nyt-short-notyet.txt NYT -0913: SCIENCE TIMES - ON VIEW The Cough That Launched a Hit Movie ... By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. For all the relentless realism of the film "Contagion," much of the real drama of epidemic disease never quite makes it to the screen. ===== notyet (2 pages) When Hollywood turns to medicine, accuracy generally heads for the hills. But the creators of the new action thriller "Contagion" went to unprecedented lengths to fact-check their story of a destructive viral pandemic, retaining a panel of nationally renowned virologists and epidemiologists as consultants. The intent was to infuse the usual hyperbole with an extra frisson: This is the way it could really happen. Be very afraid.

You have to applaud the effort, for the movie does indeed offer a procession of dead-on accurate scenes that not only could happen but, in many cases, have already happened. Still, the whole thing is an improbable caricature, with 100 action-packed Hollywood minutes veering far from reality. You can still be very afraid if you want, if a contagious apocalypse happens to be your thing. But it's not going to happen this way.

"Contagion" begins modestly and realistically enough, with a cough. Gwyneth Paltrow, a midlevel executive for an international corporation, gets sick on her way home from a business trip. She coughs from Hong Kong through a layover in Chicago and on to Minneapolis, producing clouds of a deadly Asian virus and leaving infectious droplets on everything she touches. She is the pandemic's index case, and her napkins, used tissues, drinking glasses and three-ring binder are all vectors of disease.

Her infection is a fictional combination of influenza and brain infection caused by the exotic Nipah virus. Nipah (NEE-pa) is carried by fruit bats in South Asia: bats don't get sick from it, but their saliva and urine may infect pigs, which do. Sick pigs have transmitted Nipah to their human caretakers, and in the dozen small outbreaks described since 1999, sick humans sometimes passed it on to their own caretakers. The disease has never been seen outside a rural setting and has certainly never traveled on a plane. Still, Nipah, with its 50 to 75 percent mortality rate in humans, tops most lists of scary new animal-derived viruses.

The creators of "Contagion" scaled down the mortality rate of their "MEV-1" virus infection to 25 percent (for comparison, the mortality rate of SARS in 2003 was about 15 percent, and that of even the worst influenza substantially less). Then they jacked up the viral infectivity so that a few days into the fictional epidemic dozens of unrecognized cases already dot the globe. By the time Kate Winslet, who plays an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gets off her plane in Minneapolis, that city has enough brewing cases to fill a couple of football fields with hospital beds. A few weeks later, with disease exploding everywhere, the world's social fabric begins to dissolve.

What follows is a series of gruesome worst-case scenarios, crumpling together every conceivable social and ethical complication of epidemic disease, for what boils down to a giant in-your-face public-service advertisement for the world's beleaguered health agencies.

The medical details, including the rapid demise of several excellent actors (after some highly unrealistic foaming at the mouth) are the least of it.

We also experience, in short order, the downside of contact tracing, a time-honored epidemiologic term for figuring out who has touched whom ・ all privacy immediately disappears. Likewise, a forced quarantine, the major tool for fighting contagious disease, sacrifices individual rights for the public good. Competing governmental agencies square off on turf and budget issues, while entire countries adopt aggressively misguided routines.

We see gigantic public mood swings, amplified by Internet scares. Some people become irrationally terrified, others irrationally fearless. Many succumb to the lure of unlikely patent medicines. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs quickly appear, like maggots, to feed these instincts and to feed off them.

We see selfish and selfless behavior, often in the same person. We see unexpected scientific setbacks ("It's mutated!") and slow steps to ultimate control. All unfold against the eerie visuals of quarantine, with uncollected garbage lining deserted streets, empty public spaces, masked faces, isolated clusters of families reduced to a primitive, almost tribal existence.

And indeed, from AIDS to SARS to the swine flu, pretty much all of this has actually happened somewhere in the world, if on a much smaller scale.

But for all the relentless realism, much of the real drama of epidemic disease never quite makes it to the screen.

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First, nowhere but in Hollywood does medicine, even in its most catastrophic form, unfold with the sustained hysteria that requires the beat of this unnerving, tympanitic score.

The real horror of most disease is that it all moves so slowly, leaving everyone involved all too much time to think. The worse the illness, the more time seems to drag.

And that is not only for relatives sitting in waiting rooms. At every medical ground zero, doctors and nurses pace and dither and second-guess themselves, waiting for tests to be done and results to dribble back, cursing when the IV falls out and struggling forever to put it back in, counting days and doses, watching trends. Patients do nothing but wait for the next footfall outside their door. Waiting is where much of the real drama of contagion lies. But you cannot make a movie out of that.

Further, while medical heroics may abound these days, characters like Ms. Winslet's are vanishingly rare. Medicine has become a team sport, and public health even more so. It rumbles forward like any bureaucracy, creating policy in a series of endless meetings ・ deadly for narrative purposes. So character-driven screenplays like this one become parables, with cardboard characters standing in for what is really a nuanced cast of thousands.

Finally, pandemics are never everywhere. Even in the midst of history's worst, ordinary life has always lurched on. Millions died from the flu in 1918, but many more millions were untouched. The early years of AIDS unfolded against a breathtakingly bland backdrop ・ the social equivalent of the crystalline blue sky on 9/11. Walk one block from hospitals on whose wards all hell is breaking loose and you would never know there is a problem.

The bizarre disconnect cocooning AIDS fueled an anger in affected communities that persists to this day. You cannot tell the story of AIDS without exploring the surrounding silence.

So artists seeking to represent the realities of epidemic disease have a difficult mission. The noise and action are only half the story. The rest is all very pedestrian and quiet.

The C.D.C.'s main spokeswoman during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of immunization and respiratory diseases. Dr. Schuchat, who has been with the agency for almost 25 years, has been involved with dozens of epidemics. She has the standard drills down cold ・ in fact, the creators of "Contagion" enlisted her to coach Ms. Winslet before filming began.

But in an essay published a few months ago in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that reflected on the toll H1N1 took among pregnant women, Dr. Schuchat veered away from the usual story line.

"Pandemics are personal," Dr. Schuchat began, going on to tell the story of her great-aunt Bessie, who was killed during childbirth by the 1918 flu. Bessie's death resounded through generations of the Schuchat family, just one of the millions of quiet, necessary footnotes without which the big glitzy narratives are neither accurate nor complete. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -0917: OPINION: OPINIONATOR - THE THREAD Let's Talk About Death ... By PETER CATAPANO A lot of time was spent this week discussing whom it was O.K. to kill - or perhaps just let die. ===== notyet The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.

As medical science has proven, death is hard to avoid. But it was especially hard this week.

And not just awful, actual death, of which there was plenty ・ droves of Somalia's famine-ravaged refugees or Kenya's desperate gasoline scavengers dying in a storm of flame ・ but also theoretical death, possible death, death to come. Death as a policy point. Death as a matter of discussion or partisan debate, or punishment for transgressions as morally clear as murder or as murky as not having health insurance.

Put simply, a lot of time was spent this week discussing whom it was and was not O.K. to kill ・ or perhaps just let die. To start, there was the high level debate within the Obama administration on just what sort of Islamic militant they would be allowed to kill in Yemen and Somalia (terror plotters, sure, but are foot soldiers O.K.?). Matters closer to home included

Page 2 nyt-short-notyet.txt a torrent of petitions against the planned execution of an inmate in Georgia, Troy Davis; his case has become a celebrity cause, with advocates like Desmond Tutu, Pope Benedict, Jade Jagger and the Indigo Girls (you got that right) among the petitioners. In Texas, the execution of Duane Buck, a man convicted of double-murder, was halted today, after Buck had already eaten his last meal, because of questions of racial bias in his sentencing.

And notably, those who saw last week's "Texas death penalty cheer" ・ in which Rick Perry's role in Texas's execution rate was roundly applauded, twice, by an audience at a Republican debate ・ and judged it an aberration were proven wrong on Monday when something strangely similar happened at the CNN-Tea Party Express Republican debate (full transcript here).

In a column that generated much discussion, The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson described the scene:

The lowest point of the evening ・・ and perhaps of the political season came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. "Who pays?" Blitzer asked.

"That's what freedom is all about, taking your own risks," Paul answered. "This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody. .?.?."

Blitzer interrupted: "But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?"

There were enthusiastic shouts of "Yeah!" from the crowd.

"You'd think one of the other candidates might jump in with a word about Christian kindness," Robinson wrote. "Not a peep."

To be fair, The Washington Post's Erik Wemple rightly points out, the response was more a like a few jeers, nothing compared to the full-throated chorus at the first debate. Still, Perry himself confessed to being "taken back" by it.

That almost made him seem, well, sensitive.

Which raises the question, when you kind of shock a guy who doesn't flinch at executions, what exactly is going on in the bleachers?

In his column, Robinson asked, "Where are the compassionate conservatives?" (As though we were lousy with them only weeks ago.) "According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus told the Pharisees that God commands us to 鼠 ove thy neighbor as thyself.' There is no asterisk making this obligation null and void if circumstances require its fulfillment via government."

To which Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway responded: "Of course, there is no addition to Christ's statement along the lines of 奏 herefore, thy must support massive government spending programs,' either."

Clever retort, that. But Mataconis actually puts time and thought into a more thorough rebuttal to Robinson's position.

Perhaps there are situations where only government action can address a situation. In this country, we've more or less got a social compact that accepts the existence of a basic safety net for the indigent that enjoys wide popular support. However, Robinson wants to go further than that, his basic argument that the only charity that matters is government "charity" and that opposing government action to "help" the poor is equivalent to hoping that they die. This is, with all due respect to Robinson, an utterly ridiculous example of the kind of close-minded thinking one sees far too often from political pundits. Agreeing that the poor should be helped is where the compassion comes in. Disagreeing about how that should be done does not make one uncompassionate,・

At Cafe Hayek ・・ that's after Friedrich, not Salma Robinson received a suitably skeptical response from Don Boudreaux, who asks a good question::

I don't get it. Why is Robinson's call to force Smith to care for Jones an exhibition of compassion, while Paul's endorsement of arrangements under which Smith voluntarily cares for Jones a display of heartless indifference to the plight of others?

Page 3 nyt-short-notyet.txt Reasonable people can disagree over whether or not voluntary charity would be sufficient. It's a mistake, however, to classify coerced "giving" as "compassion," and downright bizarre to accuse those of us who would rely more upon genuine compassion ・ evidenced by people giving from the goodness of their hearts rather than from a desire to avoid imprisonment ・ as endorsing a society without compassion.

Is it true, as our colleague Paul Krugman wrote, that "compassion is out of fashion," that "lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.'s base."

Andrew Sullivan delves into the issue, but can't quite shake his distaste for the behavior of the audience:

Of course, even if such libertarian purity does make sense, that cannot excuse the emotional response to the issue in the crowd last night. Maybe a tragedy like the death of a feckless twentysomething is inevitable if we are to restrain health care costs. But it is still a tragedy. It is not something a decent person cheers. Similarly the execution of hundreds, while perhaps defensible politically and even morally (although I differ), is nonetheless a brutal, awful business. You don't delight in it. And the same is true of torture. Even if you want to defend its use in limited circumstances, it remains an absolute evil, no humane person would want to do it, and no civilized person would brag of it or dismiss any moral issue with it at all.

At Outside the Beltway, Steven L. Taylor concurs, adding a little disdain for Paul's response, which, while not as unforgiving as the peanut gallery's, was hardly a model of compassion:

[L]ike Sullivan, I find the lack of introspection on these issues as displayed by some to be disturbing. This was my reaction to Rick Perry's all too calm response to the death penalty question from last week's debate and I feel the same way about Pauls' response to Blitzer's question about the uninsured. Purity about justice and liberty (respectively) make for great slogans and debates over drinks, but reality is a tad bit more messy than that. And while what one can extrapolate from audience outbursts is limited, the cheers from the debate crowd in both instances are likewise disquieting.

Joe Conason at RealClear Politics pointed out that the nation's health care situation is a threat to a population much more real than Blitzer's hypothetical man:

Lack of insurance ・・ and the lack of adequate insurance present a daily concern for increasing numbers of Americans. According to the Census Bureau, the exact number has reached 49.9 million, the highest number since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and the highest percentage of uninsured Americans since the recession of 1976.

The consequences are tragic and ・ although financially costly to American society compared with other advanced countries ・ go far beyond mere money. Being uninsured means foregoing necessary care, especially preventive care, which annually causes the premature deaths of at least 50,000 people.

The Republicans up on that debate stage and the tea party claque don't think this is their problem. They don't care. They must be the only Christians in the world who would cheer wildly at the idea of someone dying from lack of health insurance.

"Our politics is getting weird," writes Chris Ladd on Frum Forum.

While there have always been some odd characters attracted to power, it seems we're dealing with a whole new category of crazy, something we've never encountered at the highest levels of our politics before.

This year we had a GOP figure candidate rise to the top of some polls by claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He was replaced briefly by someone who has accused the President of trying to set up mandatory, Communist-style re-education camps for youth. She's been replaced by a guy who calls Social Security a giant fraud.

Something has changed. Facts are elitist. Credibility is evolving into a liability and crazy has become a tactic. Where is this coming from?

Ladd goes on to attribute it to, well, the Internet, the proliferation of shiny devices and our new ability to build technological fortresses of self-reinforcing information.

Maybe he's right. Or maybe it was just something he picked up on the Web.

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NYT -0917: TRAVEL - PRACTICAL TRAVELER Where the Bargains Are ... By MICHELLE HIGGINS If you're looking for five-star service at three-star prices, consider Latin America for your next vacation. ===== notyet LOOKING for five-star service at three-star prices? Try Latin America for your next vacation. Whether it's due to a good exchange rate (as in Argentina) or simply because a destination is just coming into its own (Colombia), travelers will find that they will often pay less for a boutique hotel experience and that meals are more reasonable, if not downright cheap, compared with Europe or the United States.

Below, places with the most bang for your buck.

Argentina

NONSTOPS FROM Atlanta , Dallas, Houston, Miami, New York.

WHAT YOU GET Cafe culture, wineries and estancias, Patagonia's glaciers, tango.

WHY GO NOW? While the dollar fluctuates in Europe, Canada and parts of Asia, it continues to go a long way in Argentina, where attractions range from the wineries and estancias (or guest ranches) of Mendoza to the wide boulevards and vibrant night life of Buenos Aires.

Weekend rates at the luxurious InterContinental Nordelta Tigre-Buenos Aires in early December start at $165 a night, based on a recent online search. Similar rooms at the InterContinental in Madrid were listed at 132 euros (about $182 at $1.38 to the euro) and 298 euros ($410) at the InterContinental Paris-Le Grande. Lunch in a Buenos Aires outdoor cafe with an appetizer, main course and espresso can be had for the equivalent of roughly $10 (at about 4 Argentine pesos to the dollar), said Myer Henderson, marketing manager at Say Hueque Tours in Buenos Aires.

For a fuller view of the country, Say Hueque has an eight-day Glaciers, Falls & Tango package that visits Iguacu Falls, Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia, and Buenos Aires, starting at $969 a person.

Belize

NONSTOPS FROM Atlanta , Dallas, Houston, Miami.

WHAT YOU GET Spectacular snorkeling and diving, Mayan ruins, luxury eco-lodges in tropical jungles.

WHY GO NOW? Long a backpacker's paradise, this English-speaking nation in Central America has a selection of upscale offerings that has grown significantly in the last decade. Yet you'll still pay less for those luxury digs than what you would for comparable accommodations in many parts of the Caribbean .

For example, prices at Matachica, a boutique resort on Ambergris Caye, which recently underwent a multimillion-dollar redesign and expansion, start at $195 a night for a 350-square-foot villa with a private patio and hammock. There are also plenty of budget options. The Maya Beach Hotel near Placencia, for example, has fall rates as low as $69 a night for a beachfront queen room. High season rates start at $99 a night.

Go before December 2012, the end of the 5,126-year era of the Maya Calendar, an event expected to lure crowds and raise prices.

Colombia

NONSTOPS FROM Atlanta , Houston, Miami, New York, Washington and Orlando and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

WHAT YOU GET Tropical beaches; Amazon jungle; snowcapped Andes mountains.

WHY GO NOW? Having made great strides in safety, Colombia is back on many travelers' wish lists. Last year, the number of visitors from the United States rose 10 percent, according to Proexport Colombia, the nation's tourism

Page 5 nyt-short-notyet.txt promoter. Though the State Department continues to caution United States travelers of violence by narco-terrorist groups in some rural areas and big cities in its Travel Warning on Colombia, it also notes that security has "improved significantly" in recent years in tourist destinations like Cartagena and Bogota.

International hotel chains have taken note. Next year, Colombia expects 42 hotels to open, adding 7,287 rooms to the country. Still, prices remain low, even at the high end. The JW Marriott Bogota, which opened last year, was recently offering last-minute weekend rates from $209 on its Web site.

Oasis Collections, a boutique rental agency with design-oriented apartments in Latin America, has several affordable Colombia options including a three-bedroom on a private island in the Rosario Islands for $2,880 a week.

Nicaragua

NONSTOPS FROM Atlanta , Houston, Miami

WHAT YOU GET Colonial cities; thatch-roof cabanas; rain forest zip lines.

WHY GO NOW? It's affordable and fun. Lonely Planet put the country high on its list of Top Value Destinations for 2011, noting that the careful traveler can get by spending $15 a day, "and midrange comforts can be had for less than double that amount."

For those beyond the backpacker budget, upscale eco-lodges and resorts continue to open. Aqua Wellness Resort, aquanicaragua.com, which opened in January on the Pacific Coast, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Managua, has four-night packages from $1,100, including breakfast and lunch or dinner, and a 15 percent discount on spa services.

Set on a private island in Lake Nicaragua, the Jicaro Ecolodge, jicarolodge.com, which opened last year with nine casitas, has a three-night Honeymoon Green Season Value package for two from $890 with taxes through Nov. 20, including a romantic dinner on the floating deck or a couples massage.

Panama

NONSTOPS FROM More than 10 United States cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami.

WHAT YOU GET Caribbean beaches, lush rain forests, night life, free medical insurance.

WHY GO NOW? The Panama Tourism Authority has created deals and other incentives, some rather unusual, to help reach its goal of attracting more than two million tourists this year.

For example, visitors can get free emergency medical insurance for up to 30 days. Pick up a brochure and insurance card at the tourist information booths in the immigration area at Tocumen International Airport for details.

