Comté, Beaufort, Emmentaler and Fribourg that was velvety, tangy and sweet all at once. By the time I staggered with bloated belly back into the frigid night, the full moon overhead almost seemed to be made of cheese as well.

ANOTHER train journey took me under snowcapped summits, over rushing rivers, through forests of white-bark trees, past hilltop castles and at last to Grenoble, a city of around 160,000. Grenoble does not have a ski area of its own, but it is surrounded by majestic peaks and can be a base for skiers.

Sipping a morning café crème in the Art Nouveaustyle Café de la Table Ronde, said to be the second-oldest existing cafe in France, you could easily imagine that Grenoble is another charming relic, a larger Annecy. Outside, the 13th-century red-brick church of St.-André and the majestic Gothic- and Renaissance-style former Parliament building cut stately figures.

But Grenoble, a bastion of the French Resistance during World War II, has long bubbled with progressive ideas.

Jacques de Vaucanson, an 18th-century forefather of robotics and cybernetics, grew up there before moving to Paris and creating magnificent human-like mechanical automatons that thrilled the gilded salons of Europe. (An exhibition devoted to his work is on view at the city’s Musée Dauphinois through June.)

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March 10 - 16, 2011

Comes from page 49 The modern French novel also traces its roots to Grenoble, thanks to a native son named Henri Beyle. Witty, acerbic and disgusted by bourgeois values, he reinvented himself under the name Stendhal and went on to write “The Red and the Black,” his gritty tale of social climbing, seduction, religious skepticism and violence in post-Napoleonic France. (A new Stendhal museum is scheduled to open at the end of the year.)

Today, the city is a major university and scientific research center. As I walked through its medieval and Baroque core, sleek trams whooshed past church facades, and gaggles of students filled the bars of Place Ste.-Claire.

Thanks to forward-looking venues like MC2, a public theater and concert space, and Le Magasin, a contemporary art space in a 1900 industrial building made by Gustave Eiffel’s workshop, Grenoble is the region’s cultural capital as well.

“It’s a very modern city with its eyes on the future,” said Hélène Vincent, the head curator at the Musée de Grenoble, as she sat on a Le Corbusier couch in an airy white exhibition room. “The Musée de Grenoble was the very first museum of modern art in France. It was the first museum to put together a collection of artists from the early 20th century.”

The evidence was displayed around us — a room full of Matisses; a wall of Picassos; masterworks by Braque, Léger, Magritte, Klee, Signac, Bonnard and Chagall (who will be the star of a blockbuster exhibition from March until mid-June). Credit for much of the collection — and the foresight to champion and exhibit such artists when no other French museums were doing so — goes to Pierre AndryFarcy, who arrived in Grenoble in 1919 to become the curator of a little-known municipal art museum that had almost no budget for acquisitions. Unable to buy paintings, AndryFarcy (as he was commonly called) came up with a novel arrangement: He would ask painters to donate their works in exchange for a promise to exhibit them.

You have to admire his technique. He enlisted his wife, an excellent cook who wrote recipes for the local newspaper under the pen name Cinderella, to regale visitors with feasts. He put billboards in the Grenoble train station, in English as well as French, urging the British and French en route to the nearby winter resorts to “Stay an Extra Day and See the Museum.” And so was born the first of a new breed in France: the curator as collector, marketing guru, entertainer and impresario.

Before long, Picasso donated “Femme Lisant,” a portrait of a fleshy neo-Raphael-like woman lost in a book that remains one of the collection’s marquee works. Matisse dropped off what would become another one, “Interieur aux Aubergines,” a massive still-life canvas of playful reflections and refractions.

Raoul Dufy, René Magritte and many others followed suit, resulting in today’s stunning permanent exhibition.

Yet on the afternoon of my visit, only a few footfalls could be heard in the honeycomb of galleries. The museum’s riches still seem to be a hidden treasure.

Come evening, the city’s theaters, music bars, indie cinemas and bookstores draw culture-hungry throngs. On a Thursday night in late January, the Grenews newspaper was filled with options. The “Festival of Cursed Films” — featuring campy sci-fi and monster-movie classics? A one-man “social-pornographic opera” at 102, an alternative performance space in a former industrial building? A tribute to American jazz masters Nat and Cannonball Adderley at La Soupe aux Choux, Grenoble’s premier jazz joint?

I cast my lot with Daphné, a 30-something French singer, who was performing at a church-turned-performance venue called Théâtre Ste.-Maried’en-Bas. Dressed in a shimmery dark dress and surrounded by an all-male five-piece band, she looked part diva and part deity underneath the Corinthian columns and soaring arches.

Soon her breathy girlish voice was filling the vaulted space with surrealist poetry and nocturnal lament, set against melodies that ranged from lounge jazz to acoustic ballads to Latin rhythms to rock to waltzes. Shifting from French to English, she launched into a plaintive number called “Even Orphans Have Their Kingdom.” “It’s Your Kingdom/It’s Your Kingdom” she sang as the full-house audience sat rapt.

YET another train took me on the nearly two-hour journey to the tiny frozen town of Moûtiers-Salins-Bridesles-Bains, where a bus shuttled a smattering of passengers higher into the Alps. The bohemia of Grenoble vanished far behind, and Courchevel, an Olympus for billionaires, came into view. It was time for a day and night of indulgence — or at least modest indulgence — and no mountain village in France seemed better equipped to furnish it.

With its winding snow-coated streets and timbered mansions, the town looked like a large-scale gingerbread village. Overhead, an occasional whirring helicopter crossed the blue sky while a sea of gondolas ferried folks up the slopes. In the streets below, the clip-clop of horse carriages mingled with the zip-zip of nylon winter pants as Saturday masses poked into the ritzy La Croix ski shop (where a salesman confided a plan to make “skis with diamonds in them”) and headed off to treatments in hotel spas by Carita, Nuxe, Givenchy and the like.

Some paused outside the Hermès boutique to admire a huge bird making love to a plump woman: a statue of Leda and the Swan by Fernando Botero. It’s one of about two dozen statues by sculptors like Salvador Dalí and César, deployed around Courchevel this season.

“This is the winter St.-Tropez — very bling-bling, gilded youth from all over the world,” said Cyrille Ricklin, manager of Le Paddock, one of the few two-star hotels in Courchevel’s galaxy of five-star crash pads.

Opened a couple of years ago, Le Paddock somehow manages to be both stylish and affordable (with rooms from 85 euros, or $113 at $1.32 to the euro): the perfect base for those of us without an Amex Centurion card or a hospital wing in our name. Mr. Ricklin added that you don’t need to be rich, or know how to ski, to appreciate the town.

“Many people come here because it’s beautiful,” he said. “Many come to shop, go to restaurants, to go out at night, to party.”

The San Juan Weekly My own nonski itinerary consisted of a gondola trip to La Saulire, the resort’s highest point, and a visit to Galeries Bartoux (which also has a branch in New York City) where I ogled works by Dalí, Foujita, Picasso and Robert Indiana.

By sundown, Courchevel was buzzing with a boisterous après-ski scene. In the sexy design-magazine interior of the Cheval Blanc hotel — which boasts a Givenchy spa, a Marc Jacobs boutique and contemporary art collection — I found my own bliss with a silver pot of hot chocolate (at a comparatively tame 10 euros), Brazilian jazz and glimpses of an experimental art video made by Haruki Murakami and Kanye West.

At the dinner hour, Courchevel transforms into a gastronome’s Shangri-La. With an official population of barely 2,000 and a total of 10 Michelin stars, the town has more starred spots than cities like Marseille, the secondlargest metropolis in France.

But epicurean bargain-hunters need remember only two words: Il Vino. The French-Italian restaurant won its first star last year, becoming the town’s most recent addition to the Michelin constellation. Equally impressive, its owner, Enrico Bernardo, is a winner of the award for world’s best sommelier (in 2004), and his restaurant has a 15-page wine list. Better still, with a two-course menu at 39 euros, the restaurant can serve you a meal for less than the cost of appetizers at many of its local Michelin brethren.

On a Saturday night in January, the liveliest restaurant and bar was certainly La Mangeoire, reputed to be the hottest party spot in the Alps. (Tip: Book a dinner reservation well in advance and be prepared to splurge.) Within the packed farmhouse-chic dining room, a din of polyglot chatter — French, English, Arabic, Italian, Russian — resounded from tables strewn with blinking BlackBerrys.