And earlier this year, Copa Airlines, in partnership with the Panama Tourism Authority, began offering free stopovers in Panama, allowing passengers on their way to the 52 destinations the airline serves to visit two destinations for the price of one.

International hotel chains continue to open in Panama City. In July, Trump Ocean Club, TrumpPanamaHotel.com, made its debut in Panama with 369 rooms from $259 a night (with the Experience Panama package, which includes daily breakfast and a $50 hotel dining credit), five pools and plans for a casino, a spa and a beach club on nearby Isla Viveros. Next month , Starwood's fifth hotel in Panama, the 611-room Westin Playa Bonita, is set to open just outside the capital.

To encourage travel beyond the capital, the tourism authority is running a campaign, "Discover your Interior," promoting the volcanic landscape of El Valle de Anton in Cocle province, the rivers and mountains of Chiriqui province, and the Caribbean beaches of Bocas del Toro with special rates. For example, about 20 hotels in Bocas del Toro are offering two-night packages with round-trip airfare from Tocumen airport, breakfast and taxes from $240 a person. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -0918 Anti-Qaddafi Forces Capture, Then Lose, Last Redoubts ... By ROD NORDLAND

Page 6 nyt-short-notyet.txt Attacks by former rebels in Bani Walid and Surt often begin with bravado and bluster, and end with a disorderly and sometimes humiliating retreat. ===== notyet (2 pages) TRIPOLI, Libya ・ In a conflict that has seen more than its share of martial ineptitude, the struggles for the town of Bani Walid and the city of Surt stand out.

Not since the fight for Brega , on the coast, have cities been claimed to have fallen so often, well before they did. And not since Ajdabiya, a desert town on the road to Benghazi in the east, have anti-Qaddafi forces repeatedly attacked and fled so frequently, often beginning the fighting day with bravado and bluster, and ending it with a disorderly and sometimes humiliating retreat.

That chain of events was repeated again on Friday both in Surt, the hometown of the ousted strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and in Bani Walid, the seat of the country's most powerful tribe, the Warfallah, known for its support of the old government.

On Friday the attackers had pushed almost to the center of Bani Walid when Qaddafi forces counterattacked and gave them such a battering that at least 70 were wounded, and 4 or more were killed, while the rest fled the town.

Tripoli fell nearly a month ago now, with the remnants of Qaddafi loyalists fleeing to four places, which have been under siege by the former rebels since at least the beginning of September (the other two places are the smaller desert oases of Sabha and Hun in the south).

By most accounts, the attackers greatly outnumber the defenders; they have apparently limitless ammunition, hundreds of pickup trucks with heavy weapons mounted on the back, and even Russian-made main battle tanks like the T-72. The defenders have Grad multiple rocket launchers, mortars and RPG-7s ・ all weapons portable enough to hide from the air ・ but whenever Qaddafi forces wheel out any vehicles or heavy weapons, NATO promptly destroys them in airstrikes.

For weeks now, defenders in Bani Walid and Surt have been surrounded by land, and in the case of Surt, blockaded by NATO warships at sea as well , and residents reached by telephone say they have been running out of food, medicine, fuel and water.

So what exactly has been the former rebels' problem?

They say they are taking care not to cause civilian casualties. Others admit that after seven months of the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi, they are just plain tired. With life returning to normal in most of Libya, they are eager to enjoy the fruits of their new freedom ・ and no longer hellbent on dying to sweep away a regime that, in the bigger picture at least, is already history.

Add to that their military inexperience and lack of discipline. In the past two weeks, at least 10 former rebels have been killed because of firearms accidents, often with their own weapons, according to Ali al-Kerdasi, a spokesman for Tripoli Central Hospital, the country's main trauma hospital.

Two exhausted fighters, Hamza Bouzeidi and Mohammed al-Naama, outside Bani Walid conceded Friday night that their side had made errors. "We were disorganized," said Mr. Bouzeidi, describing the waves of attacks by the pro-Qaddafi fighters ・ first from snipers, then from rockets and finally from a barrage of mortars that had killed a man in their group. Mr. Naama wearily took off his helmet, and described the day. "Advances and retreats. Advances and retreats," he said.

Frustration flared after the retreat, leading to arguments. At one point, a man pointed his rocket-propelled grenade launcher at a fellow fighter.

Still, anti-Qaddafi spokesmen on Saturday did what they have done in the past, declaring the fall of Bani Walid and Surt imminent. "Surt will be completely cleared today," said Anis Sharif, the spokesman for the Tripoli Military Council. "And I believe Bani Walid will not take much longer." That may prove true, but such predictions have been greatly devalued by their repetition.

Like dogs tearing off to retrieve imaginary sticks thrown by their masters, television crews and photographers have repeatedly rushed to the front lines to cover the fall of the holdouts, only to discover that the attackers were merely on the outskirts, and not even planning to stay there beyond dark. In some cases, as happened at least three times in the past week, they actually pushed well into the downtown areas, only to be repulsed.

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The photographs produced are very picturesque ・ flames licking the skies from the twin barrels of the former rebels' 30-millimeter antiaircraft guns ・ but what is not as clear is that many such pictures are posed, or taken while the former rebels are doing what they seem to do best, or at least most often ・ firing light and heavy weapons into the sky in celebration of every victory, including imaginary ones.

Antiaircraft weapons are notoriously useless in urban warfare because they are indiscriminate weapons that are hard to control when fired horizontally, and mounting them on pickup trucks, as they generally do, does not help their accuracy.

It is also unclear how firing into the air has any military value when the only warplanes up there belong to NATO and are bombing their opponents.

Such escapades do, however, take a toll. Dr. Othman el-Zentani, the chief forensic pathologist in Tripoli, said so far falling bullets had killed at least 20 people in the city. One was a 10-year-old girl taking a nap in the family's garden, long after fighting in Tripoli had stopped. Her mother thought she had a nosebleed, but could not rouse her, Dr. Zentani said. A bullet had drilled into the girl's brain as she slept.

Spokesmen for the former rebels concede that the task of taking the regime's last redoubts has been much harder than they had expected.

"The resistance is stronger than we believed it would be in Bani Walid because there are high-ranking regime figures there and they are trying to protect themselves," Mr. Sharif of the Tripoli Military Council said.

Ismail Ibrahim al-Qatani, a commander with the Martyrs of the City Brigade from Benghazi, recalled from his Tripoli hospital bed that on Friday morning he and his men were having such an easy time working their way into Bani Walid that they expected the city to fall completely by 5 p.m.

At 6 p.m., pro-Qaddafi forces counterattacked with rockets and sniper fire, he said, wounding 50 of his men, including himself; he was hit by shrapnel in both legs and the neck. Other hospitalized former rebels said they had seen 11 of their fighters killed Friday, though officials reported only four fatalities in Bani Walid (plus 24 in Surt on Saturday, according to the Misurata Military Council, whose fighters were attacking the city).

A hospitalized fighter from the Tripoli Revolutionary Brigade, Marwa Mohammed Bin Yalla, said he was one of 20 wounded in his unit. "If only the civilians would all leave Bani Walid, we could get them, but they are too cowardly to fight us in the open," Mr. Bin Yalla said.

"There must be one of Qaddafi's sons in there, which is why it's so hard to get to the center," Mr. Qatani said. Yet he added that he was confident the rebels would take Bani Walid, probably Sunday. "We just need to bring up some tanks."

Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from outside Bani Walid, Libya. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -0923 Facebook as Tastemaker ... By SOMINI SENGUPTA and BEN SISARIO Facebook is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch, hear, read and buy. ===== notyet (2 pages) SAN FRANCISCO ・ Facebook, the Web's biggest social network, is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch , hear, read and buy.

The company announced new features here on Thursday that could unleash a torrent of updates about what you and your Facebook friends are doing online: Frank is watching "The Hangover," Jane is listening to Jay-Z, Mark is running a race wearing Nike sneakers, and so forth. That in turn, Facebook and its dozens of partner companies hope, will influence what Frank and Jane and Mark's friends consume.

Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online ・ and increasingly offline ・ life.

Page 8 nyt-short-notyet.txt "We think it's an important next step to help tell the story of your life," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, who introduced the new features at the company's annual conference for developers. He called what Facebook was doing an effort to "rethink some industries."

Facebook's moves sharpen the battle lines between the social networking giant and Google, the search giant, because Facebook is trying to change the way people find what they want online. Searching the Web is still the way most people discover content ・ whether it is news, information about wedding photographers or Swiss chard recipes. Facebook is trying to change that: in effect, friends will direct other friends to content. Google has its own social network product in Google+, but it is far behind Facebook.

"This is two big rivals getting into each others' backyards," said Sean Corcoran, an analyst with Forrester Research. "It changes the game for what social networks have been doing. What Facebook is saying is, we are your life online, and also how you discover and share."

Facebook is not becoming a purveyor of media products, like Apple or Amazon.com. Rather, it is teaming up with companies that distribute music, movies, information and games in positioning itself to become the conduit where news and entertainment is found and consumed. Its new partners include Netflix and Hulu for video, Spotify for music, The Washington Post and Yahoo for news, Ticketmaster for concert tickets and a host of food, travel and consumer brands.

For companies that distribute news and entertainment, a partnership with Facebook can draw eyeballs and subscribers, though it still remains unclear exactly how much more revenue a Facebook friend recommendation can generate. Music industry analysts said the new Facebook offerings stand to improve the prospects of new media companies like the music service Spotify, which already has two million users worldwide. But they also pose a challenge to the biggest music seller of all: iTunes from Apple, which has added social features that have gained little traction.

For Facebook, the potential payoff is huge, especially as it seeks to make itself more valuable in advance of a possible public offering. A new feature called Timeline lets users post information about their past, like weddings and big vacations. And everywhere on the site, users will be able to more precisely signal what they are reading, watching, hearing or eating. This will let Facebook reap even more valuable data than it does now about its users' habits and desires, which in turn can be used to sell more fine-tuned advertising.

How users will react to the new features remains to be seen. The site's evolution could make it easier for them to decide how to spend their time and money. But it could also potentially allow them to shut out alternative viewpoints and information that is not being shared among their set of friends.

And not everyone wants to rely on their friends to shape their cultural discoveries. "Some of my friends have pretty awful taste in music," said Alexander White, whose Colorado-based Next Big Sound tracks social media responses for artists and record labels. "It's one filter. It's not the be-all, end-all."

As of May, Americans spent more time with Facebook than with the next four largest Web brands combined, according to Nielsen . Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, described Facebook as "sort of a walled garden" that, for better or worse, can increasingly filter every other activity on the Internet.

"As Facebook becomes more and more synonymous with the Internet experience, that is going to benefit Facebook shareholders," Mr. Brynjolfsson said. "Facebook has been very successful in getting the lion's share of people's time and attention. Their challenge in the coming years is to convert that dominance in time and attention into a bigger share of consumer wallets ・ a bigger share of money they spend either directly on Facebook or indirectly through advertising."

Other Internet giants have enviable assets of their own. Google has a mountain of data based on how people search. Amazon knows plenty about what you might want to buy, based on what you've bought. But no other technology company has Facebook's treasure trove of social data. It has 800 million users, half of whom return to the site every day, and it also has the information they reveal about themselves, sometimes unwittingly. With it, Facebook has the ability to leverage peer pressure at a grand scale.

Facebook executives describe their efforts as upending the traditional model of marketing. Rather than just helping people buy what they need, they aim to curate what they might want.

Its partnership with Zynga, maker of the popular game FarmVille, illustrates how Facebook can leverage its platform. The alliance has been enormously lucrative for both companies. Whether that model can be replicated with movies, music, or

Page 9 nyt-short-notyet.txt even news remains to be seen.

Still, Facebook has become unavoidable for the entertainment business. Hollywood increasingly realizes the power of peer recommendations to sell movies and television shows; some in the industry call this the "killer gateway."

Studios have long looked at Facebook as an important marketing tool, setting up pages for characters and movies. They have also been experimenting with offering full movies on the site. Warner Brothers, Miramax and Lions Gate Entertainment have all allowed Facebook users to watch movies they have paid for with Facebook's virtual currency, called Credits.

Now the studios are hoping the Facebook platform will let them connect even more directly with customers ・to grab a Facebook user's attention by telling her that her friend has watched a particular television show.

Netflix wants to allow subscribers to watch its video on Facebook . But its plans face a stumbling block in Washington. A law called the Video Privacy Protection Act prohibits the release of information about what movies a person is renting. That law would have to be lifted in the United States.

The changes raise a fundamental challenge for Facebook: can it be all things to everyone? Some of its users want to share with a small group of friends, while others want to be completely open. And there are users who complain about the trivia that sometimes seems to flood the site.

"Facebook wants to be omnipresent in the Web experience by adding commerce, video and mail to their early successes with news feeds and picture tagging," said Jodee Rich, founder of People Browsr, based in San Francisco, which analyzes data from social networks. "Trying to be all things to all people was the undoing of Microsoft and AOL. If Facebook continues to overreach, they will stumble."

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles and Nick Bilton from San Francisco. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -0924: EXHIBITION REVIEW Data as Art, as Science, as a Reason for Being ... By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN 'Think," the interactive exhibition sponsored by I.B.M. at Lincoln Center, celebrates the company's centennial as well as promotes its focus on information collection and analysis. ===== notyet (2 pages) Anyone walking past Lincoln Center during the last few days, and glancing downward at its new access road, Jaffe Drive, would have seen what seemed to be a slightly eccentric art installation. A long band of animated colored lights would snake across a 123-foot-long wall of LEDs as a digital clock counted backward. Then that band might suddenly twist and wind around itself, erupt into curves, contort into waves, and, just as unexpectedly, subside again into temporary linear calm.

Or else, if you watched long enough, the wall might go blank, and when lighted again, would resemble a kind of elongated container. Bluish lights would pour inside it, mounting and sloshing about like some kind of luminous liquid, until the entire wall's array would be filled to overflowing. And then the "liquid" would seem to spill from the sides, dripping down in cascades as the container emptied.

Now , with the opening of I.B.M.'s "Think" exhibition to the public, visitors can walk down the drive, consult text panels with explanations of these patterns and others, and obtain free timed tickets to a subterranean space where 40 seven-foot-high media panels stand like miniature pillars, showing a 12-minute film about "making the world work better." The screens then turn interactive, offering additional information and sensation, before visitors exit along an illuminated wall that offers a chronicle of 100 milestones in I.B.M.'s history, for this show is being mounted in honor of that corporation's centennial. The exhibition is visually striking, and its information is often compelling. But it also requires some deciphering and examination.

It turns out that the initial "data wall," as it is called, offers a series of displays culled from "live data streaming," some from sensors around Lincoln Center. The snaking line of light that streams across the wall, for example, is a representation of the movement of traffic along Broadway and Columbus Avenue as it is tracked by a specially mounted camera. When the flow is thwarted by red lights or traffic, the line leaps out of its straightforward progress and curves and twists into visual knots.

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The other display showing seepage and spillage is the result of robotic monitoring, not near Lincoln Center, but along the Delaware Aqueduct that carries water into New York City from upstate reservoirs; sensors have revealed continual leaks that lose a substantial amount of water every day.

So we are watching representations of complex phenomena: the flow of traffic and of water. And there are other displays that follow: a grid of accumulating vectors represents credit card transactions, the fraudulent ones exploding in red; a vast map of Manhattan with varying colors shows how many rooftops are capable of harnessing solar energy.

Inside the exhibition the interactive screens also show a wide range of images and information. You read about the invention of a fluid microchip in 2009 and see a 19th-century London map charting a cholera epidemic. A jar ornamented with dragons is described as a second-century Chinese seismograph. (Stones drop from the dragons' mouths in response to vibrations.) Brief interviews can be sampled with such disparate subjects as Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, and William J. Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner.

But what is this show meant to be? Partly, it is corporate public relations. We learn about I.B.M.'s astonishing accomplishments over a century, its researchers creating what is now commonplace: UPC bar codes, magnetic strips holding data on cards, computer hard drives. I.B.M. scientists have received Nobel Prizes, performed molecular prestidigitation and won chess and "Jeopardy!" games with pioneering examples of artificial intelligence.

The exhibition is also meant to demonstrate I.B.M.'s vision of the world while defining its mission to the public, for it is no longer an office machine company or the maker of the world's best electric typewriter (the Selectric), or the designer of mainframe computers, or even the manufacturer of the once-ubiquitous IBM PC.

The corporation is now, we learn, concerned with matters far more difficult to define. Its ambition is not just determined by its founder's blunt motto, "Think," but by the bland slogan used to name the company's centennial history book, which appears throughout the show: "Making the World Work Better." Along the data wall, some of those achievements are heralded: reduced crime, improved energy usage, healthier rivers, better air quality, safer food.

I.B.M. also sees this exhibition as a kind of milestone, meant to reveal to visitors something about the cutting edge of computer applications. The company's material points out that this is the first show it has created since its pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, where the exhibitions were designed by Charles Eames (who a few years earlier had created, with his wife, Ray, a landmark exhibition, "Mathematica," for I.B.M. that after a half-century is still impressive and readily sampled at major science museums).

In fact, you get the basic idea: the advances celebrated here involve the development of sensors that can track and trace the most complex phenomena, and of software systems that can analyze and map them.

In the film, for example, we learn about using the rice genome to create more resilient crops. On an interactive screen we read about "smart meters" that assess energy use in the Pacific Northwest, the tracking of disease patterns in southeast Texas and methods for optimizing the delivery of malaria drugs in Tanzania. What once seemed too complex to control is measured and manipulated.

But does the exhibition really help us understand these advances? Consider those outside displays. Some are being measured in real time (like nearby traffic or air quality); others are simulations based on historical data (like credit and debit card transactions). The leaking aqueduct is almost too primitive an example: sensors simply locate leaks. But we get no practical sense of how traffic information might be useful.

What if instead I.B.M. had shown a real-time traffic-management system and how it worked: how traffic flow is affected by the timing of traffic lights, the probabilities of accidents, the presence of bicycle lanes or the types of vehicles driven? That might have been both visually impressive and conceptually intriguing.

And why is there such an elementary notion of making the world "work better"? The definition is not always transparent (nor are tracking and control always beneficent).

The identification of sunny rooftops in New York, for example, suggests that they be used to create solar power, but what are the costs and benefits of power production? Are solar panels always the most efficient and environmentally congenial energy source in an urban environment? Has I.B.M. software been used to compare types of energy delivery? Such an analysis would be an important contribution to contemporary understanding.

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This also raises another question. The exhibition argues that major innovations follow a series of steps: 1) seeing (measuring various phenomena); 2) mapping (organizing information to reveal patterns); 3) understanding (using models to explain complex systems like weather); 4) believing (being convinced that change is possible and necessary); and 5) acting (designing systems that make the world work better).

But this "pattern of progress," as it is called, has an ornate, miscellaneous character. It makes "mapping" seem far less sophisticated than it is, and "believing" seem amorphous and superfluous. It would have been far more powerful to have an interactive display that led viewers on a path of interpretation and mapping, so we could experience the process instead of simply sampling images.

So, yes, the show fails to fulfill its promise and falls short of the standards set by exhibitions in I.B.M.'s distant past. But we still get a sense of a great corporation exploring the most complex human systems with the most advanced technology, marketing its efforts with graphics and, at the very least, promising us all a brighter future.

"Think" will be on display through Oct. 23 at Lincoln Center; lincolncenter.org. ~~~~~~~~~

NYT -0924: TRAVEL - PRACTICAL TRAVELER Try a Private Jet, at Public Prices ... By MICHELLE HIGGINS Though it's still not cheap, the cost of flying in a private jet may rival the price of first- and business-class tickets - and even, occasionally, coach. ===== notyet FLYING in a private jet may not be as far out of reach as you think. Though it's still not cheap, prices are rivaling first- and business-class tickets ・・ and even, occasionally, coach thanks in part to new Web sites, social media and a greater willingness by charter companies and private jet brokers to negotiate in an era of high fuel prices.

Here's how you can land a seat on a private plane for less.

SEARCH FOR LAST-MINUTE, ONE-WAY DISCOUNTS Air Partner, a charter broker based in London, introduced emptysectors.com last year, to help fill so-called empty legs (when the aircraft flies without passengers back to base or between jobs) at discounted rates. Travelers can view which flights are available online but must call for pricing. Other brokers and private jet operators like JetSuite also make empty legs available to individual travelers, so it can pay to shop around.

"The dirty little secret of the industry is, about a third of our flights are empty," said Alex Wilcox, chief executive of JetSuite, based in Southern California, which recently began posting last-minute $499 deals on Facebook for empty legs on the company's four-passenger Embraer Phenom aircraft. "Say a Gulfstream pulls into San Francisco and is going back to Vegas empty," he said. "A few years ago, if you were to say, 訴 f I give you $500 will you take me and my family?' you would get laughed at." But the recession changed such attitudes, Mr. Wilcox said. Now, he said, more companies are saying, "Sure, it'll help pay for the gas."

But empty-leg flights involve a bit of a gamble. If the private jet owner's arrangements change (say, the client they were planning to meet in Miami cancels at the last minute), you're out of luck.

You also need to be flexible to get the best deals. Last month, Mike Lewis, chief executive of a property management company in Los Angeles, was able to score one of JetSuite's $499 Facebook deals for himself and his girfriend for a last-minute empty leg on a four-passenger plane to Tucson. It was just six hours between the time he booked the flight and takeoff. Still, he said, the deal was so good ・ at roughly the same cost as he paid to fly back in coach on US Airways ・ without connections, security hassles and time lost waiting around at the airport, that he hopes to snap up similar bargains in the future.

"For $500 it's a no-brainer to me," he said.

SPLIT THE COST THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA For travelers who can't find an empty leg to meet their schedule, social media is opening up new avenues to private jet travel.

Last month, for example, JetSuite started SuiteShare, which allows a customer to charter a four-passenger aircraft and

Page 12 nyt-short-notyet.txt then offer seats that won't be needed through Facebook(facebook.com/jetsuiteair). Each time another customer joins your flight, the price everyone pays decreases, though JetSuite makes a little more.

Here's how it works: a four-passenger jet from Oakland, Calif., to Las Vegas starts at $1,500. If a second person joins, you pay $750. If a third joins, you pay $375. While that may not be cheaper than simply buying a one-way first-class ticket from San Francisco (such seats were going for about $285, based on a recent online search), if a fourth person joins , the person who booked the charter gets to fly free. The other passengers pay $450, $600 and $750 respectively, based on booking order, and JetSuite makes an additional $300 on the deal.

Social Flights, a new collective buying company in Smyrna, Tenn., started an online service in February that uses social networking to help charter companies fill seats and travelers lower their costs by sharing a plane. Already 57 private plane operators have signed on, offering flights on some 400 aircraft. Travelers register with the site, socialflights.com, and post messages to online groups called Travel Tribes, which are based in the same city or share similar interests ・ for example, football fans who want to follow their team to the Super Bowl. If enough people want to travel to the same place at the same time, each passenger simply pays the cost of his seat. Earlier this year, for example, Social Flights sent 91 Mississippi State fans on three 30-passenger turboprop planes from Jackson, Miss., to Jacksonville, Fla., for the Gator Bowl for $395 round trip each ・ roughly $95 less than the going rate at the time for a coach seat on a commercial flight, according to the company.

SocialFlights also posts one-way empty legs. A recent search pulled up open seats from $200 between Nashville and Knoxville, Tenn., and $300 between Teterboro, N.J., and Big Flats, N.Y.

USE A BROKER TO FIND YOU THE BEST DEAL If you don't have the time or inclination to hunt online for empty legs or to organize your own charter flight, you can hire a broker to do it for you. For a commission, independent private jet brokers can act as your agent to solicit bids for the flight you want from jet companies they have vetted and negotiate the best rate.

They can also help walk you through the fine print of the contract. "If something happens with your child or your health and you can't fly, you need to have a reputable broker who can be your advocate," said Chet Dudzik Jr., president of JetWay Private Air. "If that broker or agent has a good relationship with the charter company, the chances are good you can cancel." In addition, he said, "We assume every aircraft won't take off, so we have a recovery aircraft in place," and no one is left on the ramp.

Even if flying private costs more than you'd like to pay, when you factor in all the hassles of commercial travel that you can avoid ・ from long security lines to overcrowded airplanes to long drives to major airports ・ some travelers may find the splurge worth it.

"Once you've had a taste of it, it's really hard to go back to commercial," said Katrina Garnett, founder of mylittleswans.com, a high-end travel site that partners with Lufthansa Private Jet, a brand of the European carrier, for connecting flights in Europe. Being able to simply show up at the airport at the time you want, "you never have that feeling like you're part of the cattle," she said.

CHECK SAFETY RATINGS Like commercial carriers, charter operators must adhere to government rules, called Federal Aviation Regulations. Still, it is a good idea to check the safety record of the private jet company you are considering flying on. While the number of private charters involved in crashes has dropped in recent years, accidents do occur more frequently outside the commercial mainstream of scheduled flights.

To ensure the plane and crew you're getting are up to snuff, ask for an Argus TripCHEQ or Wyvern PASS report, offered by the two largest private jet safety firms ・ Argus International Inc. and Wyvern Consulting Ltd. ・ which audit charter companies and conduct background checks on crew members, making sure pilots have the requisite number of flying hours for the specific type of aircraft. Either your broker or the private jet company itself (if you're booking directly) should be able to provide this. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -0927 In Riddle of Mideast Upheaval, Turkey Offers Itself as an Answer ... By ANTHONY SHADID Turkish officials are assertively laying out a policy for the realignment of power in the region, with Istanbul anchoring a new era of political stability and economic integration.

Page 13 nyt-short-notyet.txt ===== notyet (2 pages) ISTANBUL ・ Not so long ago, the foreign policy of Turkey revolved around a single issue: the divided island of Cyprus. These days, its prime minister may be the most popular figure in the Middle East, its foreign minister envisions a new order there and its officials have managed to do what the Obama administration has so far failed to: position themselves firmly on the side of change in the Arab revolts and revolutions.

No one is ready to declare a Pax Turkana in the Middle East , and indeed, its foreign policy is strewn this year with missteps, crises and gains that feel largely rhetorical. It even lacks enough diplomats. But in an Arab world where the United States seems in retreat, Europe ineffectual and powers like Israel and Iran unsettled and unsure, officials of an assertive, occasionally brash Turkey have offered a vision for what may emerge from turmoil across two continents that has upended decades of assumptions.

Not unexpectedly , the vision's center is Turkey.

"Turkey is the only country that has a sense of where things are going, and it has the wind blowing on its sails," said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The country's foreign policy seized the attention of many in the Middle East and beyond after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's tour this month of three Arab countries that have witnessed revolutions: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Even Mr. Erdogan's critics were impressed with the symbolism of the trip.

Though many criticize his streak of authoritarianism at home, the public abroad seemed taken by a prime minister who portrayed himself as the proudly Muslim leader of a democratic and prosperous country that has come out forcefully on the side of revolution and in defense of Palestinian rights.

One Turkish newspaper, supportive of Mr. Erdogan, called the visits the beginning "of a new era in our region." An Egyptian columnist praised what he called Mr. Erdogan's "leadership qualities." And days later, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spoke boldly of an axis between Egypt and Turkey, two of the region's most populous and militarily powerful countries, that would underpin a new order in the region, one in which Israel would stay on the margins until it made peace with its neighbors.

"What's happening in the Middle East is a big opportunity, a golden opportunity," a senior Turkish official said in Ankara, the capital. He called Turkey "the new kid on the block."

The trip marked a pivot after what many had viewed as a series of setbacks for a country that, like most of the world, utterly failed to predict the revolts in the region.

After long treating the Arab world with a measure of disdain ・ Israel and Turkey were strategic allies in the 1990s ・ Turkey had spent years cultivating ties with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. More than 25,000 Turks worked in Libya, and Syria was seen as the gateway to Turkey's ambitions to economically integrate part of the Middle East.

Even after the uprisings erupted, Turkey opposed NATO's intervention in Libya. Until last month, it held out hope that Mr. Assad, despite evidence to the contrary, could oversee a transition in Syria.

Though Mr. Erdogan came out early in demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down in Egypt ・ at the very time American officials were trying to devise ways for him to serve out his term ・ that stance came with little cost. Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Erdogan were not fond of each other, and Egyptian officials resented Turkey's growing profile.

"The old policy collapsed, and a new policy is required now toward the Middle East," said Ersin Kalaycioglu, a professor of political science at Sabanci University in Istanbul.

In an interview, Mr. Davutoglu, viewed by many as the architect of Turkey's engagement with the region, laid out that new policy. In addition to a proposed alliance with Egypt, he said Turkey would position itself on the side of the revolts, especially in neighboring Syria, which represents Turkey's biggest challenge. He insisted that Turkey could help integrate the region by virtue of its economy, with its near tripling of exports since Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party took power in 2002.

The outline suggested an early version of the European Union for the Middle East ・ economic integration and political

Page 14 nyt-short-notyet.txt coordination ・ and Mr. Davutoglu said such an arrangement would eventually require at least a degree of military cooperation.

"There should be regional ownership," he said. "Not Turkish, not Arab, not Iranian, but a regional ownership."

The vision is admittedly ambitious, and Mr. Davutoglu's earlier prescription of "zero problems" with neighbors has run up against the hard realities of the region. Turkey faces a growing crisis over rights to gas in the sea off Cyprus, still divided between Greek and Turkish regions and still a foreign policy mess for Turkey. Relations with Israel collapsed after Israeli troops killed nine people on board a Turkish flotilla trying to break the blockade of Gaza last year.

Iran, Turkey's neighbor to the east and competitor in the region, is bitter over a Turkish decision to accede to American pressure and host a radar station as part of a NATO missile defense system. Syrian and Turkish leaders no longer talk with one another.

But the sense of rising Turkish power and influence is so pronounced in the country these days that it sometimes borders on jingoism. It has touched on the country's deep current of nationalism, and perhaps a hint of romanticism, harbored by the more religious, for Turkey's return to an Arab world it ruled for more than four centuries.

"We're not out there to recreate the Ottoman Empire, but we are out there to make the most of the influence we have in a region that is embracing our leadership," said Suat Kiniklioglu, deputy chairman of external affairs for Mr. Erdogan's party.

Even those who bristle at what they see as Mr. Erdogan's arrogance acknowledge that he represents a phenomenon, at home and abroad. He brought his populism to the Arab world, where he displayed an intuitive sense of the resonance that the Palestinian issue still commands, in contrast to American officials who have misunderstood it, failed to appreciate it or tried to wish it away. In speeches, he catered to the West and his domestic critics by embracing a secular state, even as he prayed in suit and tie in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.

For a region long stirred with anger at seemingly impotent leaders, submissive to American and Israeli demands, Mr. Erdogan came across as independent and forceful.

Cengiz Candar, a Turkish columnist with a resume in the Arab world dating from the early 1970s, called it Mr. Erdogan's "animal-like political intuitions."

He added: "And these intuitions tell him, apart from the emotions, that you're on the right track. As along as you take these steps, Turkey is consolidating its stature as a regional power more and more and you will be an actor on the international stage."

There remains a debate in Turkey over the long-term aims of the engagement. No one doubts that officials with his party ・deeply pious, with roots in political Islam ・ sympathize with Islamist movements seeking to enter mainstream Arab politics, namely the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and, more so, the Nahda Party in Tunisia. Mr. Candar calls them "kinsmen." "They speak a common dialect," he said.

But relations remain good with the United States, even if American officials accuse Mr. Erdogan of overconfidence. Some Turkish officials worry that the crisis with Israel will end up hurting the relationship with Washington; others believe that Turkey is bent on supplanting Israel as the junior partner of the United States in the Middle East.

The bigger challenges seem to be within Turkey. Although Turkey has opened new embassies across Africa and Latin America, its diplomatic staff remains small, and the Foreign Ministry is trying to hire 100 new employees per year. Mr. Kiniklioglu, the party official, estimated that no more than 20 people were devising foreign policy.

The exuberance of Turkish officials runs the risk of backlash, too. The Arab world's long-held suspicion toward Turkey has faded, helped by the soft power of popular Turkish television serials and Mr. Erdogan's appeal. Yet senior officials acknowledge the potential for an Arab backlash in a region long allergic to any hint of foreign intervention. Somewhat reflexively, Egyptian Islamists, piqued last week by Mr. Erdogan's comments about a secular state, warned him against interfering in their affairs.

And across the spectrum in Turkey, still wrestling with its own Kurdish insurgency in the southeast, critics and admirers acknowledge that the vision of a Turkish-led region, prosperous and stable, remains mostly a fleeting promise amid all the

Page 15 nyt-short-notyet.txt turmoil. "The image is good," said Mr. Kalaycioglu, the professor. "Whether it's bearing any fruit is anyone's guess. Nothing so far seems to be happening beyond that image ." ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -0927: SCIENCE TIMES Far From Any Lab, Paper Bits Find Illness ... By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. New , inexpensive diagnostic blood tests on thumbnail-size pieces of paper have proved highly accurate, according to early results. ===== notyet BOSTON ・ While other scientists successfully shrank beakers, tubes and centrifuges into diagnostic laboratories that fit into aluminum boxes that cost $50,000, George Whitesides had smaller dreams.

The diagnostic tests designed in Dr. Whitesides's Harvard University chemistry laboratory fit on a postage stamp and cost less than a penny.

His secret? Paper.

His colleagues miniaturized diagnostic tests so they could move into the field with tiny pumps and thread-thin tubes. Dr. Whitesides opted for a more novel approach, reasoning that a drop of blood or urine could wick its way through a square of filter paper without any help.

And if the paper could be etched with tiny channels so that the drop followed a path, and if that path were mined with dried proteins and chemically triggered dyes, the thumbnail-size square could be a mini-laboratory ・ one that could be run off by the thousands on a Xerox machine.

Diagnostics for All, the private company Dr. Whitesides founded four years ago here in Boston's Brighton neighborhood to commercialize his inspirations, has already created such a test for liver damage.

It requires a single drop of blood, takes 15 minutes and can be read by an untrained eye: If a round spot the size of a sesame seed on the paper changes to pink from purple, the patient is probably in danger.

Using paper in diagnostic tests is not entirely new. It soaks up urine in home pregnancy kits and blood in home diabetes kits. But Dr. Whitesides has patented ways to control the flow through multiple layers for ever-more-complex diagnoses. His test has proved more than 90 percent accurate on blood samples previously screened by the laboratory of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard teaching hospital, said Una S. Ryan, chief executive of Diagnostics for All.

"They should be even more accurate on fresh blood," added Dr. Ryan, a biologist. Field tests in India are set for later this year .

The initial target audience is AIDS patients with tuberculosis who must take powerful cocktails of seven or more drugs.

Some drugs damage the liver, and deaths from liver failure are 12 times as common among African AIDS patients as among American ones, Dr. Ryan said, because current liver tests are expensive and require tubes of blood.

The paper test was developed with a $10 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.The foundation and the British government just donated $3 million toward creating three more paper tests to help small farmers. One is for aflatoxin, a poison produced by mold that grows on corn, peanuts and other crops. A large dose can lead to liver cancer, but even small amounts eaten regularly can leave children stunted. Farmers who can prove their crops are mold-free can protect their families and get higher prices. But current tests cost $6 each, far more than farmers can afford. A paper test that works on water washed over the grain could be made for as little as 50 cents, Dr. Ryan estimated. Volume production could drive the cost down to pennies.

The second test checks for milk spoilage caused by bacteria. Many small dairy farmers belong to cooperatives in which they pool their milk, and one sick cow can contaminate a whole batch.

The current test detects just the acidity caused by the bacteria, which is not very specific and can be defeated by adding a base like lime. A cheap enough test would help the cooperative find the offending farmer, and the farmer find the diseased cow.

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The third proposed test detects hormones released into the urine when a cow is pregnant. Currently, farmers have to either watch their cows for behavior changes or perform physical exams that can be dangerous because they require reaching deep into the cow's rectum to palpate the uterus.

"Raising cows is how farmers build wealth," said Patrick Beattie, head of global health operations at Diagnostics for All. "They need better tests."

The company's office here is nothing fancy. The space is sublet from a nanotechnology company in an office park where pride of place belongs to an Acura dealership. Half the lab is piled with high-tech junk abandoned by a previous tenant.

And for all the elegance of the thinking that went into them, the tests themselves are produced in a remarkably low-tech, low-cost fashion. A sheet of filter paper, cut by hand, is fed into an $800 Xerox office printer that uses melted black wax instead of toner. Exactly 132 tests, resembling big shirt buttons, fit on an 8 ?-by-11-inch sheet.