“You have to come during the week!” shouted Bernard Mauruc, a doctor from Toulouse. “The girls dance on the tables. I was here Thursday, and it was crazy!”

As if on cue, the atmosphere heated up. A blonde in a low-cut dress wrapped a scarf seductively around his neck.

Then a man approached and planted a rose in her cleavage with a cackle. As the theme to “The Love Boat” burst through the bar, a table of women stood up to dance. By the time “I Will Survive” was pumping, nearly everyone in the room was standing — on tables, on the bar and even the piano — and shout-singing along.

Suddenly the dance music stopped and the theme to “Star Wars” began to boom. It was not to trumpet the arrival of Darth Vader but rather Dom Perignon — a magnum of it (1,000 euros a pop) ordered by a table of European businessmen. It was carried over the head of a waiter in a silvery ice bucket shooting fireworks.

“They always want more here!” shouted Gregory Ferrary Berthelot, a 30-ish broker of luxury real estate, as I sipped a glass of cheapie 11-euro Scotch. He seemed almost as disbelieving as I was. “I showed a 61-million-euro, 700-square-meter, five-bedroom chalet to a Russian client and he said, ‘Why are the rooms so small?’ There are no limits here!”

“And most people here at Courchevel don’t even ski.” added his wife, Emma. When I admitted that I didn’t either, she was unfazed. “Come to party! If you know St.-Tropez, it’s the same here, but on the snow!”

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

51

A Small Business Made to Seem Bigger

By EILENE ZIMMERMAN

P

eople who run a business alone often want it to appear bigger than it really is — as if it has teams of employees and unlimited resources. This is now more possible than ever thanks to some tools that so-called solopreneurs and other small businesses have at their disposal, giving them the reach and capabilities of far bigger companies.

Last year, Logan Hale, founder of YourLittleFilm, which is based in suburban Los Angeles and creates custom short films, was a sponsor of the children’s dance tour Baby Loves Disco, staffing a booth at a series of Southern California events. The promotion was so successful that he wound up with 400 leads — and a problem. “I don’t have time for that kind of follow-up,” he said. Instead, Mr. Hale used Batchbook, customer relationship management software for small business. Although he had to enter the leads, Batchbook integrated with MailChimp, a Web-based e-mail marketing platform that automatically generated and sent a follow-up e-mail to every lead. Batchbook then kept track of the responses.

“I had a 10 percent response rate, which is great for e-mail,” said Mr. Hale. “From those, I’ve already had six jobs.”

Although technology like that can be a game-changer, David S. Garland, a business owner who is author of “Smarter, Faster, Cheaper” (Wiley, 2010), cautions it can also become overwhelming. Tools, he said, should be “simple, functional and really help the business.” Here are some of the tools and strategies he, Mr. Hale and others use to emulate — and compete against — much bigger companies: SCHEDULING Mr. Garland leans heavily on Tungle.me, a free calendar-ma-

nagement tool. It lets him create a calendar page that syncs with his calendar program and shows clients open times in his schedule without revealing information about other appointments. Once a meeting date and time are approved, the appointment appears on both parties’ calendars.

Sonia Gallagher, a lawyer who runs her own business-development consulting firm, Time For Life, uses TimeTrade, an appointment-scheduling software that also helps with marketing. It invites prospective clients to schedule consultations, conferences or meetings with her. “It attaches to Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar to show them your available times, ” Ms. Gallagher said. “It’s like a personal scheduling assistant.”

Stephen Xavier, an executive coach, uses Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail system — a staple among Fortune 500 companies — through Intermedia, a hosted Exchange server, for about $50 a month.

Through Exchange, Mr. Xavier, whose business is Cornerstone Executive Development Group in Chapel Hill, N.C., links the calendars, address books and e-mail programs on his computers, BlackBerry and iPad. A change made on a calendar on any one device syncs instantly with all of the others, Mr. Xavier said. Because his large clients use Exchange, he says he believes that his using it as well “gives them the impression that I am bigger than I am.”

A Google Voice phone number can be especially useful because it automatically transcribes voice mail into e-mail — creating a written, searchable record of messages. Matthew Taylor Ruggieri, owner of the Motley, a Web site based in Los Angeles that sells men’s grooming products, said Google Voice made him more efficient. “It lets me respond to a customer’s request wherever I

AAA to Invest $475mn in 2 Reservoirs P

uerto Rico’s water utility AAA is planning to build two new reservoirs over the next few years to improve potable water service in the eastern part of the island.

The Valenciano and Beatriz reservoirs will have a total cost of $475 million and benefit over 500,000 residents.

The utility plans to begin construction of the Valenciano reservoir, which will cost US$250mn, in August. The project will take three years to complete and will have capacity to store 12.8Mm3 of water.

Work includes construction of a potable water plant in Juncos, which will produce 83,300m3/d, as well as eight storage tanks, seven pumping stations and 71.5km of distribution pipeline for Juncos, Las Piedras and San Lorenzo.

The Beatriz reservoir, located in Caguas, will have capacity to store 8Mm3 of water and cost$225mn.

The project includes building a potable water plant to produce 53,000m3/d, two storage tanks and a pumping station.

AAA is currently in the process of obtaining environmental permits for the projects. Construction is expected to take three years to complete.

am by voice, text or e-mail,” he said. “And if things get too crazy, I can route the calls to my sister’s phone and she helps me out.”

E-MAIL AND SOCIAL MEDIA MailChimp, which Mr. Hale used to follow up with those Baby Loves Disco leads, also helps him send monthly newsletters to his clients — with the option of creating a Facebook or Twitter link version of the newsletter. MailChimp can send auto-respond e-mails as well, which Mr. Ruggieri uses to follow up after a customer makes a purchase. “A personal-looking e-mail response is triggered 10 days later asking if the product was satisfactory,” he said.

As he did after the Baby Loves Disco tour, Mr. Hale puts all of his client leads and contacts into Batchbook. “I can pull up my contacts and find all my client’s information, including social media data — like their last three tweets,” he said. “This gives me something relevant to talk about in making contact with them.” It also pings him when a client’s child has a birthday coming up.

ORGANIZATION Peter Sorgenfrei, founder of a product development consulting firm, Sorgenfrei L.L.C in New York, uses a Web application called Highrise to keep track of his e-mail, so he knows when he last communicated with a client and what was said. Whenever Mr. Sorgenfrei sends an e-mail, a blind copy of the message is sent to his Highrise account, where it is archived.

“I come across as completely buttoned-up and in-control,” he said, “because I have all the information, files and discussions in one place and can access them before talking to the client.” Recently, when an automotive manufacturer he works with couldn’t find some legal documents it had sent him, Mr. Sorgenfrei located them in his Highrise archive. It took him just minutes to send the documents back to the client.

Mr. Hale relies on OmniFocus, a Web-based task management program with an iPhone app that allows him to capture his thoughts and turn them into actionable items. “Whether it’s that I need

to buy milk, call a client, write my e-mail newsletter,” he said, “it gets it out of my head and prioritized, so I know when I’ll do each thing.”

Mr. Garland solves his clutter problem — the piles of papers and receipts — with Shoeboxed. “They send you a prepaid envelope and you shove everything in there,” he said. “They digitize it and create a content management system for you, then send back the originals.” Shoeboxed has an iPhone app for scanning business cards and receipts; if users send photos of those cards and receipts, Shoeboxed will extract the expense and contact data.

ACCOUNTING Several business owners recommended FreshBooks, a cloudbased accounting software that is free (up to a point that suits most solo business operators). FreshBooks’ MiniBooks app for the iPhone allows business owners to record their time on the way home from a client or send an invoice when traveling. It also integrates with Shoeboxed so that digitalized expense receipts can be turned into an invoice. “It’s very easy to use and lets you send out professional-looking invoices instantly, which is very important,” Mr. Garland said.

OFFLINE TOOLS AND STRATEGIES Many solo entrepreneurs rely on virtual assistants — temporary help hired as needed — who work remotely, usually from their homes. They can handle tasks like research, data entry and e-mail replies. Mr. Garland uses virtual assistants about 40 hours a month. “What’s nice is you don’t have an employee,” he said. “This is someone who bills you by the hour, so it’s an expense you can deduct.” Mr. Sorgenfrei has a membership in Regus, which enables him to find temporary office space worldwide. “I can show up at any Regus location and work there for the day, get a land line, Internet access and schedule a conference room if I have a meeting,” he said. “As a solopreneur it’s easy to get caught up in a coffee shop thinking big thoughts instead of actually getting work done.”