The sheet is then placed for a few seconds into a heating box ・ one executive called it "our $5,000 Easy-Bake oven" ・ to melt the wax deeper into the paper, creating the channels.

(Originally, Dr. Whitesides used a plastic that hardened in ultraviolet light, but wax is cheaper and faster.)

Reagents are spotted on by hand with a pipette ・ a tedious job, but the $100,000 machine that can automate it is not in the budget, Dr. Ryan said. Then the paper "buttons" are cut out by a computer-driven scalpel.

Multiple layers are made this way, then glued into a sandwich and laminated.

Finally, each batch is sealed into a foil envelope to keep out moisture and sunlight.

In an interview in his office in Harvard's main chemistry building, Dr. Whitesides described the origins of his idea.

He began working in microfluidics 20 years ago when the Pentagon was seeking a "lab on a chip" that soldiers could carry to detect bio-warfare threats like anthrax and rabbit fever.

Because cost was less of an issue for the military, expensive polymers could be used.

"But that was too expensive for the developing world," he said, "so I was thinking, 糎 hat's the minimum-cost way of making patterns, of putting things into test zones?' And what came to mind was newspapers and comic books. And that led to these paper diagnostics."

Dr. Whitesides sees many possible advances. The liver-function test uses chemistry. The next generation will use immunology ・ for example, one design has dried antibodies attached to bits of paint that drift over a surface to which other antibodies are fixed. The paint making it through gives the color reaction.

After that, he plans to build something like the battery-powered glucose meter used by diabetics, but on a disposable chip, employing flexible circuits printed with metal-infused ink and light-emitting diodes less than a millimeter across.

He also envisions a chip that will count how many cells in a drop of blood have malaria parasites inside.

Multiplying DNA, a key part of tests for viruses, is a bigger obstacle, since that usually requires repeated heating and cooling.

"I don't see us doing sequencing," he said. "That's still going to be done in an aluminum box. But we're still a long way from getting to the end of what's inventable."

For now, Dr. Whitesides is eager to see his inventions prove their usefulness in the real world.

"I'm going to breathe a sigh of relief when somebody says, 糎 e've used up the first 10,000 in our clinic, and we think they're absolutely terrific. Send us another 50,000.' "

Eventually, Dr. Ryan explained, the goal is for Diagnostics for All, which is nonprofit, to wean itself off grant money by

Page 17 nyt-short-notyet.txt licensing its chip technology to commercial companies.

For example, she said, marathon runners might be able to touch a chip to their sweaty foreheads to see if their electrolytes are still in balance before they drink more water. Or Americans with high cholesterol taking statins, which can also cause liver damage, might routinely monitor their liver enzymes with a finger prick.

Markets like those could give the company an income stream that would go a long way toward supporting its research in Africa, Dr. Ryan said.

"Although," she added, "there will be huge pushback from the lab companies, because that's their bread and butter."

善OSTAGE STAMP' LIVER TEST

Dr. George Whitesides's paper diagnostic test assesses the level of aspartate transaminase in the blood. The enzyme, better known as AST, is released when liver cells break down.

1. A drop of blood is touched to the back of the square of paper. It first seeps through a membrane with pores that block the large red and white blood cells, letting through only the clear plasma.

2. The next layer contains two dried chemicals, one of which is cysteine sulfinic acid, which is chemically similar to aspartate, the amino acid that AST normally binds to. (These chemicals are available from lab supply houses.)

3. If AST is present, it binds to the two chemicals, causing a reaction that ultimately releases sulfite ions, SO3.

4. The next layer contains a methyl dye that is normally blue but turns colorless when sulfites attach to it. It is printed over a pink background, so the spot looks purple. If the layer changes to light pink, the blood contains dangerous levels of AST. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1001: TRAVEL 36 Hours in Krakow, Poland ... By INGRID K. WILLIAMS Offbeat galleries and shiny new restaurants are sprouting up in Poland's rejuvenated second city. ===== notyet IN Krakow, Poland's second city, comparisons are unavoidable. The Old Town's stately main square, ringed by outdoor cafes and dominated by the twin spires of a magnificent church? Like Prague's, but larger. The hilltop castle lording over a languorous river? Like Budapest's, but older. The rollicking night-life scene thumping in grimy tenements? Like Berlin's, but tamer. But this rejuvenated city now also packs some original surprises. Museums are sprouting in formerly dilapidated factories, and offbeat art galleries are showcasing works from the city's creative class. Shiny new restaurants are claiming space among their bohemian brethren, infusing the once-staid local food scene with fresh, modern fare. All this means that Krakow may soon be the cool, post-Communist enclave with which Europe's next crop of emerging cities is compared.

Friday

4 p.m. 1) WALK IN THE PARK

Krakow's compact historic districts are eminently walkable, so start with a stroll through Planty Park, an attractive arboreal arcade that encircles the Old Town. Follow this leafy two-mile loop toward Wawel Hill, where the majestic royal castle and cathedral are perched above the Vistula River. Weave through the hilltop courtyard and then down the back side of the hill to the manicured promenade that hugs the river's green banks. Then continue along the waterfront until you reach the year-old steel-arched Laetus Bernatek Footbridge, a pedestrian- and bike-friendly river crossing that links the Kazimierz and Podgorze districts.

6 p.m. 2) FREE YOUR MIND

Kunst Macht Frei ・ art sets you free. So claims a sculpture, modeled after the haunting entrance to nearby Auschwitz, welcoming visitors to the premier exhibition at the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, or MOCAK (Ulica

Page 18 nyt-short-notyet.txt Lipowa 4; 48-12-263-4001; mocak.com.pl), which opened in May in the industrial Podgorze district. The permanent collection inside the sleek glass-and-concrete galleries features similarly provocative pieces, like a full-scale reproduction of a Guantanamo Bay prison cell by the Polish artist Tomasz Bajer. For a lighter dose of culture, check out the temporary exhibition "Between Sculpture and Fashion," which runs through Oct. 30.

8:30 p.m. 3) TASTE OF POLAND

At Restauracja Pod Baranem (Ulica Swietej Gertrudy 21; 48-12-429-4022; podbaranem.com), the hokey furnishings and moody oil paintings border on kitsch, but the kitchen cranks out reliably solid Polish classics. Start with a steaming bowl of shockingly purple beetroot soup or the hearty cream of mushroom soup served in a bread bowl. Then move on to pierogi ruskie ・・ dumplings stuffed with cottage cheese or sliced duck swimming in sweet apple cinnamon sauce. Cap off the meal with gooey gingerbread for dessert. Dinner for two, about 90 zloty, or $29 at 3 zloty to the dollar, without drinks.

11 p.m. 4) WODKA, 100 WAYS

The Old Town is peppered with bars and outdoor cafes, but to sample the local tipple of choice, head to the Wodka Cafe Bar (Ulica Mikolajska 5; 48-12-422-3214; wodkabar.pl). Forget sampling the entire vodka menu ・ there are around 100 types ・ and start with a chilled glass of hazelnut vodka (7 zloty) that you'll want to sip and savor rather than shoot and scowl. Then settle in with a tatanka (11 zloty), an apple juice and vodka mixture, at one of the three tiny tables downstairs or in the cozy alcove above the bar.

Saturday

10 a.m. 5) ART CRAWL

Start the day with a tour of Polish art through the centuries. Begin at the Cloth Hall, the enormous market building in the middle of the main square, where, in September 2010, the National Museum reinstalled the Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art upstairs (Rynek Glowny 3; 48-12-424-4603; muzeum.krakow.pl) inside four color-coded exhibition rooms. Next visit the Galeria Plakatu Krakow (Ulica Stolarska 8-10; 48-12-421-2640; cracowpostergallery.com), a shop stocked with thousands of the rare 20th-century graphic-art posters that emerged as a major art form in Poland after the World War II; keep an eye out for trippy pieces by Wieslaw Walkuski. Conclude the tour in the 21st century at the Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery (Plac Szczepanski 3a; 48-12-422-1052; bunkier.art.pl), a multistory space that hosts experimental, large-scale exhibitions, like a recent anti-capitalist video installation.

1:30 p.m. 6) COWS AND CAKES

The cow is sacred at Love Krove (Ulica Jozefa 8; 48-12-422-1506), a cool year-old burger joint with mismatched decor, a huge bovine-inspired street-art-style mural scrawled across a wall, and juicy all-beef patties piled high with unusual toppings. Try the Ozzy burger with beetroot, grilled pineapple, cheese and barbecue sauce (15 zloty), plus a bowl of crispy fried potato wedges (5 zloty). For dessert, pop into Cupcake Corner (Ulica Bracka 4; 48-12-341-4272; cupcakecorner.pl), a new bakery run by a cupcake-loving expat from Chicago. Flavors change daily, so cross your fingers that the moist red velvet cupcakes (6 zloty) are on the menu when you go.

4 p.m. 7) HISTORY LESSON

The buzziest attraction in town these days is also the most sobering. The former enamel factory of Oskar Schindler, which was portrayed in Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List," opened in June 2010 as a haunting new branch of the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow (Ulica Lipowa 4; 48-12-257-1017; mhk.pl). The museum's impressive permanent exhibition "Krakow Under Nazi Occupation 1939-1945" traces life (and death) in the city from the outbreak of World War II through the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto with exhibits that are both informative and unforgettably moving.

8 p.m.

Page 19 nyt-short-notyet.txt 8) THE PIEROGI EATERS

Please your palate with a pierogi "palette" ・ a sampler of dumplings stuffed with various fruit (17.50 zloty), meat (39.50 zloty) or vegetarian (36.90 zloty) fillings ・ at Pierozki u Vincenta (Ulica Bozego Ciala 12; 48-501-747-407; kazimierz.uvincenta.pl), a sunny pierogi restaurant with van Gogh-inspired decor and a "Starry Night" mural swirling across the ceiling. Or mix-and-match one of two dozen pierogi varieties on the menu ・ cottage cheese with walnuts (13.50 zloty) is a winner ・ with a free topping, like butter, onions or a generous dollop of sour cream.

10 p.m. 9) JEWISH QUARTER NIGHTS

These days, Krakow's liveliest drinking dens are packed into the dingy streets of Kazimierz, the historical Jewish quarter. On warm nights, pay a visit to the convivial beer garden at Mleczarnia (Ulica Meiselsa 20; 48-12-421-8532; mle.pl), opposite the bohemian cafe's brick-and-mortar location. Then saunter over to the bar Singer (Ulica Estery 20; 48-12-292-0622) near Plac Nowy, Kazimierz's main square, where the ersatz tables lining the sidewalk are actually antiquated sewing machines. When the temperature dips, step indoors at Alchemia (Ulica Estery 5; 48-516-095-863; alchemia.com.pl), a shadowy, candlelit lair with glass beakers strung from the ceiling and a stuffed crocodile hovering above the bar.

Midnight 10) BLUE VAN SPECIAL

In Krakow, the most popular street food is the zapiekanka, a toasted open-faced baguette topped with mushrooms and cheese (or any number of optional add-ons). Conveniently, the rotunda in the middle of Plac Nowy is packed with zapiekanka vendors, but the best of the bunch is Endzior (Plac Nowy; 48-12-429-3754; endzior.eu). If you're willing to walk for your midnight snack, instead seek out the blue van parked just past the elevated railroad tracks beside Hala Targowa (Market Hall) at the intersection of Blich and Grzegorzecka. Until 3 a.m., a white-jacketed duo quietly cooks footlong kielbasa over an open flame in a makeshift wood-burning grill beside the van. Served with a crusty bun and a pool of mustard, these sausages (8 zloty) have earned a cult following, so be prepared to wait in line.

Sunday

11 a.m. 11) SALT ROCK CITY

On nearly every street corner in the Old Town, there's a blue-and-white cart selling obwarzanek (Polish bagels). Grab a couple and hop on the train to Wieliczka, a quiet town about eight miles away that is home to the Wieliczka Salt Mine (Ulica Danilowicza 10, Wieliczka; 48-12-278-7375; kopalnia.pl), one of the very first Unesco World Heritage sites. The two-and-a-half-hour guided tour of the site begins by descending 210 feet into a 17th-century mine shaft and then snakes through a sprawling maze of underground chambers, including one fantastically grand chapel complete with an altar, chandeliers, sculptures and bas-relief works made from salt. Don't believe it's all salt? Lick it to see for yourself.

IF YOU GO

The sleek 34-room Hotel Unicus (Ulica Florianska 35/Swietego Marka 20; 48-12-433-7111; hotelunicus.pl) is in the heart of the Old Town and the area's boisterous late-night hot spots. The spacious, modern rooms are tranquil, however, and outfitted with plush beds and black-tiled bathrooms. Doubles from 480 zloty (about $155).

The elegant Hotel Copernicus (Ulica Kanonicza 16; 48-12-424-3400; copernicus.hotel.com.pl) is a luxe Relais & Chateaux property on a cobblestone side street near Wawel Hill. The 29 rooms are tucked around a glass-roofed patio, and have period furnishings and rustic wood-beam ceilings. Doubles from 900 zloty. ~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1003: OP-ED The University of Wherever ... By BILL KELLER Can technology provide an elite education for the masses? ===== notyet (2 pages) FOR more than a decade educators have been expecting the Internet to transform that bastion of tradition and authority,

Page 20 nyt-short-notyet.txt the university. Digital utopians have envisioned a world of virtual campuses and "distributed" learning. They imagine a business model in which online courses are consumer-rated like products on Amazon, tuition is set by auction services like eBay, and students are judged not by grades but by skills they have mastered, like levels of a videogame. Presumably, for the Friday kegger you go to the Genius Bar.

It's true that online education has proliferated, from community colleges to the free OpenCourseWare lecture videos offered by M.I.T. (The New York Times Company is in the game, too, with its Knowledge Network.) But the Internet has so far scarcely disturbed the traditional practice or the economics at the high end, the great schools that are one of the few remaining advantages America has in a competitive world. Our top-rated universities and colleges have no want of customers willing to pay handsomely for the kind of education their parents got; thus elite schools have little incentive to dilute the value of the credentials they award.

Two recent events at Stanford University suggest that the day is growing nearer when quality higher education confronts the technological disruptions that have already upended the music and book industries, humbled enterprises from Kodak to the Postal Service (not to mention the newspaper business), and helped destabilize despots across the Middle East.

One development is a competition among prestige universities to open a branch campus in applied sciences in New York City. This is Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to create a locus of entrepreneurial education that would mate with venture capital to spawn new enterprises and enrich the city's economy. Stanford, which has provided much of the info-tech Viagra for Silicon Valley, and Cornell, a biotechnology powerhouse, appear to be the main rivals.

But more interesting than the contest between Stanford and Cornell is the one between Stanford and Stanford.

The Stanford bid for a New York campus is a bet on the value of place. The premise is that Stanford can repeat the success it achieved by marrying itself to the Silicon Valley marketplace. The school's proposal (unsubtly titled "Silicon Valley II") envisions a bricks-and-mortar residential campus on an island in the East River, built around a community of 100 faculty members and 2,200 students and strategically situated to catalyze new businesses in the city.

Meanwhile, one of Stanford's most inventive professors, Sebastian Thrun, is making an alternative claim on the future. Thrun, a German-born and largely self-taught expert in robotics, is famous for leading the team that built Google's self-driving car. He is offering his "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" course online and free of charge. His remote students will get the same lectures as students paying $50,000 a year, the same assignments, the same exams and, if they pass, a "statement of accomplishment" (though not Stanford credit). When The Times wrote about this last month, 58,000 students had signed up for the course. After the article, enrollment leapt to 130,000, from across the globe.

Thrun's ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. "Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost," Thrun told me.

The traditional university, in his view, serves a fortunate few, inefficiently, with a business model built on exclusivity. "I'm not at all against the on-campus experience," he said. "I love it. It's great. It has a lot of things which cannot be replaced by anything online. But it's also insanely uneconomical."

Thrun acknowledges that there are still serious quality-control problems to be licked. How do you keep an invisible student from cheating? How do you even know who is sitting at that remote keyboard? Will the education really be as compelling ・ and will it last? Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.

"If we can solve this," he said, "I think it will disrupt all of higher education."

Disrupt is right. It would be an earthquake for the majority of colleges that depend on tuition income rather than big endowments and research grants. Many could go the way of local newspapers. There would be huge audiences and paychecks for superstar teachers, but dimmer prospects for those who are less charismatic.

It's ironic ・・ or maybe just fitting that this is playing out at Stanford, which has served as midwife to many disruptive technologies. By forging a symbiotic relationship with venture capital and teaching students how to navigate markets, Stanford claims to have spawned an estimated 5,000 businesses. This is a campus where grad school applicants are routinely asked if they have done a startup, and some professors have gotten very, very rich.

Page 21 nyt-short-notyet.txt

John Hennessy, Stanford's president, gave the university's blessing to Thrun's experiment, which he calls "an initial demonstration," but he is cautious about the grander dream of a digitized university. He can imagine a virtual campus for some specialized programs and continuing education, and thinks the power of distributed learning can be incorporated in undergraduate education ・ for example, supplanting the large lecture that is often filled with students paying more attention to their laptops. He endorses online teaching as a way to educate students, in the developing world or our own, who cannot hope for the full campus experience.

But Hennessy is a passionate advocate for an actual campus, especially in undergraduate education. There is nothing quite like the give and take of a live community to hone critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills, he says. And it's not at all clear that online students learn the most important lesson of all: how to keep learning.

As The Times's Matt Richtel recently reported, there is remarkably little data showing that technology-centric schooling improves basic learning. It is quite possible that the infatuation with technology has diverted money from things known to work ・ training better teachers, giving kids more time in school.

THE Stanford president is hardly a technophobe. Hennessy came up through computer engineering, used his sabbatical to start a successful microprocessor company, and sits on the boards of Google and Cisco Systems.

"In the same way that a lot of things go into the cost of a newspaper that have nothing to do with the quality of the reporting ・・ the cost of newsprint and delivery we should ask the same thing about universities," Hennessy told me. "When is the infrastructure of the university particularly valuable ・ as it is, I believe, for an undergraduate residential experience ・ and when is it secondary to the learning process?"

But, he notes, "One has to think about the sustainability of all these things. In the end, the content providers have to get paid."

I see a larger point, familiar to all of us who have lived through digital-age disorder. There are disrupters, like Sebastian Thrun, or Napster, or the tweeting rebels in Tahrir Square. And there are adapters, like John Hennessy, or iTunes, or the novice statesmen trying to build a new Egypt. Progress depends on both.

Who could be against an experiment that promises the treasure of education to a vast, underserved world? But we should be careful, in our idealism, not to diminish something that is already a wonder of the world.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/nytkeller and join me on Facebook. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1006: THEATER REVIEW - 'THE THREEPENNY OPERA' Toxic Dispatches From Weimar ... By BEN BRANTLEY It's your ears that keep you awake in Robert Wilson's interpretation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. ===== notyet (2 pages) And some like it cold.

I mean as cold as a body on a mortuary table. The first real chill of autumn hit New York with the arrival of Robert Wilson's frost-bitten interpretation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera," which opened on Tuesday night at the Howard Gilman Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Halloween may be the official date on which corpses are said to rise from their graves to taunt and terrorize the living. But the cadaverous members of the Berliner Ensemble who inhabit Mr. Wilson's production, which runs through Saturday, decided not to wait to throw their own special Walpurgisnacht.

And while you may think you've seen these glamorous ghouls before ・ especially if you've ever seen a Wilson show or, for that matter, any production of the musical "Cabaret" ・ don't dismiss them as chic trick-or-treaters until you've heard them sing. Their voices really do come from beyond the grave, or to be exact, from Berlin in 1928, when the original "Threepenny Opera" opened there, making sounds the world had never heard before.

Usually the eyes have it when Mr. Wilson is in charge. Even in his collaborations with composers like Philip Glass (for

Page 22 nyt-short-notyet.txt the breathtaking "Einstein on the Beach"), what you see usually lingers in the memory more than what you hear. For Mr. Wilson is a magician at whipping up exquisite dreamscapes, fluid yet fragmented visions that seem to have stepped out of the darkness of your sleeping mind.

But despite the usual eye-popping lineup of elegant Wilsonian grotesques, this time it's your ears that keep you awake, anxious and often enthralled. In this production's artfully ragged, disturbingly dissonant music ・ summoned by nine perfectly calibrated musicians and by singers whose voices are the opposite of those of Broadway-trained crooners and belters ・ you feel something of the shock of the new that Berlin theatergoers must have experienced 90-some years ago.

In the minds of many Americans "The Threepenny Opera," a snarling, impudent reinvention of the 18th-century English "Beggar's Opera" by John Gay, exists mostly as one of those legendary shows that changed culture that are more often discussed than experienced. Though the frissons it set off in its Berlin opening were said to travel around the world, it has often baffled American interpreters.

A popular Off Broadway incarnation in the 1950s (which starred Weill's widow, Lotte Lenya) is still remembered with proprietary fondness by those who saw it, as is Richard Foreman's 1976 production at Lincoln Center. But in recent years especially, American actors and the "Threepenny" songs have made for sorry mismatches. Too often singers succumb to the temptation to make love to Weill's hypnotic melodies, when what's required is that they be roughed up, played with and discarded, a bit the way Macheath (the show's felonious hero, played here by Stefan Kurt) treats his women.

Listen to Brecht on the subject: "When an actor sings, he undergoes a change of function. Nothing is more revolting than when the actor pretends not to notice that he has left the level plain of speech and started to sing." The actor, he continued, should not try to bring out "emotional content" nor should he obediently follow the melody. In other words, only disconnect, and keep your audience aware that a song is merely a song.

I've never known that theory to be put to practice in live performance as thrillingly as it is in this production, which has musical direction by Hans-Jorn Brandenburg and Stefan Rager. From the scrappy, combative strains of the overture ・ in which the music seems almost to give up on itself in disgust ・ you intuit that this is not an evening of ear candy.

That suspicion is confirmed once the actors begin to sing ・ or rather, growl, belch and warble their notes and lyrics. This is singing that at the same time expresses character and disdains sentimental notions that character might be glorified by song.

Listening to love ballads, in particular, is like watching someone shredding a valentine with an X-Acto blade. And when performed by the brilliant Stefanie Stappenbeck or Angela Winkler, as two of Macheath's women, these songs glow with an enlivening toxicity that makes you want to swear off easy-listening forever.

I was less entranced by the mise-en-scene as a whole. In reworking Gay's original operetta of the dispossessed for angry Weimar Germany, Brecht and Weill pushed the era a hundred years forward, from London in the 18th century to the time of Queen Victoria's coronation. That decorous age, with its bourgeois pieties and hypocrisies, was viewed in the distorting mirrors of a criminal underclass, which in turn was meant to reflect the socially corrupt Germany of the 1920s.

Mr. Wilson (and his costume designer Jacques Reynaud) has taken many of his visual cues from Weimar art and Expressionist cinema. In the show's stunning opening sequence ・ which has Macheath (wearing a glittery ballgown and elbow-length gloves) singing "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" ・ the characters pass before us like a cavalcade of walking corpses. Their faces chalk white, their eyes (and sometimes their mouths) rimmed in black, they look as if they might have just stepped out of Dr. Caligari's cabinet or a painting by George Grosz.

This is the same visual vocabulary that often shows up in evocations of fashionably decadent Germany in the Jazz Age. These creepy figures are like the nightclub denizens of "Cabaret," but at the end of the show, when they have no life left in them. (In his epicene makeup Mr. Kurt's Macheath evokes the puppetlike M.C. created by Joel Grey in "Cabaret," and it effectively castrates a character meant to be a super stud.) They've been so scooped of human feeling that they're merely going through the same tired old motions.

Mr. Wilson's signature use of ritualized (and often excruciatingly slow) movement and artificial sound effects emphasizes this sense of people locked into an empty, mechanical existence. They're as good as dead, even if they don't know it. And they have progressed beyond decay and into sterility, a feeling underscored by the Dan Flavin-like bars of light that are used to define space.

Page 23 nyt-short-notyet.txt This allows for some grimly gorgeous scenic moments, but not for the nose-thumbing vitality that was said to have energized Berlin audiences of the late 1920s. And be warned: There are longueurs, especially in the seemingly interminable, two-hour first act. The big, admonitory curtain numbers for both acts, led by Macheath with the evil-dead ensemble lined up behind him, feel a bit like sermons from a Hell House. (The show is in German with supertitles.)

But within this predetermined context, there arise moments of beautifully stylized and truly shocking ugliness. The nasty, sentimental duets between Macheath and his bride, Polly Peachum (Ms. Stappenbeck), and his favorite whore, Jenny (Ms. Winkler), are jaw droppers, making you think, "Did they really just sing what I think they sang?"

When Ms. Stappenbeck's fluttery, wide-eyed Polly performs the macabre "Pirate Jenny" in the first-act wedding scene, she becomes not so much another person as a living, contemptuous compendium of a whole culture where the haves collide with the have-nots. More than any tableau of German Expressionist ghouls, that fractured, grating and occasionally sticky-sweet voice summons the show in which Weimar Germany once heard its own raucous, disintegrating soul.

THE THREEPENNY OPERA

By Bertolt Brecht, adapted from Elizabeth Hauptmann's German version of John Gay's "Beggar's Opera"; lyrics by Brecht; music by Kurt Weill; directed by Robert Wilson; music direction by Hans-Jorn Brandenburg and Stefan Rager; sets by Mr. Wilson; costumes by Jacques Reynaud; lighting concept by Mr. Wilson, lighting by Andreas Fuchs and Ulrich Eh; dramaturgy by Jutta Ferbers and Anika Bardos. A Berliner Ensemble production, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music Howard Gilman Opera House, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4100, bam.org. Performed in German, with English titles. Through Saturday. Running time: 3 hours.

WITH: Jurgen Holtz (Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum), Traute Hoess (Celia Peachum), Stefanie Stappenbeck (Polly Peachum), Stefan Kurt (Macheath), Axel Werner (Brown), Anna Graenzer (Lucy), Angela Winkler (Jenny) and Georgios Tsivanoglou (Filch). ~~~~~~~~~~

======NYT -1007 (October 7, 2011) U.S. Panel Says No to Prostate Screening for Healthy Men ... By GARDINER HARRIS Giving healthy men P.S.A. blood tests for prostate cancer does not save lives and often leads to treatment that can cause needless pain and side effects, a government panel said. ===== notyet Healthy men should no longer receive a P.S.A. blood test to screen for prostate cancer because the test does not save lives over all and often leads to more tests and treatments that needlessly cause pain, impotence and incontinence in many, a key government health panel has decided.

The draft recommendation, by the United States Preventive Services Task Force and due for official release next week, is based on the results of five well-controlled clinical trials and could substantially change the care given to men 50 and older. There are 44 million such men in the United States, and 33 million of them have already had a P.S.A. test ・ sometimes without their knowledge ・ during routine physicals.

The task force's recommendations are followed by most medical groups. Two years ago the task force recommended that women in their 40s should no longer get routine mammograms, setting off a firestorm of controversy. The recommendation to avoid the P.S.A. test is even more forceful and applies to healthy men of all ages.

"Unfortunately, the evidence now shows that this test does not save men's lives," said Dr. Virginia Moyer, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and chairwoman of the task force. "This test cannot tell the difference between cancers that will and will not affect a man during his natural lifetime. We need to find one that does."

But advocates for those with prostate cancer promised to fight the recommendation. Baseball's Joe Torre, the financier Michael Milken and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, are among tens of thousands of men who believe a P.S.A. test saved their lives.

The task force can also expect resistance from some drug makers and doctors. Treating men with high P.S.A. levels has

Page 24 nyt-short-notyet.txt become a lucrative business. Some in Congress have criticized previous decisions by the task force as akin to rationing, although the task force does not consider cost in its recommendations.

"We're disappointed," said Thomas Kirk, of Us TOO, the nation's largest advocacy group for prostate cancer survivors. "The bottom line is that this is the best test we have, and the answer can't be, 船 on't get tested.' "

But that is exactly what the task force is recommending. There is no evidence that a digital rectal exam or ultrasound are effective, either. "There are no reliable signs or symptoms of prostate cancer," said Dr. Timothy J. Wilt, a member of the task force and a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Frequency and urgency of urinating are poor indicators of disease, since the cause is often benign.

The P.S.A. test, routinely given to men 50 and older, measures a protein ・・ prostate-specific antigen that is released by prostate cells, and there is little doubt that it helps identify the presence of cancerous cells in the prostate. But a vast majority of men with such cells never suffer ill effects because their cancer is usually slow-growing. Even for men who do have fast-growing cancer, the P.S.A. test may not save them since there is no proven benefit to earlier treatment of such invasive disease.

As the P.S.A. test has grown in popularity, the devastating consequences of the biopsies and treatments that often flow from the test have become increasingly apparent. From 1986 through 2005, one million men received surgery, radiation therapy or both who would not have been treated without a P.S.A. test, according to the task force. Among them, at least 5,000 died soon after surgery and 10,000 to 70,000 suffered serious complications. Half had persistent blood in their semen, and 200,000 to 300,000 suffered impotence, incontinence or both. As a result of these complications, the man who developed the test, Dr. Richard J. Ablin, has called its widespread use a "public health disaster."

One in six men in the United States will eventually be found to have prostate cancer, making it the second most common form of cancer in men after skin cancer. An estimated 32,050 men died of prostate cancer last year and 217,730 men received the diagnosis. The disease is rare before age 50, and most deaths occur after age 75.

Not knowing what is going on with one 's prostate may be the best course, since few men live happily with the knowledge that one of their organs is cancerous. Autopsy studies show that a third of men ages 40 to 60 have prostate cancer, a share that grows to three-fourths after age 85.

P.S.A. testing is most common in men over 70, and it is in that group that it is the most dangerous since such men usually have cancerous prostate cells but benefit the least from surgery and radiation. Some doctors treat patients who have high P.S.A. levels with drugs that block male hormones, although there is no convincing evidence that these drugs are helpful in localized prostate cancer and they often result in impotence, breast enlargement and hot flashes.

Of the trials conducted to assess the value of P.S.A. testing, the two largest were conducted in Europe and the United States. Both "demonstrate that if any benefit does exist, it is very small after 10 years," according to the task force's draft recommendation statement.

The European trial had 182,000 men from seven countries who either got P.S.A. testing or did not. When measured across all of the men in the study, P.S.A. testing did not cut death rates in nine years of follow-up. But in men ages 55 to 69, there was a very slight improvement in mortality. The American trial, with 76,693 men, found that P.S.A. testing did not cut death rates after 10 years.

Dr. Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic, an expert in prostate cancer, said he disagreed with the task force's recommendations. Citing the European trial, he said "I think there's a substantial amount of evidence from randomized clinical trials that show that among younger men, under 65, screening saves lives."

The task force's recommendations apply only to healthy men without symptoms. The group did not consider whether the test is appropriate in men who already have suspicious symptoms or those who have already been treated for the disease. The recommendations will be open to public comment next week before they are finalized.

Recommendations of the task force often determine whether federal health programs like Medicare and private health plans envisioned under the health reform law pay fully for a test. But legislation already requires Medicare to pay for P.S.A. testing no matter what the task force recommends.

Still, the recommendations will most likely be greeted with trepidation by the Obama administration, which has faced

Page 25 nyt-short-notyet.txt charges from Republicans that it supports rationing of health care services, which have been politically effective, regardless of the facts.

After the task force's recommendation against routine mammograms for women under 50, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius announced that the government would continue to pay for the test for women in their 40s. On Thursday, the administration announced with great fanfare that as a result of the health reform law, more people with Medicare were getting free preventive services like mammograms.

Dr. Michael Rawlins, chairman of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in Britain, said he was given a P.S.A. test several years ago without his knowledge. He then had a biopsy, which turned out to be negative. But if cancer had been detected, he would have faced an awful choice, he said: "Would I want to have it removed, or would I have gone for watchful waiting with all the anxieties of that?" He said he no longer gets the test.

But Dan Zenka, a spokesman for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, said a high P.S.A. test result eventually led him to have his prostate removed, a procedure that led to the discovery that cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. His organization supports widespread P.S.A. testing. "I can tell you it saved my life," he said. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1008 Panel's Advice on Prostate Test Sets Up Battle ... By GARDINER HARRIS A finding that a blood test to screen for prostate cancer does not save lives, but results in needless medical procedures, is being contested. ===== notyet A day after a government panel said that healthy men should no longer get screened for prostate cancer, some doctors' groups and cancer patients' advocates began a campaign to convince the nation that the advice was misguided.

Their hope is to copy the success of women's groups that successfully persuaded much of the country two years ago that it was a mistake for the same panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, to recommend against routine mammograms for women in their 40s. This time, the task force found that a P.S.A. blood test to screen for prostate cancer does not save lives, but results in needless medical procedures that have left tens of thousands of men impotent, incontinent or both.

Both sides in the battle have marshaled distinct arguments, and both said their only goal was to protect patients. Caught in the middle are 44 million men in the United States over the age of 50 who must now decide whom to believe. Some have already had a P.S.A. ・・ prostate-specific antigen test and must choose what to do with the result. Others have undergone biopsies, surgeries, radiation therapy and even drug treatment that results in a form of chemical castration. Many have suddenly confronted the thought, perhaps for the first time, that their pain and suffering may have been for nothing.

Members of the government panel said they knew that they would have to defend their recommendation and delayed issuing their report for two years to prepare for the battle that was certain to ensue. Dr. Michael L. LeFevre, co-vice chairman of the task force, said the panel originally voted against routine screening for prostate cancer in 2009. But after the firestorm over its advice on mammography, Dr. LeFevre said he deliberately slowed down the process.

"I looked at this and said, 選 know this is going to happen with prostate cancer for all the same reasons, and we absolutely have to have the science right,' " he said. As for the resulting delay, Dr. LeFevre said, "I will take full blame and full credit."

If the panel's analysis of the science is correct, thousands of men were probably harmed by unnecessary tests and treatments during the delay.

At the heart of its advice is the startling finding that thousands of doctors in the United States have been doing many of their patients more harm than good. While the panel did not explicitly level such a charge, Dr. LeFevre said that the dangers of common treatments were what drove the members to recommend against screening. "If you're the guy doing the treatment, that's pretty hard to swallow," he said.

Sure enough, urologists ・ the doctors who most often treat prostate cancer ・ promised to fight. The American Urological Association issued a statement saying that the recommendation "will ultimately do more harm than good." Many urologists reacted angrily.

Page 26 nyt-short-notyet.txt

"All of us take extraordinary issue with both the methodology and conclusion of that report," said Dr. Deepak Kapoor, chairman and chief executive of Integrated Medical Professionals, a group that includes the nation's largest urology practice. "We will not allow patients to die, which is what will happen if this recommendation is accepted." He and other urologists said that the P.S.A. test is just one part of an overall strategy that, in the hands of well-trained doctors, can help prevent death and other consequences of cancer.

Treating patients with prostate cancer is a highly profitable business in the United States, and much of the practice of urology is dedicated to this fight. If men no longer get screened routinely, urologists will see a steep decline in patient visits and income. But Dr. Kapoor rejected the notion that profit plays any role in his defense of screening.

"That I'm going to treat patients that don't need therapy is morally repugnant," he said.

But Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, suggested that is what doctors like Dr. Kapoor are doing. "We in medicine need to look into our soul and we need to learn the truth," he said. "If your income is dependent on you not understanding something, it is very easy not to understand something."

Dr. Derek Raghavan, president of the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, N.C., said that at the very least, men must stop being so anxious about the results of their P.S.A. tests. "Men come into my office crazy and absolutely fearful," he said. But even P.S.A. test results that are considered high by many doctors ・・ in the hundreds, for instance are not dangerous unless the levels are rising rapidly, Dr. Raghavan said.

"We need to educate men to slow down," he said.

But Dr. J. Brantley Thrasher, chairman of urology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, said he feared that the task force's recommendation will eventually lead insurers to stop paying for many prostate cancer treatments and lead many men not to get tested.

"There is no question that some people are being overtreated in this country," Dr. Thrasher said. "But we can't go back to the day when men waited so long to be treated that all I could do for them was give them narcotics and wait for them to die."

The choices are fateful for men, many of whom believe the P.S.A. test saved their lives. Robert Ginyard, 49, of Baltimore, said he had gradually rising P.S.A. tests for years when his doctor finally suggested he see a urologist. A biopsy showed that he had cancer, but not an aggressive kind.