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The San Juan Weekly

Officials Disagree on Penalties for Mortgage Mess

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and DAVID STREITFELD

A

s state attorneys general and regulators in Washington approach the end of investigation into abuses by the nation’s biggest mortgage companies, deep disputes are emerging over how much to punish the banks as well as exactly who should benefit from a settlement.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is pushing for $20 billion in penalties, backed up by the attorneys general and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Other regulators, including Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Reserve, do not favor a large fine, contending a small number were victims of flawed foreclosure procedures.

There are signs the banks have not come to grips with problems plaguing foreclosure process. Problems burst into view last fall with so-called robo-signers processing thousands of foreclosures without the required legal safeguards. The resulting furor prompted attorneys general to step in. Some banks suspended foreclosures to review their processes before resuming.

HSBC disclosed it had suspended foreclosures after regulators found “deficiencies” in its handling of them.

These included problems with court affidavits, notarization, mortgage documentation and oversight of law firms.

HSBC declined to say how many homeowners were affected.

“The events of the fall really uncovered and provided a degree of focus on fundamental problems in the way banks service and foreclose on mortgages,” said Paul Leonard of the Center for Responsible Lending. “Regulators have a great opportunity to come up with some serious fixes.”

Assuming, that is, they can agree. As difficult as it is to decide on a figure for any broad settlement, the question of what to do with the money could ultimately prove more vexing.

If only victims of problems at the servicers are helped in a settlement, that would cover a small portion of homeowners who are in default and even fewer of those whose homes are valued at less than they owe.

All the regulators declined to comment publicly on just how close they are to wrapping up a global settlement that would be presented to the banks. But signs of the differences have emerged in public testimony as well as in private conversations with government officials.

The acting comptroller of the currency, John Walsh, testified last week that while there were widespread problems with documentation and oversight of law firms and other crucial links in the foreclosure chain, only a “small number of foreclosure sales should not have proceeded.”

Despite skepticism on the part of the comptroller’s office, other regulators would like a broader plan to help pay for modifications of mortgages that are delinquent or in default, even if homeowners cannot point to a specific example of wrongdoing on the part of servicers. In other cases, the money might be used to help mortgage holders whose loan principal exceeds the home’s current value.

What’s more, the Obama administration, as well as the F.D.I.C., sees any broad settlement with the servicers as an opportunity to do more than just fix the foreclosure process. They want to stabilize the housing market, where prices are continuing to decline, and try to help bolster the economic recovery, which is facing newer threats like higher oil prices.

Some two million American homes are in foreclosure, a third of which are vacant. Another two million households are behind on their payments and facing the

prospect of foreclosure this year. To make matters worse, roughly a fifth of the nation’s home loans exceed the value of the underlying house, raising the risk that homeowners will simply walk away, further weakening the housing market.

Right now, the Obama administration argues, the housing market is facing the worst of both worlds — a big back-up in foreclosures as procedures are reworked, and a similarly long wait to get a mortgage modification in which the principal or the interest rate of the loan is lowered, easing monthly payments.

Any settlement would include provisions to streamline the modification process, which has proceeded at a snail’s pace at many servicers, frustrating many homeowners. The money from the banks, in turn, would help cover the cost of reducing principal and interest payments, paving the way for more modifications. Advocates argue that would finally get the housing market moving again.

But even if these proposals make it past all the regulators, they face fierce opposition from the banks, which argue that what the administration and the attorneys general have in mind is a back-door bailout for delinquent homeowners.

“It’s like taking money that should be paid to the Treasury and using it for an unappropriated social program,” said a lawyer for one of the top servicers, who

spoke anonymously because the negotiations were still fluid and the banks had yet to be presented with a proposed settlement. “This is a bad idea, no matter who pays for it.”

The nation’s largest mortgage servicer, Bank of America, is already readying what will be among the industry’s main arguments: that it is unfair to reward homeowners who are delinquent or underwater but cannot point to specific errors in their case.

“The question is one of fairness, who should receive a modification and who should not,” said Jim Mahoney, a spokesman for the bank. Too broad a rescue package, he said, “could forestall the housing market recovery or even create perverse incentives.”

One possibility, industry insiders and banking lobbyists suggest, is that homeowners might deliberately become delinquent on their loans to get a principal reduction. Housing activists counter that homeowners seeking modifications are often told by their lenders to stop payments, and then end up in foreclosure.

The debate reflects some degree of weariness with foreclosure, as the administration’s signature mortgage modification program is under attack by both House Republicans and housing activists as a failure.

“There has been a tension in this country during the financial crisis,” said Michael S. Barr, a former Treasury official now at the University of Michigan Law School.

“People want those who are in economic trouble to get a fair shake. But they don’t want them bailed out for making their own mistakes, like buying too big a home.”

Regulators worry how punitive any settlement should be, lawyers for foreclosed hoping for criminal charges are set to be disappointed.

In testimony in December about improper foreclosures by banks, a Federal Reserve governor, floated the notion of imposing fines on individuals responsible for violations or banning them from banking, but officials said this idea had not gotten much traction either.

Puerto Rican Government Brings Solar Power Project With Western Wind Energy Corp

W

estern Wind Energy Corp. signed a 30 megawatt solar photovoltaic power purchase agreement with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (“PREPA”) for a term of 20 years. Western Wind also executed a 40-year land lease with the Puerto Rico Land Authority for a (401) acre parcel located within the Municipality of Yabucoa.

Most of the environmental approvals are essentially complete and Western Wind is in the final permitting, engineering procurement, construction, tax structuring and project finance negotiation stages.

In January 2011, a team from Western Wind conducted a thorough site and island visit with a key member of the lending group that provided the financing for the recently financed, 120 megawatts Windstar project in California.

Western Wind has several more project documents to execute before the financial close and anticipates construction start before the end of 2011. Anticipated completes costs of the Yabacoa Solar Project is up to US $150 million, to be financed by project tax equity and project debt.

Jeff Ciachurski, CEO of Western Wind states “We

are honored by the opportunity to build, own and operate one of the first large scale solar photovoltaic generating facilities in Puerto Rico. In this effort, we are deeply grateful to the vision and dedication of the PREPA, the Land Authority of Puerto Rico, the Mayor and the citizens of Yabucoa and the tireless efforts of the many people within numerous government agencies who have set the course of leadership in the pursuit of energy independence, energy conservation and a meaningful reduction in global greenhouse emissions. Our special thanks to the Governor, his staff and members of Congress who have set the vision of a dynamic way forward providing meaningful job creation and energy independence.”

Western Wind is a swall renewable energy production company with large scale growth plans. Currently it has over 500 wind turbines and 165 MW of net rated capacity in production or in construction, and a further 311 MW of expansion plans in the States of California, Arizona and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The company has a 1,300 MW California Development Initiative program which it will continue developing as it progresses.

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Retail Sales Rose in February, but Gas Prices a Worry

By CHRISTINE HAUSER

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ost of the nation’s retailers reported improved sales in February, topping expectations in a month hit hard by winter weather and in which gasoline prices rose sharply.

The Thomson Reuters overall index that tracks sales of retail stores open at least a year rose 4.2 percent in February.

“It doesn’t meant there are no headwinds but I think this is moving in the right direction,” said Ken Perkins, president of Retail Metrics, which had forecast a 3.7 percent rise last month in sales at stores open at least a year, a crucial indicator called same-store sales.

“Sales might have been even better had we not seen this precipitous rise in gas prices,” Mr. Perkins said. “It is certainly on consumers’ minds. People are really starting to notice $3.50 a gallon in some parts of the country. If it is sustainable and goes to $4, it is really going to have an effect.”

Weather was also a factor. Mr. Perkins said winter weather might have dampened shopping in the early part of the month but there was a progressive pickup in sales from the middle of the month because of pent-up demand, shopping for Valentine’s Day and during the Presidents Day holiday.

Within the various sectors of the index, apparel retailers recorded a 5.6 percent increase, but that number was skewed somewhat because it did not include the Gap, which recorded a decline. The department store index was up 5.3 percent and the index for discount store was up 4.9 percent.

Among the department stores, Saks was up 15.3 percent, while Nordstrom’s sales rose 7.3 percent, with jewelry, dresses and women’s shoes among the top-perfor-

ming categories. Sales were strongest in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, Nordstrom’s said. J.C. Penney rose 6.4 percent, and Kohl’s had a 5 percent gain. All of those results topped expectations.

Limited Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret and Bath and Body Works, had a 12 percent gain, which also topped forecasts.

Among discount retailers, the Costco Wholesale Corporation was up 8 percent while the Target Corporation rose 1.8 percent.

The retail sector has been struggling in an economy where rising commodity costs and stubborn unemployment have held back the discretionary spending of consumers, and retailers have responded in recent months with discounting and promotions.

Economists say that an oil price rise because of recent turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa could hit consumers if it is sustained, a point reinforced earlier this week by the Federal Reserve chief Ben S. Bernanke in testimony on Capitol Hill. Consumers are already feeling it at the pump, where gasoline prices have rise more than 20 cents in the last week.

The dichotomy of the month was highlighted by the results of Stage Stores, which saw a 7.2 percent decline in samestore sales in February, the largest fall of the 25 retailers in the Reuters survey.

But Andy Hall, president and chief executive of Stage Stores, noted the difference between the first of the month and the end of the month in a Webcast.

“We were pleased with the way the business performed in the second half of the month, with comparable store sales up approximately 10 percent,” Mr. Hall said.

“Unfortunately, this was not enough to offset the weakness we experienced in the

Plaza Las Américas first half of February, as a result of extreme weather conditions in the center of the country, most notably Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri, which represent close to 51 percent of our comparable store sales base.”

Among retailers aimed at teenagers, Zumiez had a 12.8 percent gain, driven by sales in footwear and accessories but held back by boys’ apparel, the company said in a Webcast.

“Teen retailers were especially strong which is a reflection of consumers responding to new spring fashion,” said Randy Konik, a managing director for Jefferies & Companies Inc. But he said he was surprised that a Gap store like Old Navy had a 4 percent decline.

“It could be early signals of con-

sumer hesitancy responding as a result of these higher oil and gas prices that have been in the headlines,” Mr. Konik said.

Dillards slipped 1 percent, saying sales in the home and furniture category and the men’s category were significantly below trend during the four-week period ended Feb. 26.

Gap’s comparable same-store sales fell 3 percent, including online sales, but net sales were down 2 percent. Mark Webb, the vice president for investor relations, said in a recorded call that sales were strongest in the fourth week of the month and weakest in the first.

Mr. Webb said the company was “not pleased” with the result, but added: “It is a relatively small month and we remain focused on our full-year goals.”

Agencies Fine and Sue Companies That Purported to Aid Jobless

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL

A

yearlong investigation into allegations that bogus employment and business opportunities had bilked consumers out of millions of dollars has yielded dozens of civil and criminal actions, federal and state officials announced Wednesday.

The investigation focused on businesses that lured financially unsophisticated retirees and the unemployed with opportunities to start businesses or gain access to job listings, often with little personal effort but hefty upfront fees, the authorities said.

The victims risked “their limited financial resources in response to the promise of a job, an income or the chance to build a profitable home-based busines-

ses,” said David C. Vladeck, the director of the consumer protection arm of the Federal Trade Commission. “But these turned out to be empty promises. And the people who counted on them ended up even deeper in debt.”

The commission announced more than 90 civil actions, including three lawsuits against companies the agency said defrauded consumers of more than $49.5 million. The F.T.C. said it had obtained judgments and levied fines totaling $14.6 million in six other cases.

The Justice Department said it had taken 48 criminal actions, most in conjunction with the Postal Inspection Service. In 36 criminal cases presented Wednesday, officials said there were 16 guilty pleas, three convictions and seven ceaseand-desist orders. Nineteen sentences

handed down to defendants total more than 56 years.

Eleven states participated in the operation, imposing millions in civil penalties and restitution.

Roy Cooper, the North Carolina attorney general, said that some victims might not get their money back because the swindlers had spent it all or left the jurisdiction of the courts.

In one of the F.T.C. lawsuits, regulators said that Ivy Capital Inc. of Nevada and 29 other defendants had taken $40 million from consumers who paid up to $20,000 for “worthless” business coaching and other services the company had said would help them earn up to $10,000 a month on the Internet.

Calls for comment to a number listed for Ivy Capital in Nevada went unanswe-

red Wednesday.

In another case, the F.T.C. said that the National Sales Group of California advertised sales jobs online that did not exist and offered clients the inside track to hiring at Fortune 1,000 companies with a subscription of about $30. The F.T.C. said the company lied about its relationship with the companies and often charged customers double or triple their advertised rate, charging customers a total of $8 million.

A telephone number for the company was not immediately available, and its Web site was not navigable Wednesday afternoon.

In both lawsuits, the F.T.C. has obtained orders halting the companies’ operations, freezing their assets and placing the companies in receivership.

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March 10 - 16, 2011

2 Qaddafis Fought Over Business

By JAMES RISEN

S

oon after Coca-Cola decided to move into Libya in 2005, it received a harsh lesson in how the personal jealousies and brutality of the feuding family of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi shape the nation’s economy.

Two of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons began to fight for control of the local Coca-Cola bottling company, and their battle turned into an armed confrontation dominated by a militia loyal to one of the sons, according to American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. The dispute was settled when Colonel Qaddafi’s daughter intervened, but only after at least one worker was hurt, one Qaddafi cousin was stuffed into the trunk of a car and the Coca-Cola plant was shut down for months, the cables said.

The episode provides a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the Qaddafis and more broadly underscores how the whims of ruling families have tainted the climate for economic development in parts of the Arab world.

In the 1990s, with Libya chafing under international sanctions, Coca-Cola did not have a bottling plant in the country. Instead, it was distributed through a franchise in neighboring Tunisia. It was only after Colonel Qaddafi abandoned his nuclear weapons program in 2003 and sanctions were relaxed by the West that American companies, including Coca-Cola, began to invest there again.

Coca-Cola’s new bottling plant opened in 2005 through a local franchise known as the Global Beverage Company.

But almost immediately, two of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, Mutassim and Mohammed, began to compete for control of Global Beverage. The feud burst into view in late 2005, just two weeks after the plant opened, when security troops loyal to Mutassim occupied the bottling plant in Tripoli, according to a 2006 State Department cable. His militia occupied the plant until February 2006, blocking production.

The State Department cable recounts how on Dec. 28, 2005, “Two military cars carrying armed personnel without clear identification illegally broke into the facility, asked the employees to leave the premises and shut down the plant.” Mutassim’s forces quickly took control of the plant after one foreign worker was injured and some equipment was destroyed.

During the plant’s occupation, managers were initially allowed to enter the plant “singly or in pairs,” but later Coca-Cola employees were barred completely. Over the following weeks, company shareholders received extortion demands from “freelancers” while anonymous callers threatened the plant’s foreign workers with “political problems” or physical harm, according to the cable.

“At no time did any Libyan authority offer a legal justification for the plant’s shutdown,” the cable said, recounting complaints from business officials involved.

The battle reached a peak in February 2006, when men loyal to Mutassim went to Mohammed’s residence, where they abducted and assaulted one of his cousins, who is also one of Mohammed’s in-laws, in order to “send a signal to The Engineer (Mohammed),” according to the cable.

Mutassim’s associates arrived at “Mohammed’s residence and began shouting for him to come out,” the cable says, quoting a witness. “Receiving no response, they left in search of one of Mohammed’s cousins, whom they stowed in the trunk of one of their cars and brought back to the residence.”

One of the company’s board members received a hurried call warning him to leave Tripoli before Mutassim’s men could find him.

Finally, their sister, Aisha Qaddafi, appeared to have become fed up with the fighting and brokered a deal between her brothers. According to the cable, the compromise called for Mohammed to sell his shares in the bottling operation, and in return Mutassim would

A battle between two sons of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi - Mohammed, left, and Mutassim - for control of a Coca-Cola bottling company turned violent, according to diplomatic cables. call off his men and leave the company alone.

One person caught in the middle of the fight told an official from the United States Embassy, according to one of the cables, that “although he had heard stories about doing business in Libya, he never imagined that what transpired was still possible here. ‘You know the movie, ‘The Godfather’? We’ve been living it for the last few months.’ ” On Wednesday, Kerry Tressler, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola at the company’s headquarters in Atlanta, acknowledged that in 2006 there had been “a period of uncertainty about the local ownership of the bottler” in Libya, but that the problem was eventually resolved.

She said that production and distribution at the bottling plant have now stopped because of the protests and unrest.