Studies show that many men have cancer in their prostate that never results in illness or death. But Mr. Ginyard, like many men, could not live with the idea that he was harboring cancerous cells. His father had prostate cancer, and he is black ・ factors that put him at higher risk. But he is in his 40s, and dangerous prostate cancer is very rare in men younger than 50.

"I've got two young daughters, and that man instinct kicked in," he said. "And I said, 選 t's not about my life right now. It's about making sure that I take care of my family.' If you have cancer, you get it out and you bother with the statistics later."

So Mr. Ginyard had his prostate removed last year and underwent radiation therapy. The side effects, including impotence and incontinence, were significant, but he said they have since passed.

The task force's recommendation, he said, "gives men another reason to place their personal health and well-being on the back burner." ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1014 In Cooling China, Loan Sharks Come Knocking ... By DAVID BARBOZA A growing number of entrepreneurs in China, unable to make payments to illegal lenders, have gone into hiding to avoid physical harm or family dishonor. ===== notyet (2 pages) WENZHOU, China ・ The 300 employees of Aomi Fluid Equipment here were delighted recently when the owner offered

Page 27 nyt-short-notyet.txt an all-expenses-paid, two-day trip to a mountain resort three hours away.

The owner, Sun Fucai ・・ or Boss Sun, as he's known was so insistent that his workers attend that he imposed a $30 fine on any employee who refused the getaway. Nearly everyone went.

Except Boss Sun.

When the employees returned from their holiday, they found that the factory had been stripped of its equipment and that Boss Sun had fled town. "It was entirely empty," Li Heying, a former Aomi worker, said of the factory. "It was like what happens in wartime."

The boss, as it turned out, was millions of dollars in debt to loan sharks ・ underground lenders of the sort that many private businesses in China routinely use because the government-run banks typically lend only to big state-run corporations.

As China's economy has begun to slow slightly, more and more entrepreneurs are finding themselves in Mr. Sun's straits ・ unable to meet debt payments on which interest rates often run as high as 70 percent in this nation's thriving unregulated, underground loan system. Such illegal lending amounts to about $630 billion a year, or the equivalent of about 10 percent of China's gross domestic product, according to estimates by the investment bank UBS.

In recent months, at least 90 business executives from this coastal city, a one-hour flight south of Shanghai, have disappeared because of mounting debts and impending bankruptcies, according to a local government report.

Whether out of fear of mafia-style loan enforcers ・ kidnappings and broken kneecaps are common tactics ・ or the family dishonor that is its own harsh penalty in China, some of the Wenzhou missing have gone into hiding or fled overseas.

And in the last few weeks, at least three have tried to commit suicide by jumping off high-rises in the city, according to the state-run news agency, Xinhua, which reported that two of them died and the other survived with a broken leg.

That tycoons in a city known for its savvy entrepreneurs are running scared has raised concerns that private business, a vibrant part of China's economy, may be losing steam ・ while exposing the high-risk, unregulated financial system on which so many of the nation's small and medium-size businesses have come to depend.

"There have always been people running away because they couldn't pay their debts," said Wang Yuecai, general manager at Wenzhou Yinfeng Investment & Guarantee, which guarantees state bank loans when small businesses are lucky enough to get them. "But recently, the situation here has gotten much worse."

Last week, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and a delegation of top officials, including the head of the nation's central bank, visited Wenzhou, promising to get official banks to lend more to small companies and to crack down on underground lenders that charge high interest rates.

And on Wednesday, China's state council, or cabinet, announced a series of measures aimed at helping small businesses with tax breaks and new lines of credit.

Beijing no doubt worries that similar problems could surface in other parts of the country.

"This is not just happening in Wenzhou," said Chang Chun, who teaches at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. "Some companies borrow from the state banks and then lend into the underground market. Many are doing this type of arbitrage."

But caging the loan sharks could prove difficult, not only because the activity is so rampant but because the lending is in some ways a result of the government's own banking policies.

Here in Wenzhou, known for its pen makers, textile producers and big cigarette lighter factories, business owners complain that they are struggling with inflation and rising prices for raw materials. But they also point to a government-created credit squeeze. As elsewhere in China, most bank loans in Wenzhou go to big corporations or to finance projects backed by the government, making it increasingly difficult for smaller businesses to borrow money.

"This informal lending was aggravated by the credit tightening that made borrowing from the official banking system

Page 28 nyt-short-notyet.txt more difficult," said Wang Tao, a UBS economist based in Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, as is also the case throughout China, the government keeps interest rates on household bank savings accounts so low ・ currently only about half the 6 percent inflation rate ・ that people seek other ways to make their money grow.

Many households pool their money into underground lending syndicates, the source of the loans that have gotten borrowers like Boss Sun in over their heads. According to one local survey, more than 90 percent of Wenzhou's households have invested in such lending pools.

As long as China's economy was racing along at an 11 percent growth rate, small companies could hope for enough business to stay a step or two ahead of their underground creditors. But there was little room for error.

Now , businesses here and elsewhere in China are being caught short because the national economy has begun to moderate a bit, to a projected 9 percent rate by year's end, in response to government-imposed measures to fight inflation and let air out of the real estate bubble.

Ms. Wang, at UBS, said the slowing economy and weakening exports would hurt many small Chinese businesses. Already, according to a recent survey by the city's small-business council, one in five of Wenzhou's 360,000 small and medium-size businesses have recently stopped operating because of cash shortages.

At Aomi, former workers interviewed here this week said that Mr. Sun, like many other Wenzhou entrepreneurs, not only had borrowed from underground lenders but had dipped into his company's funds to lend to other private companies at exorbitant rates. That would have left him even more exposed if any of his borrowers' businesses collapsed.

"He was doing some financial business," said Ding Shouyu, a former Aomi executive who left the company shortly before its collapse. "But then everything fell apart."

Other workers said Aomi, a maker of valves, was doing relatively well, and was busy filling orders at the time Boss Sun fled. They said he owed them about $157,000 in wages, which the local government subsequently paid.

Earlier this week, after Prime Minister Wen's visit to the city, Mr. Sun and several other businessmen who recently fled Wenzhou struck a deal with the local government to return to the city.

City officials did not disclose details of the agreement with Mr. Sun, but the government released a statement saying it would aid Aomi and also ensure Mr. Sun's safety.

He will need it. A few days ago, newspapers in Wenzhou reported the arrest of seven people suspected of "collecting debts with violence."

Mr. Sun could not be reached at his office Wednesday or Thursday, and did not answer his mobile phone. But in an interview with Xinhua published Tuesday, Boss Sun said he had borrowed millions from banks and private lenders and the interest rates grew "higher and higher."

He also said his personal safety was in jeopardy.

"My capital chain broke completely," he said in the interview. "I was driven to foolishness by the debts and was forced to flee."

Gu Huini contributed research. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1014 In Cooling China, Loan Sharks Come Knocking ... By DAVID BARBOZA A growing number of entrepreneurs in China, unable to make payments to illegal lenders, have gone into hiding to avoid physical harm or family dishonor. ===== notyet (2 pages) WENZHOU, China ・ The 300 employees of Aomi Fluid Equipment here were delighted recently when the owner offered an all-expenses-paid, two-day trip to a mountain resort three hours away.

Page 29 nyt-short-notyet.txt

The owner, Sun Fucai ・・ or Boss Sun, as he's known was so insistent that his workers attend that he imposed a $30 fine on any employee who refused the getaway. Nearly everyone went.

Except Boss Sun.

When the employees returned from their holiday, they found that the factory had been stripped of its equipment and that Boss Sun had fled town. "It was entirely empty," Li Heying, a former Aomi worker, said of the factory. "It was like what happens in wartime."

The boss, as it turned out, was millions of dollars in debt to loan sharks ・ underground lenders of the sort that many private businesses in China routinely use because the government-run banks typically lend only to big state-run corporations.

As China's economy has begun to slow slightly, more and more entrepreneurs are finding themselves in Mr. Sun's straits ・ unable to meet debt payments on which interest rates often run as high as 70 percent in this nation's thriving unregulated, underground loan system. Such illegal lending amounts to about $630 billion a year, or the equivalent of about 10 percent of China's gross domestic product, according to estimates by the investment bank UBS.

In recent months, at least 90 business executives from this coastal city, a one-hour flight south of Shanghai, have disappeared because of mounting debts and impending bankruptcies, according to a local government report.

Whether out of fear of mafia-style loan enforcers ・ kidnappings and broken kneecaps are common tactics ・ or the family dishonor that is its own harsh penalty in China, some of the Wenzhou missing have gone into hiding or fled overseas.

And in the last few weeks, at least three have tried to commit suicide by jumping off high-rises in the city, according to the state-run news agency, Xinhua, which reported that two of them died and the other survived with a broken leg.

That tycoons in a city known for its savvy entrepreneurs are running scared has raised concerns that private business, a vibrant part of China's economy, may be losing steam ・ while exposing the high-risk, unregulated financial system on which so many of the nation's small and medium-size businesses have come to depend.

"There have always been people running away because they couldn't pay their debts," said Wang Yuecai, general manager at Wenzhou Yinfeng Investment & Guarantee, which guarantees state bank loans when small businesses are lucky enough to get them. "But recently, the situation here has gotten much worse."

Last week, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and a delegation of top officials, including the head of the nation's central bank, visited Wenzhou, promising to get official banks to lend more to small companies and to crack down on underground lenders that charge high interest rates.

And on Wednesday, China's state council, or cabinet, announced a series of measures aimed at helping small businesses with tax breaks and new lines of credit.

Beijing no doubt worries that similar problems could surface in other parts of the country.

"This is not just happening in Wenzhou," said Chang Chun, who teaches at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. "Some companies borrow from the state banks and then lend into the underground market. Many are doing this type of arbitrage."

But caging the loan sharks could prove difficult, not only because the activity is so rampant but because the lending is in some ways a result of the government's own banking policies.

Here in Wenzhou, known for its pen makers, textile producers and big cigarette lighter factories, business owners complain that they are struggling with inflation and rising prices for raw materials. But they also point to a government-created credit squeeze. As elsewhere in China, most bank loans in Wenzhou go to big corporations or to finance projects backed by the government, making it increasingly difficult for smaller businesses to borrow money.

"This informal lending was aggravated by the credit tightening that made borrowing from the official banking system more difficult," said Wang Tao, a UBS economist based in Hong Kong.

Page 30 nyt-short-notyet.txt

Meanwhile, as is also the case throughout China, the government keeps interest rates on household bank savings accounts so low ・ currently only about half the 6 percent inflation rate ・ that people seek other ways to make their money grow.

Many households pool their money into underground lending syndicates, the source of the loans that have gotten borrowers like Boss Sun in over their heads. According to one local survey, more than 90 percent of Wenzhou's households have invested in such lending pools.

As long as China's economy was racing along at an 11 percent growth rate, small companies could hope for enough business to stay a step or two ahead of their underground creditors. But there was little room for error.

Now , businesses here and elsewhere in China are being caught short because the national economy has begun to moderate a bit, to a projected 9 percent rate by year's end, in response to government-imposed measures to fight inflation and let air out of the real estate bubble.

Ms. Wang, at UBS, said the slowing economy and weakening exports would hurt many small Chinese businesses. Already, according to a recent survey by the city's small-business council, one in five of Wenzhou's 360,000 small and medium-size businesses have recently stopped operating because of cash shortages.

At Aomi, former workers interviewed here this week said that Mr. Sun, like many other Wenzhou entrepreneurs, not only had borrowed from underground lenders but had dipped into his company's funds to lend to other private companies at exorbitant rates. That would have left him even more exposed if any of his borrowers' businesses collapsed.

"He was doing some financial business," said Ding Shouyu, a former Aomi executive who left the company shortly before its collapse. "But then everything fell apart."

Other workers said Aomi, a maker of valves, was doing relatively well, and was busy filling orders at the time Boss Sun fled. They said he owed them about $157,000 in wages, which the local government subsequently paid.

Earlier this week, after Prime Minister Wen's visit to the city, Mr. Sun and several other businessmen who recently fled Wenzhou struck a deal with the local government to return to the city.

City officials did not disclose details of the agreement with Mr. Sun, but the government released a statement saying it would aid Aomi and also ensure Mr. Sun's safety.

He will need it. A few days ago, newspapers in Wenzhou reported the arrest of seven people suspected of "collecting debts with violence."

Mr. Sun could not be reached at his office Wednesday or Thursday, and did not answer his mobile phone. But in an interview with Xinhua published Tuesday, Boss Sun said he had borrowed millions from banks and private lenders and the interest rates grew "higher and higher."

He also said his personal safety was in jeopardy.

"My capital chain broke completely," he said in the interview. "I was driven to foolishness by the debts and was forced to flee."

Gu Huini contributed research. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1124 Digital Downloads Sub for Weighty Scores ... By DANIEL J. WAKIN Jeffrey Kahane, a guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic this week, led the orchestra from a harpsichord, using an iPad instead of a score. ===== notyet Digital gadgetry has increasingly been making its mark on classical music performance. It hit a milestone this week at the New York Philharmonic . Jeffrey Kahane, the pianist and conductor who is making a guest appearance at the orchestra, used an iPad on Tuesday instead of a score to lead the orchestra in a Mozart symphony.

Page 31 nyt-short-notyet.txt

It was a first for the orchestra, the Philharmonic said. Mr. Kahane said it was also his debut with the device in such a major setting.

"I just thought, why not," Mr. Kahane said in a telephone interview. "I have it there. It's easy. I don't have to deal with turning the pages. It's easy to read. I thought it would be a fun thing to try, and it worked perfectly."

Mr. Kahane conducted from a harpsichord, improvising an accompanying part, or continuo, to the symphony. The sight of a computer tablet sitting atop a quintessentially nonelectronic instrument made of wood, strings and plectrums for plucking them was incongruous.

Mr. Kahane agreed. "I said: 禅 his is hilarious. Here I am trying to recreate the spirit of an 18th-century performance of a Mozart symphony, and I'm using an iPad.' But why not?"

"I'm convinced," he added, "if Mozart could have used an iPad, he would have done it."

Musicians more and more are using iPads and laptops instead of traditional paper scores, especially pianists. The Borromeo String Quartet makes it a regular practice. Wireless foot pedals or a quick screen tap make it easier to turn pages. Downloading scores for study or performance saves about 30 or 40 pounds of luggage while on the road, said Mr. Kahane, who is music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Mr. Kahane said the iPad would be impractical for a Mahler symphony, say, with its much larger scoring, and there is the danger of equipment malfunction. But tapping also eliminates the possibility of turning two pages at once, tearing out a leaf or pulling the whole score off the stand, as can happen, he said. He uses a stylus or other program features to mark the scores, many of which he downloads from open-source sites. Mr. Kahane said he had about 100 scores on his iPad, including Mozart's Symphony No. 33, the work played on Tuesday and scheduled for performances on Friday, Saturday and Tuesday.

"It's been just a life-changing thing for me in many ways," he said, but not for performing on the piano: he memorizes his recital programs.

Mr. Kahane discussed another issue: the practice of leading a Mozart symphony from the keyboard. There is debate about the practice, and Mr. Kahane acknowledged that he did not know of specific documentary evidence supporting his approach. But, he said, it was clear that Mozart conducted from the keyboard when performing his piano concertos or leading his operas.

"We know for a fact that Mozart certainly didn't conduct from the podium or use a baton," Mr. Kahane said. "We can be reasonably certain that for a good part of his career, he generally conducted from a keyboard instrument." The inclusion of harpsichords in the list of instruments in orchestras Mozart was known to have performed with, he added, supported the theory.

But more important is the musical contribution that conducting from the keyboard makes. "It is really there as much, or more, for the musicians on stage as it is for the audience," Mr. Kahane said. The keyboard functions like a big band's rhythm section ・・ "part of the motor," he said and allows the conductor to lead with sound as well as with physical gesture.

"By playing with the orchestra instead of standing on the podium waving my arms," Mr. Kahane said, "I'm able to create more of the atmosphere and style and sound and rhythmic character that is appropriate to the music." ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1124 Secrets of a Great Spiral: The Grip and the Release ... By SAM BORDEN Even quarterbacks can't agree on the best way to throw a football. ===== notyet Organized Thanksgiving football is believed to date to 1876, when the Intercollegiate Football Association decided to schedule its inaugural championship game on the holiday. The first professional game to be played on Thanksgiving came almost a half-century later, in 1920, when Fritz Pollard and the Akron Pros defeated Jim Thorpe and the Canton Bulldogs, 7-0.

Page 32 nyt-short-notyet.txt

But all these years later, and for all the Thursday afternoon quarterbacks across the country ・ on N.F.L. fields and in Central Park and in backyards in Omaha ・ a single, essential question endures: How can I reliably throw a spiral?

Considering the deeply embedded place in American culture that football occupies, one can only imagine that the well-known players of that era faced the same annoyance at this time of year that current ones do: an endless string of questions from scads of quarterbacks who are eager to battle each other (and indigestion) in backyards across the country.

"Everyone wants to play and everyone thinks they can throw," Giants quarterback Eli Manning said.

Most can't. Those who can still struggle with achieving the consistent spiral, or a legitimate approximation of one.

"I get it all the time around now," said Bret Johnson, a quarterbacks coach based in California who has worked with the Jets' Mark Sanchez. "This is what they say: 遷 ust give me two tips. Just two tips so I don't look like an absolute idiot.' "

Throwing a football, however, is not so easy. Even Archie Manning, who would seem to have a solid resume when it comes to teaching the skill (what with two sons as N.F.L. quarterbacks), said he struggled to come up with a simple tutorial.

Back when he was playing for the New Orleans Saints, Manning said, the Hall of Fame basketball player Pete Maravich ・ then with the New Orleans Jazz ・ came to a practice and wanted to learn how to throw. Manning played catch with Maravich, and while Maravich was perfectly adept at catching the ball, his passes were "not the best," Manning said. "And I'm trying to be delicate."

Maravich returned to a few more practices, and each time he worked with Manning, who did his best to adjust Maravich's grip and motion. Nothing worked.

"He just couldn't do it," Manning said of throwing a spiral. "I remember thinking, At least he can dribble."

For the determined, there are at least a few basics to consider. The starting point, all successful passers seem to agree, is the grip. Unlike with, say, throwing a four-seam fastball in baseball, there is not one standard technique.