The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said it would have no comment on the cables’ revelations.

Jobless Filings Fall to 3-Year Low

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

T

he number of people requesting unemployment benefits last week plunged to a nearly three-year low, bolstering hopes that companies will expand hiring this year.

The government said Thursday that applications for unemployment benefits fell by 20,000 to a seasonally adjusted 368,000.

It was the third decline in the four weeks.

Applications are now at their lowest level since late May 2008.

The four-week average for applications, a less volatile figure, fell last week to 388,500. That was the lowest level since July 2008, the last time the four-week average was below 400,000.

Economists say applications that remain consistently below 375,000 tend to signal declines in the unemployment rate.

Applications for benefits peaked during the recession at 651,000.

The downward trend suggests that companies are easing the pace of layoffs

now that the economy is gaining momentum. During the recession, companies slashed work forces, cut or froze workers’ pay and took other aggressive steps to reduce costs.

Companies are expected to increase hiring in the month ahead.

Stronger job creation is needed to steadily reduce unemployment. The economy needs to produce at least 200,000 a month on a consistent basis for that to happen.

Thursday’s report also showed the number of people receiving unemployment benefits dropped to 3.77 million, the lowest level since mid-October 2008.

That does not include millions of people enrolled in emergency unemployment benefit programs financed by the federal government. Another 4.5 million unemployed workers received benefits under the extended programs during the week ending Feb. 12, the latest data available. Altogether, 9.2 million people were on the benefit rolls that week.

In a second economic report on Thurs-

day, the Labor Department said that productivity grew in the final quarter of 2010 at the fastest pace in nine months, even as economists expect a significant slowdown in growth in 2011.

Productivity grew at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter while labor costs fell at an annual rate of 0.6 percent.

Both figures were unchanged from a preliminary report a month ago.

For the year, productivity grew 3.9 percent, the biggest increase in eight years. However, economists believe productivity may grow at just half that rate in 2011 as companies reach the limit on the amount of output they can squeeze out of their workers and start hiring more employees.

A survey of top forecasters from the National Association for Business Economics this week predicted that productivity would advance 2.1 percent this year and 1.9 percent in 2012. While those gains would be in line with the growth trend over the last three decades, it would represent a signifi-

cant slowdown after a surge over the last two years.

The 3.9 percent jump in productivity in 2010 followed a 3.7 percent rise in 2009.

Both figures were the highest since productivity rose 4.6 percent in 2002, the largest increase in a half century.

Normally, a slowdown in productivity would be considered bad for the economy. But the two-year surge came at the expense of many workers. Companies shed 8 million jobs during the recession and the economy now needs job growth now, even at the expense of worker productivity, economists say.

The 2.6 percent rise in productivity in the fourth quarter was the best quarterly showing since an increase of 4.6 percent in the first three months of 2010.

The 0.6 percent drop in unit labor costs was the first quarterly decline since labor costs fell at a 4.6 percent rate in the first quarter of 2010. For the year, unit labor costs declined 1.5 percent after having fallen 1.6 percent in 2009.

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ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR

In Buenos Aires, Light and Luster

By PAOLA SINGER

T

HE story of how Jennifer Webster, an American film producer, and Zsolt Juhasz Buday, a Hungarian architect and set designer, came to live in a railroad baron’s grand old house in Argentina is one of serendipity and hard work.

Eight years ago, the couple were living in Budapest, but a trip to Buenos Aires caused them to rethink their lives.

“We fell in love with the city,” said Ms. Webster, 42. “Every place was interesting and fresh.”

The city was booming, filled with creative types from around the world who came for its affordability and cosmopolitan feeling. Ms. Webster realized it was an ideal place for a branch of Pioneer Productions, a company she had started in Hungary in the mid-1990s to serve the growing advertising industry in Eastern Europe.

By June 2003, Pioneer had its first overseas office, and the couple began splitting their time between Budapest, where they own an apartment, and Buenos Aires, where they bought a small house in Palermo Soho, a lively area of the city.

But three years later, when Ms.

Webster became pregnant, they decided to spend most of the year here and began looking for a home in a quieter neighborhood. An online listing for a Beaux-Arts house in Belgrano, an upscale area with tree-lined streets, caught Ms. Webster’s eye. They drove by and were amazed to find a Hungarian church next door.

“We’re not really religious,” she said, but “we thought it was such a great coincidence and a good sign.”

That spring, they bought the 8,000-square-foot house, built in the early 1900s by an English railroad executive, for about $300,000. “For the size and the price, it was amazing,” Ms. Webster said.

Continues on page 56

ARCHITECTURE & HOME DECOR

Comes from page 55 Not surprisingly, it needed a complete makeover. The house had been uninhabited for a decade, and at some point in its history had been converted into an elementary school, so it was a warren of ugly partitions with lots of tiny bathrooms.

The new owners were experien-

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ced renovators; even so, they were intimidated by the magnitude of the project.

“We had a low budget,” said Mr. Buday, 45. And given the size of the house, “we had to be very careful.”

Time was scarce, too, as their first child was due in the fall.

They began tearing down walls,

demolishing an entire building at the back of the property to make room for a garden and a pool. “It was a very intense renovation,” Ms. Webster said, particularly since they oversaw every aspect of the project themselves.

Six months and $200,000 later, the old structure was almost unrecognizable, at least on the inside.

Gone were the narrow corridors and the small rooms; in their place were ample spaces filled with light.

On the second floor are the children’s two bedrooms (although Sophie, 4, and Felix, 3, still share a room), a guest bedroom and the master suite. Downstairs, a 540-squarefoot kitchen looks out onto the garden through a wall of windows. On the other side of the house, a sliding door made of sheet metal opens into an office, where an old ceiling with rusted beams was uncovered during rebuilding. The couple chose to leave it that way, Mr. Buday said, because “something too modern can be too cold.”

Another remnant of the early 20th century is the entry hall, where the staircase with its wrought-iron banisters has been restored, along with the moldings and an original skylight. The pilastered front facade has also been returned to its former luster.

The huge basement is mostly empty, except for a housekeeper’s room, a storage space and a studio where Mr. Buday is designing interiors for a project in Hungary.

Living and working in two hemispheres has its challenges, he said, but it’s worth it.

“This is the first time I’ve lived in another country,” said Mr. Buday, who grew up under a Communist regime that imposed travel restrictions.

“I never imagined it.”

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57

Sports

Shifting Sands at Top of Rankings bably been the best player in the world,” Westwood said, adding that the volatility at the moment suited him fine. “It’s good that it swings about. You know, if you don’t play well, which I haven’t started off this year very good, you know, by high standards, which you have to have when you are No. 1 in the world, then you deserve to drop down.

Tiger Woods, above left, with Lee Westwood last month in Dubai.

Woods is ranked No. 5.

Martin Kaymer, left, and Luke Donald at last week’s Match Play Championships. Kaymer has replaced Lee Westwood at No. 1 in the world rankings.

By LARRY DORMAN

T

he movement at the top of the World Golf Ranking last weekend could be just an insignificant temblor, a fluctuation in the orderly world of professional golf.

But when the Englishman Lee Westwood dropped to No. 2 from No. 1, switching places with Martin Kaymer of Germany after 17 weeks atop the rankings, it may have also been the precursor to a tectonic shift in the game.

If so, the question quickly becomes: Is anyone among the current top 10 players capable of staking a claim and keeping the No. 1 ranking for more than a few weeks?

Kaymer is not playing this week at the Honda Classic, which begins Thursday on the Champion Course at PGA National Resort. But Westwood is. He is making no predictions, but his intentions are clear.

“I don’t think there’s any doubting over the last few weeks, Martin has pro-

“But I’m not too worried about that.

I’m never too fast out of the blocks at the beginning of the year, so just one of those things. That’s how I am.”

All this uncertainty stems from Tiger Woods’s lack of form while he is in the midst of the third major swing change of his career. Winless since November 2009, Woods has slipped to No. 5 in the world. No one, not even Woods, is predicting when he will regain the form he had in dominating the golf world as No. 1, a position he held off and on for 11 years before yielding it to Westwood last October.

But Jack Nicklaus, the 70-year-old whose career record of 18 major championship victories is the one that Woods has pointed to since childhood, does not believe Woods is going into a total eclipse at age 35, with 14 majors among his 71 victories.

“He’s got such a great work ethic,” Nicklaus said Wednesday before teeing it up in the Honda Classic pro-am with the former Florida football star Tim Tebow.