Grips come in all forms, with some quarterbacks, like Eli and Peyton Manning, laying two fingers ・ the pinkie and the ring finger ・ across the laces of the ball. Others, like Eli Manning's backup, David Carr, have only one finger ・・ the ring touching the laces.

"It's because I never had huge hands," Carr said.

Then there are the truly unusual, like the former Dallas Cowboys star Troy Aikman. Johnson played with Aikman at U.C.L.A. and recalled his reaction the first time he saw Aikman's grip. It eschewed the laces almost entirely, with Aikman laying most of his palm across the strings so his fingers touched only leather.

"Wait, how do you throw the ball, dude?" Johnson recalled asking Aikman.

Eli Manning said he told most questioners to go with what felt comfortable. Some quarterbacks even prefer setting their fingers on the seam of the ball instead of on the laces. Just pick up the ball in your throwing hand and roll it until you feel ready to pass, Manning said. That is the grip to use.

"The grip is personal," he said. "The key, really, is not to hold it too tight."

Johnson agreed, and added that, despite Aikman's success, most amateurs should think about getting their palm off the ball. Grip the ball in the fingers, Johnson said, and as a test to see if you are doing it right, try holding it above your head with the tip pointing down. The gap between the hand and the ball should be wide enough that the thrower can look up and see the sky.

"It forces you to hold it lightly that way," Johnson said. "And that helps get the action you want."

By action, he meant the pretty spiral that soars through the air and sends your shifty cousin on a deep route through the flowerbed and into the neighbor's trash cans. To pull off the spiral consistently, Carr said, the release ・ more than the

Page 33 nyt-short-notyet.txt actual motion of the throw ・ is critical.

The inclination for many, it seems, is to snap the wrist down and in ・ a pronation, Carr said, as if to try to force the ball to spin. In reality, a passer wants to do the exact opposite; let the fingertips linger on the ball as long as possible and finish with the palm going outward ・ a supination of the wrist.

Carr said he advised focusing on the thumb of the throwing hand. If a passer pronates, the thumb will finish sticking up in the air; if he supinates, it will finish facing down.

"If the thumb is down, you've got a chance," Carr said. "If it's up, you've got no chance at all."

Johnson, whose family runs quarterback camps in addition to working with professionals, added that he also harps on keeping the passing elbow high. Keeping the elbow above the shoulder, Johnson said, makes it easier to be consistent and puts less strain on the elbow.

"The higher the elbow, the better the accuracy," Johnson said. "But it's tough to do."

Of course, those who struggle will be in good company. Even nonquarterbacks in the N.F.L. like to think they can throw a pretty pass, and it can take a long time before acceptance sets in. During casual, off-season workouts, the Giants' linemen often take turns throwing, an activity that Rocky Bernard, a veteran defensive tackle, used to enjoy participating in. But not anymore.

"I don't even do it much," Bernard said. "I'd probably break my arm if I tried now. I just can't do it and I know it."

Carr knows that those who are committed to mixing stuffing and spirals this Thanksgiving may not give up so easily, and for them he suggested that there was no shame in using a Nerf football "or even one of those balls that has a wing on it."

If that does not help? Well, then, it may be best to consider the message the former Jets quarterback Ken O'Brien uses as his last resort. O'Brien, the highest-rated passer in the N.F.L. in 1985, said he attempted to be compassionate in such situations.

"Look, it's hard," O'Brien said. "But sometimes you just have to say, 閃 aybe you should think about wide receiver.' " ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1124 Man Guilty of Raping Ex-Girlfriend and Then Framing Her ... By DAN BILEFSKY A Queens jury believed the victim, Seemona Sumasar, who said her former boyfriend, Jerry Ramrattan, had assaulted her and then accused her of armed robberies after she reported him. ===== notyet Seemona Sumasar said all along that she was raped by her ex-boyfriend, who then framed her for a series of armed robberies that never took place.

On Wednesday, a jury in State Supreme Court in Queens agreed, finding the ex-boyfriend, Jerry Ramrattan, guilty of more than 10 charges, including rape, perjury and conspiracy. Mr. Ramrattan faces more than 25 years in prison when he is sentenced on Jan. 4.

Using knowledge he gleaned partly from watching television crime dramas like "C.S.I.," Mr. Ramrattan, a private detective in Queens, orchestrated what prosecutors called the most complex and diabolical frame-up in New York in recent memory.

For Ms. Sumasar, 36, the verdict, following a day and a half of deliberation, brought vindication after a nightmarish experience that had transformed her from rape victim to criminal.

"Now that this is over, I can start my life again," she said in an interview. "Last year, I spent Thanksgiving inside a jail cell. Jerry told so many lies, and I was imprisoned because authorities had decided to believe him. But I am not bitter. The truth won out in the end."

As the guilty verdict was announced, Mr. Ramrattan, 39, who had muttered at the prosecution witnesses and smiled at the

Page 34 nyt-short-notyet.txt jury during the trial , sat quietly, staring ahead. Outside the courtroom, Ms. Sumasar's family leapt in joy.

Prosecutors told the jury that Mr. Ramrattan hatched the scheme after Ms. Sumasar, a former restaurant owner and analyst with Morgan Stanley, refused to drop rape charges against him. They said he intimidated and cajoled false witnesses into telling the authorities that she had dressed as a police officer and robbed them at gunpoint.

While jailed for seven months, until last December, Ms. Sumasar was separated from her young daughter. She lost her restaurant, and her house in Far Rockaway, Queens, went into foreclosure. Her bail was set at $1 million, which she could not afford. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramrattan walked free until an informer came forward and exposed his ruse.

The verdict was a righting of wrongs for the Queens district attorney's office, which had insisted, along with the Nassau County district attorney's office, on Ms. Sumasar's guilt until she was freed from her cell on Long Island just weeks before her own trial was to begin. Legal experts said the case was a cautionary tale of how tunnel vision could infect law enforcement officials, in some cases pushing them to wrongly punish the innocent.

Prosecutors insisted that few could have seen Mr. Ramrattan's sinister plot.

Frank DeGaetano, an assistant district attorney and the prosecutor in Mr. Ramrattan's case, alluded to the scale and brutality of his crimes.

"Jerry Ramrattan created a complex web to ensnare Seemona," Mr. DeGaetano told jurors. "He is unique: who goes to such extremes to destroy a person?"

Mr. Ramrattan's lawyer, Frank Kelly ・ whose request for a mistrial, on the grounds that prosecutors did not hand over vital documents, was refused ・ said he would appeal. During his summation, he accused prosecutors of relying on "a bunch of liars, thieves and manipulators" to make their case.

The nearly monthlong trial offered two narratives that were difficult to reconcile. Prosecutors portrayed Ms. Sumasar as a single mother charmed by a wily confidence man who ruined her life. But the defense presented Ms. Sumasar as a scorned woman who falsely accused her ex-boyfriend of rape because their relationship had soured.

Members of the jury said the guilty verdict hinged on their belief that Mr. Ramrattan had raped Ms. Sumasar, giving him a motive to set his plot in motion. They said the defense's argument had seemed to be a smoke screen.

"We believed that she was raped," said Caryn Eyring-Swick, the jury forewoman. "She didn't fall apart or crumble on the stand. You could see her jaw tighten. We knew that Ramrattan had done something that would affect his victims forever."

Jury members said they had not been convinced by the defense's argument that Ms. Sumasar was a jilted and vengeful woman.

Denise Li, an alternate jury member from Flushing, said the defense's claim that Ms. Sumasar was set up by underworld characters to whom she owed money seemed like a conspiracy theory conjured by Mr. Ramrattan. She said she had been put off by Mr. Ramrattan's demeanor in court.

"Ramrattan was so arrogant and smirking during the trial," Ms. Li said. "He was manipulative and thought so highly of himself, he thought he could get away with it."

Danielle Stancik, another juror, said the case seemed like Hollywood fiction. "If I had seen this on TV," she said, "my reaction would be, 践 ow could this really happen?' " ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1125: OP-ED The Life Reports ... By DAVID BROOKS After a few thousand readers over 70 wrote in with personal histories, here are some of the lessons they shared. ===== notyet If you are over 70, I'd like to ask for a gift. I'd like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way. You can write this as a brief essay or divide your life into categories ・career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge ・ and give yourself a grade in each area.

Page 35 nyt-short-notyet.txt

If you send these life reports to me at [email protected], I'll write a few columns about them around Thanksgiving and post as many essays as possible online.

I ask for this gift for two reasons.

First, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday people will take a step back and try to form a complete picture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

More important, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relatively little help in understanding how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.

The closest things I've been able to find to Life Reports of this sort are the essays some colleges ask their alumni to write for their 25th and 50th reunions. For example, I just stumbled across a collection of short autobiographies that the Yale class of 1942 wrote for their 50th reunion. Some of the lives are inspiring, and some are ones you'd want to avoid.

The most common lament in this collection is from people who worked at the same company all their lives and now realize how boring they must seem. These people passively let their lives happen to them. One man described his long, uneventful career at an insurance company and concluded, "Wish my self-profile was more exciting, but it's a little late now."

Others regret the risk not taken. One rancher wrote, "The pastoral country and its people of New South Wales and Tasmania are similar to Arizona of fifty years ago, that I recall so fondly. I deeply regret not moving to Australia when I was married there 25 years ago."

Others wish they had had more intellectual curiosity, or that they weren't so lazy, or that they had not gotten married so young . Some are strangely passive even in the case of their own character flaws. One chemistry professor wrote, "I am stubborn, cold, selfish, and resentful of being corrected or opposed. I also wish that a course in parenting had been required of all of us at Yale."

Looking back, many were amazed by the role that chance played in their lives. Others point to the pivotal moment that changed their lives. One man was nationally humiliated when he lost to Charles Van Doren in a television quiz show (Van Doren was cheating). Another had a daughter who developed schizophrenia at 16. Another made his fortune in a moment, inventing a mechanical birdcall. "The way it is shaping up now it will be The Audubon Birdcall that is my legacy, and not much else," he wrote.

The most exciting essays were written by the energetic, restless people, who took their lives off in new directions midcourse. One man, who was white, trained an all-black unit during World War II, was a director of the pharmaceutical company that developed The Pill, and then served as a judge at an international court at The Hague. "Career-wise, it was a rocky road," another wrote, "but if diversity is the spice of life, then mine resembled hot Indian curry." Nobody regretted the life changes they made, even when they failed.

Some felt summoned to do one thing. Their essays ring with passion and conviction. "I have been put on earth to be a painter," one artist wrote. A scientist writes, "I can think of no career more rewarding and no pursuit more noble."

After an unexciting business career, one man found total fulfillment teaching others how to build custom fishing rods. Another found it volunteering for the International Crane Foundation, preserving bird habitats.

The men all mention serving in the war, but none go into detail about their war experiences. Many were struck by tragedy: blindness, the suicide of a child, a profound professional catastrophe.

They strike me as less intellectually adventurous than the Yale students of today. They were alarmed by the shift in values they had witnessed during their lifetime. But most were immensely grateful to live in the era that they did. An amazing number cherished their marriages of 43 years or more. And, for almost all, family and friends mattered most.

And they left these essays, offering lessons for the rest of us. I'm hoping you'll do that, too. ~~~~~~~~~~

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NYT -1126 In Quiet Part of Russia, Putin's Party Loses Steam ... By ELLEN BARRY United Russia can no longer count on voters in places like Tula, an industrial region where many residents say that their quality of life has stopped rising. ===== notyet ARSENYEVO, Russia ・ It was a grim-faced crowd that gathered last week at the Palace of Culture in this village, making its way past decrepit housing blocks, broken streetlights and a statue of Lenin.

The governor had driven in from the regional capital, and detachments of pretty girls in blue smocks were handing out flags for United Russia, the party that serves as an extension of the Kremlin's power.

But the villagers were not in a holiday mood. They wanted to complain ・ about unresponsive local officials, corruption, alcoholism, decaying housing and the hopelessness that is sending young people away. "You know what we need?" said one woman as she waited in line for sausage. "A monument to dead factories."

United Russia can no longer count on voters in places like Tula, an industrial region about 120 miles south of Moscow where many residents say that their quality of life has stopped rising. This lagging support is an unsettling prospect for the government ・ even though United Russia will almost certainly dominate parliamentary elections on Dec. 4. With competition all but eliminated, Russia's political system depends heavily on its leaders' popularity to provide legitimacy. As winter settles in, that no longer feels assured.

With elections a week away, pollsters were predicting that United Russia would lose as many as 60 of its 315 seats in Parliament, and officials in Tula were making a last push to win back voters' confidence.

An array of pay raises and public projects have been announced in recent weeks. Vladimir S. Gruzdev, a rising political star who was installed as governor in August, holds marathon town hall meetings reminiscent of reality television, dressing down local apparatchiks like a populist Donald Trump. Arsenyevo has only 4,900 residents, but they got three and a half hours with Mr. Gruzdev this month. They then scattered into the dark, some impressed, some skeptical.

"This is an election campaign," said Antonina Dyrova, a 60-year-old bookkeeper, as she bundled up against the cold. "I can't tell whether anything will actually change."

Tula is not the place you would expect the Kremlin's troubles to come from.

United Russia polls badly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but those are places populated by wealthy liberals, whose complaints have never had much impact. Tula, by contrast, is average. Its weapons factories have endured waves of layoffs since the 1990s, leaving tens of thousands of families in decaying housing. Young people depart for Moscow as if drawn by a giant magnet.

Tula voted 60 percent for United Russia in 2007, but polls this fall showed support slipping to around 40 percent. In interviews, voters complained of stagnant wages, rising prices and increases in utility payments.

"We were hoping for something better," said Yekaterina Demidova, 25, a shop assistant in Arsenyevo. "Ten years ago, we felt that things were moving. Now they've stopped."

Numerous voters said they did not plan to cast ballots at all . Larisa Kharich, a seamstress, said that she would support United Russia because it represented "young, energetic" Russians, but that the party's political monopoly was beginning to grate on her nonetheless.

"What I don't like is the sense that everything has been decided already," said Ms. Kharich, 43. "There is no competition. There are no competitors and no competition. There are lots of shows. But people are not stupid."

Mr. Gruzdev's visit to Arsenyevo offered a glimpse into the depth of citizens' grievances and the government's efforts to address it.

The new governor, 44, worked in the Soviet foreign intelligence service and then founded a chain of grocery stores, accumulating a fortune Forbes estimates at $950 million. He was appointed in the midst of a scandal; his predecessor, a party member who was appointed by President Vladimir V. Putin in 2005 and then reappointed by President Dmitri A.

Page 37 nyt-short-notyet.txt Medvedev in 2010, was charged with taking a $1.3 million bribe.

The case alienated United Russia voters like Gennady A. Fedin, who said he would never vote for the party again.

"The fish rots from the head," said Mr. Fedin, 72, a retired factory foreman. "Where did this corruption come from? It can only come from the top."

Mr. Gruzdev has responded with a kind of populist shock therapy that voters seem to love. His town hall meetings are jokingly referred to as "execution visits" because he calls on local officials to respond to citizens' complaints on the spot. Occasionally he tells them on the spot to tender their resignations. In October, after a roomful of citizens vented their complaints against a regional administrator, he recommended that the official shoot himself.

"Let's take care of this right now," Mr. Gruzdev said briskly here in Arsenyevo, after listening to an excruciatingly detailed complaint about fees for electricity in apartment stairwells, which results in additional costs of several dollars a month. When an official meekly said he had scheduled a round table on the issue, the governor shot back, "Round tables are all very well, but our citizens are getting bills today." He was rewarded with warm applause.

In an interview afterward, Mr. Gruzdev said these were routine outings by a new governor, and unrelated to the elections. He acknowledged, however, that his popularity was helping the party.

"United Russia's approval rating is linked, above all, with the people who embody United Russia," he said.

Vladimir Kosteyev, an election consultant who has been working for United Russia in Tula since April, said the mood seemed particularly dark in the industrial cities that are close enough to Moscow to compare their relative wealth; poorer cities in the hinterlands are more forgiving. He added that there was nothing very surprising about the erosion of support for United Russia.

"It is just a normal trend of exhaustion with a political brand," Mr. Kosteyev said. "In the United States, the oldest brands have been repositioned dozens of times." If voters are becoming tired of the party, or of Mr. Putin, he added, "we need to do a rebranding."

Branding may not be enough in a region like Tula, where voters' grievances are economic and "people right now do not believe in words," said Alexei V. Makarkin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow.

In any case, he says, the authorities have little to fear from the parliamentary elections.

The real hazard will come months from now, when all the posters have been taken down and an already bitter electorate faces stark economic realities, Mr. Makarkin said. The campaign season has uncovered "something happening in our society, a very important process," he argued, as Russians ・ people accustomed to 7 percent growth rates ・ reassess Mr. Putin and United Russia through an increasingly critical lens.

"People have the expectation that at least things won't be worse," he said. "And it will probably be worse." ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1126: ARTSBEAT - Q. AND A. For Hallberg, a Month Inside the Bolshoi Pressure Cooker ... By ELLEN BARRY David Hallberg, the first American to be a principal dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet, discusses the pressure he faces and his ankle injury, which will force him to sit out for two weeks. ===== notyet Dmitry Astakhov/RIA Novosti Kremlin, via Associated PressDavid Hallberg, right, is greeted by President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan , left, and President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, center, after the Nov. 18 performance of "Sleeping Beauty" at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. For the South Dakota native David Hallberg his appearance on the storied main stage of the Bolshoi Ballet last Friday was, he said beforehand, probably the most important appearance of his career ・ a stress-filled test of whether the Bolshoi's artistic director, Sergei Filin, had made a good bet in bringing him to Moscow as the company's first American principal dancer.

The stakes had been ratcheted up four days before Mr. Hallberg's performance in "Sleeping Beauty" by the news that

Page 38 nyt-short-notyet.txt Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev , two of the Bolshoi's young stars, were leaving for the Mikhailovsky Theater, a lesser-known house in St. Petersburg financed by the billionaire Vladimir Kekhman. The news came as a blow to Mr. Hallberg, who said that the opportunity to dance with Ms. Osipova was "15 percent" of the reason he had joined the Bolshoi. Mr. Kekhman, gloating over his success, told the Independent that he would poach Mr. Hallberg "in the next year or so ."