“He’s so determined to what he wants to do. I’m very surprised that he has not popped back. I still think he’ll break my record.”

Until Woods’s skid ends — and he does not have a top-10 finish in his nine Tour appearances since last year’s United States Open — the forecast is for considerable churn at the top. The vacuum at No. 1 has already provided some fascinating fodder. For one, there was Graeme McDowell’s stunning finish at the Chevron World Challenge last December that denied Woods what looked like a sure victory.

And McDowell, of Northern Ireland, is making no apologies for his world ranking of No. 4. He is allowing himself to think about how close he is to one of his childhood dreams and current goals.

“Obviously I’m very proud to be here,” the garrulous McDowell said. “But you know, definitely that little bit of extra pressure of trying to maintain that, you know, I realize my world ranking reflects my last 10 months of golf, which has been pretty good.

“I’m just excited as to where that’s going to take me, and of course the No. 1 spot is in touching distance more so than it’s ever been. Obviously with Tiger being so far in front there, after the turn of the century and the last seven or eight years, the No. 1 spot’s seemed very out of reach, but I would be lying if I sat here and said that it wasn’t a goal of mine.”

Some golfers, most recently David Duval, have striven to be No. 1 only to find the view from the top is not as advertised. Duval, who spent 14 straight weeks atop the rankings from March to June in 1999 and one more in October 1999, fell to No. 882 before the United States Open

at Bethpage Black in 2009. A tie for third at Bethpage, his first top-10 finish in a major since his 2001 British Open victory — “I have no explanation,” he said then — got him started back up the hill. He is currently ranked No. 178 and in the field this week.

For the first time since 1992, four Europeans are atop the rankings: Kaymer; Westwood; the Englishman Luke Donald, who won last week’s W.G.C.-Accenture Match Play Championship; and McDowell. Paul Casey of England, who is not playing this week, is No. 7, but Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland (No. 8) could move into the top five with a victory.

When players are this close to the top, and the dominant player is off form, the chance to get to the top — and reap some of the bonuses written into contracts and the resultant bumps in appearance money in Europe — is alluring. But they can become the sirens calling from the rocks.

The Hall of Famer Nick Price knows the benefits and the pitfalls. When he spent 44 weeks as No. 1 from August 1994 to June 1995, he wore himself thin with appearances around the world.

“I may have bitten off more than I can chew there for a while,” Price said. “You know, you do have a lot of responsibilities as the No. 1 player. You also have a lot of commitments that you just are obliged or obligated to do. That was difficult.”

Price said he hoped Woods would return to form soon. In the meantime, he believes every one of the top players should strive to become No. 1.

“There comes a time, if you’ve got it inside you — the passion for the game and all the hard work that you do puts you in position — you have to reward yourself,” he said. “Don’t think about all of the consequences, what’s going to happen if you do win. Just make it happen, and go win, and worry about all that stuff later.”

Oliver Perez Throws Two Scoreless Innings O

By DAVID WALDSTEIN

liver Perez had a reasonably good start, or at least a far better outing than in his spring training debut, in which he gave up four runs and three walks in just two innings.

Pitching against the Cardinals, Perez threw two scoreless innings for the Mets, allowing two hits and no runs and, best of all, he did not walk anyone. In fact, Perez threw 15 strikes among his 25 pitches. Compared with his previous start, it was practically a perfect game.

“Everything that happened in the last game, I tried to change that,” he said.

Even though the Mets told reporters that Perez would be starting the game, Perez said he did not find

out until he arrived at camp morning. He said he felt more comfortable in the starting role than he did coming out of the bullpen in his first game.

But Perez, who wants to remain a starter, might have to settle for something different. The Mets could also use him in a long relief role, as a set-up man, or just release him, which coming into camp was considered the most likely option.

“The last nine years of my career I was a starter,” he said. “At the same time I know I have to be ready. It’s not easy, but it’s good for the team.”

Additionally, Perez’s velocity was slightly better than his last outing, as he reached 87 miles per hour on the radar gun, still eight miles an hour below what he once threw.

“I know my velocity is not there, so I have to find

ways to get outs,” he said. “When my velocity comes back, I’m going to be the same.”

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Fill-In for Billups Follows His Advice

Knicks forward Amar’e Stoudemire slaps the ball away from Hornets center Emeka Okafor at Madison Square Garden.

By HOWARD BECK

T

he star and the understudy talked, as they have nearly every day for the last week. The conversation was basic and to the point.

The Knicks needed a new Three in their Big Three, and Toney Douglas, with his humble résumé, was the sole candidate.

Chauncey Billups was direct with his protégé: Do not defer. If you call a play, run it. Do not worry about the consequences.

“Be in command,” Billups said.

“Be in command out there.”

Douglas nodded, then did his best to emulate his new mentor. With Billups nursing a bruised thigh Wednesday, Douglas took command of the offense, faced down Chris Paul and directed the Knicks to a 107-88 rout of the New Orleans Hornets at Madison Square Garden.

There is no replacing Billups’s veteran savvy, but Douglas was steady and productive, with 24 points, 5 assists and 4 rebounds. He was also efficient, going 10 for 13 from the field. His timing was perfect, too, providing the Knicks some relief a night after they lost a tough game — and Billups — in Orlando.

“He stepped up big in place of Chauncey,” said Carmelo Anthony, who had 22 points in his second home game as a Knick. “He knew that he had to take that challenge tonight, being the starting point guard, going up against a great point guard like Chris Paul. He took that challenge.”

Douglas kept the offense humming and Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire in rhythm, never looking overwhelmed by the task. Stoude-

mire had 24 points and 7 rebounds.

Anthony played just 29 minutes.

And nearly everyone got to rest in the fourth quarter, with the rout well established.

There was a lot to like in the victory. The Knicks (31-28) shot 54.5 percent against one of the league’s better defensive teams, while holding the Hornets (35-28) to 46.5 percent shooting. Anthony and Stoudemire showed some admirable hustle, chasing loose balls out of bounds.

David West (16 points) was the only Hornets starter to score in double figures. Jarrett Jack had 21 points off the bench.

Paul, a perennial All-Star — and the Knicks’ top free-agent target in 2012 — was a virtual no-show in his only Garden visit this season. He scored just 4 points and did not hit his second field goal until the middle of the fourth quarter, with the game out of reach.

“We’re not playing with a lot of confidence, especially myself,” Paul said, “and it puts us in a tough situation night in and night out. We’re not playing the way we can and it’s not a good thing.”

Paul got the LeBron James treatment from the fans — they cheered wildly when he was introduced — but he played as if he would rather be somewhere else.

This was a critical test for the Knicks, who had just lost two of three games on the road and are still getting their balance with a new roster.

Billups had been the Knicks’ most critical player since arriving in the Anthony trade last week. He bruised his left thigh late loss in Orlando and could be out for a few days.

“I think we’ll be fine,” said Bi-

llups, who is listed as day to day. “It gives Toney an opportunity to play more with Melo and Amar’e.”

Billups gave his instructions to Douglas in the morning. One by one, others reinforced the message — from Anthony to Stoudemire to Coach Mike D’Antoni.

“You’ve got Amar’e Stoudemire here and you’ve got Carmelo there and he’s in the middle with the ball, you can get all whacked out,” D’Antoni said. “And he has to settle down, be himself, play his game and it takes awhile.” He added: “He’s got to have an ego and a game where he’s Toney Douglas, and that’s good enough. Tonight was a good step.”

As D’Antoni pondered a night — or a few — without his new floor leader, he sounded a small alarm about the Knicks’ lack of fluid play, the shrinking schedule and the higher expectations that came with Anthony’s arrival.

“It’s a little bit different,” D’Antoni said before the game, “and the stakes are a little higher, to be honest with you.” He added: “We’re expected to win every game now. Lets try to get that mentality and do it.”

Five games into the Anthony era, the Knicks are equally formidable and unsettled. With Douglas and Ronny Turiaf starting, the Knicks had their third new lineup in a week.

Jared Jeffries, who signed as a free

agent, immediately joined the rotation and had six rebounds in 24 minutes.

Normally, Billups would have spent the night playing mentor to Douglas. But Billups’s clothes have not yet arrived from Denver, and he did not have the proper attire — per league rules — to sit on the bench.

Fortunately, the message had already been received.

Douglas was assertive from the opening tip, hitting a 3-pointer and a layup to start the game. He had a team-high 10 points in the first quarter, going 4 for 4 from the field.

Stoudemire and Anthony also reached double figures by halftime, staking the Knicks to a 52-42 lead.

“He’s a great person, a great player,” Douglas said of Billups. “I really look up to him. This morning he talked to me and told me to stay aggressive. No matter what, play your game.”

REBOUNDS After waiving two players and signing two more this week, Donnie Walsh said he was probably done tinkering with the lineup. The Knicks are still missing a skilled 7-footer, but finding one now appears unlikely.

“Everybody in the world knows we’re not big enough,” Walsh said, adding, “I didn’t know if I could get a guy that could come in here and help this team.”

Jared Jefferies (9), who was signed, immediately joined the Knicks’ rotation to help Amar’e Stoudemire against the Hornets.

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

59

Sports

Beltran Gives Knee a Run and Manager a Scare

By KAREN CROUSE

T

he sun was barely up when the first fans pulled into Digital Domain Park, six hours before the first pitch. The Sunday matinee between the Mets and the visiting Boston Red Sox sold out in two hours, and judging from the number of spectators whose backs bore the numbers of Jonathan Papelbon, David Ortiz and Kevin Youkilis, the 2011 Grapefruit League debut of Carlos Beltran was not the main attraction.

A crowd of 7,413, the largest in Port St. Lucie baseball history, saw Beltran, the Mets outfielder with the balky right knee, produce one hit in three at-bats as the designated hitter in the Mets’ 6-5 victory.

Although the Boston presence was abundant in the stands, Ortiz, Youkilis and most of the other Red Sox regulars were nowhere to be seen. Marco Scutaro was the only everyday Boston player in the lineup.

Beltran’s first at-bat came in the second inning, against the right-hander Michael Bowden. Batting from the left side, he lined the third pitch he saw, a fastball, to right for a single, and eventually scored from second.

In the third, Beltran batted from the

right side against the left-hander Andrew Miller, and flied out to right on a 1-2 pitch.

In his last appearance of the day, also from the right side, he popped out to right on a 2-1 pitch from Hideki Okajima.

“I was a little more jumpy from the right side,” Beltran said, adding, “From the left side, I feel like I was a little more patient.”

Beltran’s long road back from knee surgery in January 2010 has been yet another test of endurance for long-suffering Mets fans. After an extended rehabilitation, Beltran appeared in 64 games last season, which ended as he appeared to be finding his groove at the plate.

His mobility in center field, the position at which he won three Gold Gloves, has not been the same since his surgery. Beltran recently asked to shift to right field to stave off any potential drama with Angel Pagan, who played well in center last year in Beltran’s absence.

Beltran, 33, said he hoped to make an appearance at his new position, where he has appeared three times in his 13-year career, in roughly a week. “I’m going to approach it day by day,” he said.

At Citi Field, right fielders have to cover more space than in many other ball-

parks, so Beltran will have to be mobile. Terry Collins, the first-year manager, regarded Beltran’s base running in the second inning as a positive sign.

“That was a brighter spot than what he did at the plate,” said Collins, who admitted he was nervous when Chip Hale, the third-base coach, waved Beltran home on Daniel Murphy’s single to right.

“I can’t tell you what was going through my mind,” Collins said, adding: “He came around third base and he was running good. I watched him the whole way.”

The frustration for Beltran is that he cannot be sure how he will feel from one day to the next. “Maybe one day I feel great,” he said, “and the next day I feel like it’s hard to move around.”

Three hours before the game, there was plenty of space along the fence surrounding the back field where Josh Alley stood between his father, Kevin, and brother, Jeremiah, watching several Mets players go through batting and fielding practice.

Alley, a self-described battle-tested Mets fan who lives and works in Tampa, was wearing the No. 15 jersey of Beltran, his favorite player.

“He’s probably one of the most

unappreciated Mets of all time,” Alley said of Beltran, who arrived in New York in 2005 as a free agent fresh off a postseason with the Houston Astros in which he hit eight home runs.

“He’s never had another Houston Astros moment with the Mets,” Alley said wistfully. He spoke of how well Beltran moved before his knee injury and what a joy it was to watch him gobble up balls in center as if he were a human Pac-Man. “He’s always seen as a lazy loafing guy,” Alley said, “but it’s just because when he was in the outfield in his prime he was so graceful, it really didn’t look like he was putting out an effort.”

Even before his knee grew achy and arthritic, Beltran was seen as damaged goods by some Mets fans who will never forgive him for his season-ending strikeout in Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series against St. Louis.

“People can’t get past that,” Alley said, adding, “They forget that Adam Wainwright threw him one of the best curveballs you’ll ever see in your life.”

There is nothing wrong with Beltran’s mobility when it comes to moving beyond his past. “My job is to play baseball,” he said. “Whatever people think, I’m O.K.”

Sports

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The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Vizquel’s Path to Shortstop at 40 Could Stand as a Test for Jeter

By TYLER KEPNER

O

mar Vizquel first played shortstop in the major leagues in 1989, when Derek Jeter was a freshman in high school. Now Vizquel is the only player on a roster who was active in the 1980s, the oldest man in baseball who does not throw a knuckleball.

Vizquel, who turns 44 next month, started at shortstop for the Chicago White Sox at Camelback Ranch.

He does not play the position much anymore — just nine times last season — but his 2,690 games at shortstop rank first on the career list. Jeter is fifth with 2,274.

Jeter turns 37 in June to Vizquel, he is young. The master rejects premise Jeter is slipping.

“It’s really weird I start reading a lot of stuff last year about people doubting him as a shortstop,” Vizquel said in the clubhouse. “I just couldn’t believe what I was reading, because here I am playing shortstop at 41, 42 years old, and a guy that is 36, they’re talking about, ‘He can’t do it anymore.’ You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Vizquel may be incredulous because he is the only player in the last 90 years to do what Jeter is attempting.

Jeter’s new Yankees contract includes a player option for 2014, which he has said he will use. That would mean four more seasons as the starting shortstop, through age 40.

Hall of Famer Honus Wagner played 100 games at shortstop from 1911 through 1915, when he was 41. Vizquel is the only man to play 100 games at the position four consecutive seasons at age 37 or older. He did it for Cleveland Indians and San Francisco Giants 2004 through 2007.

(Luke Appling, another Hall of Famer, lost most of

two seasons to military service during World War II, when he was 37 and 38, and returned to be a regular shortstop for three of the next four seasons.)

Vizquel listed all the reasons the position can be challenging for older players. To succeed a shortstop must have quickness and explosiveness, swift lateral movement and ability to accelerate, decelerate and jump.

“You’ve got to stay on top of your game all the time,” Vizquel said. “If you let it go, your body’s going to let you know real quick. And when you’re going to try to come back, it might be too late.”

Jeter starts training earlier in the off-season than he used to, and his workouts last longer. His efforts last season could not save him from the worst year of his career, when his average tumbled 64 points, to .270. His defense suffered despite winning a Gold Glove.

Vizquel also had a bumpy year at age 36, in 2003. He recovered to hit ..291 for the 2004 Indians, but when he became a free agent, only the Giants offered him a three-year contract through age 40.

Vizquel won Gold Gloves in the first two seasons in San Francisco and hit at his career norms, if not a bit better.

He did not feel his age in the field until 2007, when he was 40 and in his final season as an everyday player. It was an unwelcome sensation for a fielder once famous for range.

“The ball goes by you, and you start questioning yourself and doubting: ‘Wow, I saw the ball there, why couldn’t I just get it?’ ” Vizquel said. “Maybe it was a matter of first-step reaction, or a matter of leaning down to get that ball. Your mind is telling you that you can get to that ball, and your body’s not allowing you to get to that ball.”

Omar Vizquel, with the Giants in 2006, is the career leader in games at shortstop, with 2,690; Derek Jeter of the Yankees is fifth, with 2,274, and says he intends to play through 2014, the option year in his contract.

Advanced fielding metrics show Jeter improved his range for two seasons before last year’s decline. Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman has spoken about Jeter’s eventually leaving shortstop, but learning a position in his late 30s could be more challenging than simply staying put.

Vizquel did not start at another position until 2009, when he was 42. Jeter has never played another position, and Vizquel doubts he ever will.

Few have ever looked as natural or graceful in the field as Vizquel, who needs 201 hits for 3,000, a milestone Jeter should reach by midseason. Vizquel doubts he will get enough playing time to make it, but his glove is his legacy, anyway.

His glove and his enthusiasm.

Model of N.B.A. Success Has Fallen Into Disarray

By JOANNE C. GERSTNER

T

he Detroit Pistons appear to be in chaos, a startling state for a franchise that has clicked so well on so many levels over the past decade.

The team reached six Eastern Conference finals and two N.B.A. finals, taking the 2004 title, and fans packed the Palace of Auburn Hills under the steady hand of Bill Davidson, the owner.

The branding worked, too, with the team adopting a Going to Work theme as a nod to Detroit’s engrained work ethic and blue-collar values.

The synergy is now in disarray. The Going to Work model shattered thanks to player discontent, including a boycott of a practice last week; the team’s 22-41 record; and the process to sell the team and the arena by Davidson’s widow, Karen.

“There is no page in the N.B.A. sports business handbook for what is happening,” said Alan Ostfield, president and chief executive of Palace Sports and Entertainment.

“We have the economy, team performance, ownership sale what happened last week.

It’s about sticking to the core values that made us successful.

The most stunning blow came when seven players, with varying excuses, skipped a shootaround as a protest against

their second-year coach, John Kuester. Later, Kuester used only the six players who attended the shootaround.

The benched players, Ben Wallace, Tracy McGrady and Rodney Stuckey, were laughing when Kuester was ejected that night for arguing with officials in a loss to the 76ers.

Chris Wilcox, Austin Daye, Stuckey and Richard Hamilton were fined for missing the shootaround. Wallace, Tayshaun Prince and McGrady had personal or medical reasons for not participating.

Attendance is down 13 percent average crowd of 16,304, a far cry from when the 22,076-seat Palace bulged every home game. Fans that do show up are testy, booing players and yelling at Kuester. Pistons were booed off court Feb. 14, after lethargic 94-79 loss to the Atlanta Hawks.

Hamilton has a protracted dispute

with Kuester. He has been benched several times and caused discord within the locker room. Kuester and Hamilton said they had repaired their relationship and they intended to start over.

Players and coaches go through arguments. That’s all it was, a disagreement.”

The Pistons’ on-court player dissonance drew strong rebukes from Lakers Coach Phil Jackson, Magic Coach Stan Van Gundy, the former Pistons coach Dick Vitale and Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo.

“What happened was absolutely absurd,” Vitale told ESPN Radio. “When those players did what they did in mutiny, unbelievable. It is absolutely sad and a black eye and absolutely hurts the image of the N.B.A. big time.” “It breaks my heart.”

Joe Dumars, the Pistons’ president for basketball operations, has taken an equally staunch stand, giving Kuester a vote of confidence.

“We’ve had a long and proud history of being a first-class organization that handles its business the right way,” Dumars said in a statement. “We expect everyone that represents the Detroit Pistons to do so in a first-class manner, and that will continue as we move forward.”

It is unclear if the turbulence will affect sale negotiations between Tom Gores, a private equity financier based in Los An-

geles, and Davidson. The parties have been exclusively talking since January without coming to a formal agreement.

Gores and Davidson have said they will not comment on the negotiations.

Rodney Fort, a sports economics professor at the University of Michigan, sees Gores looking at the long-term potential of the Pistons.

“You can’t get caught up in the shortterm when you’re investing hundreds of millions into a company,” Fort said. “You look at the revenue stream potential, how will this asset perform within its market over the long haul?

“Investors such as Tom Gores are not getting caught up in the same stuff that the fans are right now.”

Rob Tilliss, founder of the New Yorkbased sports equity firm Inner Circle, indicated he believed the franchise was on shakier ground. Inner Circle has handled the sale of the Texas Rangers and the Nets, among other franchises and arenas.

“There are a lot of storm clouds: a team that’s woefully underperforming, ownership that’s not committed to making changes because of the sale process, and all of this in a city that’s been economically to hell and back,” Tilliss said. “This is a distressed franchise right now. But it’s a glass half full thing. Things eventually do, hopefully, turn around.”

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

61

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 62

62 March 10 - 16, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Make those important calls and communicate in the right way. If you get things in place now, you will have a head start on the rest of us. As always your natural charm and charisma are your great gifts; so use them to grand effect. Far off places beckon and if you cannot get there yet, enjoy the planning stage.

Love commitments look promising indeed and will work spectacularly well. No sweat.

Look after yourself and attend to any health niggles.

You now have a real chance to get your house in order. How about a bit more exercise? In work situations keep your cool and do not be intimidated by others. You are an equal in every respect. Do not panic and do anything for the wrong reasons. Your time will come and by the end of the summer you will have all the answers to what puzzles you now.

Taurus

Scorpio

(April 21-May 21)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

In love you can afford to let your mind wander, just a little. Be careful of your heart, though. Protect yourself until you have a pledge or declaration you know you can trust. Dreamy thoughts can almost be a great substitute for the real thing for now. Indulge yourself and get into the feel of some light-hearted vibes. You will soon have to make some very pragmatic moves and decisions, but, there is time enough for all that. Be cool in stressful situation.

Make the most of your silver tongue and native wit.

Love heats up and provides a bit of sauce - about time too? In work, do not get caught out by not paying attention-okay? Be realistic with regard to what you can achieve, while the rest of the world stumbles on. Enjoy the distractions on offer; for love has surprises up its sleeve. You would do well to reserve judgment and give your heart some room to breathe.

Financially, do not get fazed by a temporary hitch.

Gemini

Sagittarius

(May 22-June 21)

Keep an eye out for bargains. You can clothe yourself and furnish your house tastefully and economically. This stretch of time puts the emphasis on your material well-being. You can sort out a lot in practical ways now. Communications will restore your faith in your closest relationships and boost your confidence with regard to the support system you already have. Value this and build on a good thing.

Preserve situations that feel right.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Things are now moving in the right direction. Be brave and courageous when confronting someone.

You must clear up long-term misunderstandings.

Prepare to move on, lighter and brighter. Destiny has a cunning plan in place for you. Prepare to make a splash whether you want to or not. Attention will be turned in your direction BIG time, so be on your best behaviour. The behaviour of others is unpredictable; but do not let it faze you.

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

You must now ditch anyone or anything that has become untenable. Maintain your optimism and stay optimistic, in order to attract financial luck.

Legal matters can be pinned down to everyone’s satisfaction. Be prepared to travel and embrace what is on offer. You will soon settle into a spirit of excitement and adventure that has been mighty elusive in the last number of years. Energies shift in your favour.

Social complications may arise if you panic where a change of time, place or person is concerned. If you are organizing an event, keep your cool. Honour the organic flow and let things unfold naturally. It will pay to steer clear of any kind of dispute; there really is no point; you will not be heard. There is much too much hot air flying around. However, love gets a welcome boost. A bit more trust in the benevolent universe would not go amiss. Be self-confident.

Leo

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)

(July 24-Aug 23)

Where there is a will, there is a way: be deterYou really must stop harping back to the past. Regrets and sorrow are completely pointless. Life is too short for all that and you need your future thoughts to be much more positive, so that you do not undermine what you can achieve. Focus in the present now and all will be well. Be assured of your success: it is certain. Love compensates for a whole lot. Get some fresh air and clear the head.

Be vigilant and make the most of all your contacts. A light-hearted sense of fun and mischief is very much worth developing. Be loud and proud and a little dangerous to know. If you push out the boundaries now, you will keep the rest of us amused. Your natural ebullience will clear the way for many curious moments. The adventure which is your life is about to turn a major corner. Prepare yourself and grab opportunities whole heartedly. Just say ‘YES’!

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

The surface appearance of things is likely to The great outdoors beckon as do the sweet sounds and smells of springtime. Await developments and try not to make any major changes. A travel plan looks good, though. Take the rest you need and prepare for what is ahead. Put those feet up and recharge your batteries. Maybe a trip is now possible? If not, let your mind wander, an exercise which could be very productive indeed. Preserv energies for you.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Be confident and funny when it counts. Deal with family problems head-on. Do not worry and certainly do not make anyone else’s problems your own, which, in a nutshell, means deal with your side of things only. Everything will work out just fine.

Just do the next thing and fulfil your obligations. Financially, things look good and you can pretty much have whatever you ask for. Now is the time to chat up the bank manager if you need to.

The San Juan Weekly

Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 61

The San Juan Weekly

March 10 - 16, 2011

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

63

Ziggi

64

March 10 - 16, 2011

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