In the midst of this ferment, "Sleeping Beauty" opened. The New York Times chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, was rapturous in his review of Mr. Hallberg's performance on Nov. 20, which was telecast live to theaters all over the United States. "Has the Bolshoi already made him faster, higher, more expansive? On camera it appears so," Mr. Macaulay wrote. The reviewer from the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets called him "entrancing and refined in his every movement." And his fellow critic from Komsomolskaya Pravda described an audible gasp when Mr. Hallberg finally appeared on stage, commenting that he "didn't need to dance at all, and could have just walked back and forth on stage, delighting the public with the lines of his body."

Mr. Hallberg is reflecting on his adjustment from the American Ballet Theater to the Bolshoi, and from New York to Moscow, in a series of conversations with the Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times, Ellen Barry. Here, edited and condensed, is their latest chat, in which Mr. Hallberg reveals an injury that would keep him out of performances for two weeks.

Q. Was there anything unexpectedly challenging about the performance?

A. There was an obscene amount of pressure. You could have cut it with a knife it was so thick. I first felt it in my very first run with the company when we ran the ballet with the company on the upper stage of the Bolshoi and [Yuri] Grigorovich [the choreographer and the company's former artistic director] was watching me for the first time. He approved me but he had never seen me dance. I haven't been that nervous in a really long time.

Q. Which was the performance that mattered the most?

A. The 18th was the premiere ・ [Dmitry] Medvedev [the president of Russia] was there. The 20th was the telecast, and everyone in America was watching. I sprained my ankle on the first entrance of the telecast. It happened on stage ・ I twisted my ankle. I'm out for two weeks. I just got through the performance through total adrenaline.

Q. Who did you tell when that happened?

A. No one , not until curtain went down. Russians love that kind of drama in the theater. It would have been really dramatic, but nothing would have gotten accomplished. When stress sets in, and pressure, I focus. I don't want the world to know I sprained my ankle, because that will just create disorganization. Nothing will get done. Had it happened two days before it would have been a catastrophe, because now I can't dance. I can barely walk right now.

Q. Were you asking yourself if you could get through it?

A. No , because I didn't even question it.

Q. How did you find out about the departure of Ms. Osipova and Mr. Vasiliev?

A. Through a journalist who was interviewing me about "Sleeping Beauty." She was asking me how do you feel about "Beauty," and I was like, "it's gorgeous," then she goes, how do you feel about Osipova and Vasiliev leaving the Bolshoi for Mikhailovsky? She was speaking in English, so I thought something had gotten lost in translation and she meant

Page 39 nyt-short-notyet.txt something else, like how do you feel about them going to dance with the theater. Sure enough I get home and I read that they've left the Bolshoi.

Q. Wasn't dancing with Ms. Osipova part of the package that brought you here?

It was one of the incentives that brought me here, but there was no guarantee. It's true that she wasn't doing my every performance, because she doesn't dance Swan Lake and she doesn't dance Sleeping Beauty at the Bolshoi Theater and I do.

Q. Can you tell me about your relationship with her?

A. We don't verbally communicate, but it's a very raw, very emotional, almost sexual connection. I mean ・ it's a feeling. Because obviously we don't talk, so we don't profess anything. We just dance together. And when we dance together, it's electric for both of us.

Q. Have you talked to Natalia?

A. There's nothing really to say. I'm not mad. I would have loved for her to stick around to dance with me, but she has to do what she has to do. She has to be artistically fulfilled, and if she thinks that she'll find that there, then go for it. I'm not here to say, "Listen we were supposed to dance together, wasn't that an incentive to stay?" Because it's not.

Q. I guess Mr. Kekhman's saying he'll get you too.

A. "We'll welcome him." Did you read that in The Independent? I'm like, wow, that is a bold statement.

Q. The kind of drama you've lived through in the last month, it seems like it's beyond the norm.

A. [The injury] could be a testament to the fact that I have reached my limit emotionally. I felt like I was in a pressure cooker. I literally pictured myself in a pressure cooker being pressure steamed. Like, just sucked dry. Because I felt like it all came down to this ・ this one moment , and I'm on stage for an hour and 15 minutes. It was this one moment when I had to produce. I could not fail.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 25, 2011

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1126 Under Rule, Hailing a Cab for a Stranger Can Be Illegal ... By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM Dating to the early 1990s, when swindlers would target unsuspecting tourists, a New York City rule prohibits procuring a taxi unprompted for a stranger. ===== notyet Recently, a man named Juan Bannister approached a stranger on Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. "Do you need a taxi?" Mr. Bannister asked, according to a subsequent police report. "Can I get you a taxi? Just wait here; you're next."

Page 40 nyt-short-notyet.txt

Mr. Bannister flagged down a taxi, placed the stranger's luggage in the trunk and, for his efforts, received a $1.50 tip. He was promptly arrested at the scene ・ charged, improbably, with the unlawful hailing of a taxicab.

Mr. Bannister had fallen afoul of a little-known New York City traffic rule that prohibits anyone from procuring a taxi unprompted for another person "not in his or her social company."

The offense alone cannot lead to an arrest ・ Mr. Bannister, who was described by his lawyer as homeless, was also charged with criminal nuisance for blocking traffic ・ but it can result in a summons that must be answered in Criminal Court. Since 2009, the Manhattan district attorney's office has prosecuted 109 cases that included a violation of unlawful hailing, officials said.

The rule, in place since 1992, is on Page 10 of the city's 108-page book of traffic regulations, after one that requires pedestrians to cross at the crosswalk and another that bans hitchhiking. But few New Yorkers seem aware of its existence.

The doormen's union, whose members routinely procure rides for strangers of a sort, was mystified to learn of it. The Police Department said it did not keep records of summonses given for the rule. Even the taxi commissioner at the time the rule was passed, Fidel F. Del Valle, said he had only a vague recollection of it.

"I've done thousands of cases related to traffic ・ I've never seen this charge," said John Campbell, whose firm in Westchester County, Tilem & Campbell, handles a variety of vehicular and pedestrian violations in New York City.

The rule dates to a time when so-called squeegee men, who roamed the roadways demanding tips in return for washing windshields, were common. One related scourge was swindlers who would "help" unsuspecting passengers into cabs and then request the entire fare upfront.

The practice was widespread at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, where tourists, unfamiliar with the city's cab trade, would hand over $80 to the friendly man who helped with their luggage. By the time they reached their destination, and realized the mistake, the scam artist was long gone.

"When I drove years ago, it happened to me," said David Pollack, the editor of Taxi Insider, an industry publication. "I say, 塑 ou forgot to pay me.' And they say, 糎 e already paid.' I say, 糎 hat?' 糎 ell, we paid the gentleman who put the luggage in the trunk.' "

Variations abounded: slam the trunk shut, but slyly keep the luggage; demand a tip for, among other unnecessary services, holding open the taxi door.

That problem was addressed with another regulation: "No person, other than an occupant or prospective occupant of a passenger vehicle on a street, shall open, hold open or close ・・ or offer to open, hold open or close any door of the vehicle."

So does this mean that the city's ranks of doormen, in dutifully procuring rides for tenants, have been breaking the law all these years? Not exactly.

The rules make clear that hailing for others is allowed if the passenger initiates the request. And there is an exception for doormen in the no-holding-doors rule, which specifies that the act is allowed "when intended purely as a social amenity without expectation or acceptance of a gratuity." (There is no guidance, however, on whether to tip a bellhop.)

These days, the police have cracked down on the Penn Station-style scam, and hailing summonses are mostly issued in conjunction with other charges, like fraud.

Edward McCarthy, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who handles arraignments at Manhattan Criminal Court, said he had encountered the rule several times. "When the rule is enforced and results in an arrest, generally speaking the individual has had a history of similar arrests," Mr. McCarthy wrote in an e-mail.

A hailing violation carries no prescribed fine or penalty. But Mr. Bannister, who could not be reached for comment, did not go unpunished.

He pleaded guilty to the charges against him and received a sentence of seven days in jail, including time served.

Page 41 nyt-short-notyet.txt ~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1127: THEATER Alone Onstage, Desperate for Clarity ... By SARAH LYALL The actor Cillian Murphy is Brooklyn bound as the star of a one-man play, "Misterman," by Enda Walsh. ===== notyet LONDON - IT was last summer in Galway, Ireland, and the actor Cillian Murphy had just delivered the final line of the first preview of "Misterman," an emotional wringer of a one-man play in which his character goes spectacularly off the rails. But when the lights went out, the theater was flooded, not with applause but with silence.

Mr. Murphy was flooded with panic. "Well, that's it," he thought. "They hate it."

The spell was finally broken after several ominous moments by the sound of one man clapping (it was the playwright, Enda Walsh, but still). The rest of the audience, immobilized, it seemed, by the power of the work, jolted awake and gave the performance a standing ovation.

"Misterman" had a triumphant run in Galway, and is now heading to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn for a three-week engagement, beginning on Wednesday. The occasion should give the many ardent partisans of Mr. Murphy, best known for his electrifying, typecast-defying turns in a range of movies, big and small, a chance to see him up close onstage for 90 exciting minutes.

Up even closer in an interview at a $10-a-lunch vegetable-focused cafe near his house in Kilburn, Northwest London, Mr. Murphy, 35, whose first name is pronounced KILL-ian, was relaxed, cheerful, funny and modest. He spoke with fluent intelligence about the themes in "Misterman," but was less interested in discussing his movies or his career strategy, to the extent he admitted he had one.

He had just recovered from a bout of prolonged news media exposure brought on by the recent release of "In Time," a futuristic thriller in which he plays a futuristic law-enforcement officer who is charged with preventing the theft of time but who mostly steals scenes from Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried.

Mr. Murphy has appeared in other big-budget movies, invariably bringing conviction and credibility to his roles, no matter how implausible the scenario. These include "Batman Begins" (2005), in which he played the Scarecrow, a creepy villain who drives people insane with his creepy insanity-gas, and "Inception" (2010) in which he played a corporate heir caught up in the movie's tangled dream-hijacking conspiracy. As seriously as Mr. Murphy takes all of his parts, it is hard to imagine how he manages to get through even one of the press junkets that these movies require. When asked to discuss an admittedly inane Timberlake-related point, his eyes clouded over. "That is a junket question," he said.

Topic dismissed.

In "Misterman," a co-production of the Galway Arts Festival and Landmark Productions, Mr. Murphy plays the tormented, and sinned-against-and-sinning, Thomas Magill, who has fled his tiny Irish village and taken up residence in a vast abandoned warehouse. There, desperate to control his past by rewriting his memory of it, he obsessively relives a fateful day back home, playing and replaying a reel-to-reel tape he recorded of various encounters with his mother and their neighbors. Mr. Murphy, a wicked mimic, performs most of the offstage characters' voices himself, interpreting them through Thomas's own "demented prism," as Mr. Murphy put it.

An earlier version of the play was performed in 1999, with Mr. Walsh himself playing Thomas. He is directing the new version of "Misterman"; he reworked the old script extensively with Mr. Murphy's help.

"We decided that it's the first time that he's played this day through in its entirety, this day that he's rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed," Mr. Murphy said. (After seeing him play so many American parts, it was odd to hear his Irish lilt.) "It's about him staying alive ・ it's about him living with this guilt, this immutable fact that he carries in his head and also literally in this tape recorder."

Like many of Mr. Murphy's characters, Thomas is a complicated mixture of sympathetic and not nice at all ・ deeply wounded, but with a dangerous, skewed moral code.

Page 42 nyt-short-notyet.txt "Sociologically, this character is instantly recognizable to people in Ireland," Mr. Murphy said. "He's the sort of eejit" ・ an Irish-ism for "idiot" ・ "who is harmless enough, but who falls through the cracks. Throughout the play, he's calling for help, and everyone just sort of dismisses him or fobs him off. Those kind of characters have popped up in tragic Irish stories for a long, long time."

As Thomas's memory painfully unfurls into his consciousness, it becomes clear that he harbors a terrible secret and is not entirely the victim he at first seemed to be. The part requires Mr. Murphy to take himself to the edge of sanity while also covering the length of an unusually large set.

"The relationship is between the man and this huge space he's found himself in," Mr. Walsh said in a telephone interview from New York. "How can he control the space and a story that is unraveling in front of him? He's saying, 選 want to tell my story and find clarity here.' "

It is an emotionally and physically draining role, but Mr. Murphy thrives in it, Mr. Walsh said, explaining: "He adores having an audience. He loves it; he controls them in a beautiful way. He's fantastically winning and you just want to look at him onstage."

The actor and the playwright have been friends since meeting in Cork, where Mr. Murphy grew up, in the mid-1990s. Mr. Murphy was 18, playing the guitar and singing in a jazz-rock band, the Sons of Mr. Greengenes ("We liked Frank Zappa") and "posing as a law student," as he said, a role he would soon drop. Enthusiastically neglecting to study, he badgered a former high school teacher, Pat Kiernan, into letting him audition for a play he was about to direct in Cork ・ "Disco Pigs," written by Mr. Walsh.

"There was something about him ・ he was incredibly enigmatic and he would walk into a room with real presence and you 'd go, 閃 y God,' " Mr. Walsh recalled. He added, as a by-the-way: "It had nothing to do with those bloody eyes that everyone's going on about all the time."

(A digressive word about Mr. Murphy's eyes, which are blue but so unusual that describing them precisely would require a thesaurus that does not yet exist. The effect is like some kind of otherworldly sea glass. They are not straightforwardly handsome, like Paul Newman's, but mesmerizing ・ entire Web sites have been devoted to this point ・ and on film can captivate or horrify, depending on what is required. They are also really big.)

In any case, "Disco Pigs" was a huge hit, and Mr. Murphy went off to become a very busy movie actor. Among many roles, he appeared in Neil Jordan's "Breakfast on Pluto" (2005) playing an Irish transgender teenager. He was in Wes Craven's "Red Eye" (2005) in the role of a charismatic psychopath who charms, then terrorizes, Rachel McAdams on a hellish cross-country plane trip. He appeared in Danny Boyle's science-fiction movie "Sunshine" (2007) as a physicist on a space mission to save the earth by flying into the sun. He married his longtime girlfriend, an Irish artist, became the father of two sons, now 6 and 4, and moved to London.

He has a number of movies in production or coming up, but said he was looking forward to being onstage again.

"The live nature of it makes it so dangerous," he said. "You're only there because of the good will of the audience, and that's compounded by its being a one-man show.

"People are so tense," he added cheerfully. Him, too.

"It's important to always have a level of hunger, of fear," he said about being an actor. "If you ever have a moment where you say " ・ here Mr. Murphy affected a plummy, actorly voice ・"I was brilliant, brilliant,' you might as well be dead."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 25, 2011 An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the area of London where Mr. Murphy lives. It is Kilburn, not Killburn. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1127: OP-ED In the Arab World, It's the Past vs. the Future ... By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Page 43 nyt-short-notyet.txt As the fighting continues in Egypt and Syria, crucial questions are raised. ===== notyet IN 2001, a book came out about George Mitchell's diplomatic work in Northern Ireland that was entitled "To Hell With the Future, Let's Get On With the Past." One hopes that such a book will never be written about today's Arab awakenings. But watching events unfold out there makes it impossible not to ask: Will the past bury the future in the Arab world or will the future bury the past?

I am awed by the bravery of the Syrian and Egyptian youths trying to throw off the tyranny of the Assad family and the Egyptian military. The fact that they go into the streets ・ knowing they face security forces who will not hesitate to gun them down ・ speaks of the deep longing of young Arabs to be free of the regimes that have so long choked their voices and prevented them from realizing their full potential.

But I am deeply worried that the longer the fighting continues in Syria and Egypt, the less chance that any stable, democratizing order will emerge anytime soon and the more likely that Syria could disintegrate into civil war. You can't exaggerate how dangerous that would be. When Tunisia was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Egypt was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. When Libya was convulsed by revolution, it imploded. If Syria is convulsed by revolution, it will not implode. Most Arab states implode. Syria explodes.

Why? Because Syria is the keystone of the Levant. It borders and balances a variety of states, sects and ethnic groups. If civil war erupts there, every one of Syria's neighbors will cultivate, and be cultivated by, different Syrian factions ・ Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, Druse, Christians, pro-Iranians, pro-Hezbollahites, pro-Palestinians, pro-Saudis ・ in order to try to tilt Syria in their direction. Turkey, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, Hamas, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel all have vital interests in who rules in Damascus, and they will all find ways to partner with proxies inside Syria to shape events there. It will become a big Lebanon-like brawl.

Syria needs a peaceful democratic transition set in motion now. Ditto Egypt. But that is easier said than done. Events in both countries are a reminder of the multidimensional struggle for power across the Middle East ・ what I once described as the struggle between "The Lexus and the Olive Tree."

On one level, you have the very modern, deeply felt and truly authentic longing by Syrians and Egyptians for freedom, for the skills to thrive in modernity and for the rights of real citizens.

Outsiders often underestimate just how much these Arab youths are determined to limit the powers of their militaries as a necessary step for achieving true democracy. What you see in Egypt today are young people from across the political spectrum and classes who are willing to join forces, break ranks with their own parties and return to Tahrir Square to press for real freedom. This is a generational rupture. It is the old versus the young. It is the insiders (the adults) versus the outsiders (the youth). It is the privileged old guard versus the disadvantaged young guard. These young Egyptians, and Syrians, who have stopped fearing their military masters, are determined to unleash a true transformation in their world. We should be on their side.

But the weight of their history is so heavy. The new Lexus-like values of "democracy," "free elections," "citizen rights" and "modernity" will have to compete with some very old Olive Tree ideas and passions. These include the age-old civil wars within Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, over who should dominate the faith, the heated struggle between Salafists and modernists over whether the 21st century should be embraced or rejected, as well as the ancient tribal and regional struggles playing out within each of these societies. Last, but not least, you have the struggle between the entrenched military/crony elites and the masses. These struggles from the "past" always threaten to rise up, consume any new movement for change and bury "the future."

This is the grand drama now being played out in the Arab world ・ the deeply sincere youth-led quest for liberty and the deeply rooted quests for sectarian, factional, class and tribal advantage. One day it looks as though the revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Tunisia are going to be hijacked by forces and passions from the past while the next day that longing of young people to be free and modern pushes them back.

The same drama played out in Iraq, but there the process was managed, at a huge cost, by an American midwife ・ managed enough so that the communities were able to write a new, rudimentary social contract on how to live together and, thereby, give the future a chance to bury the past. But we still do not know how it will end in Iraq.

We know, though, that there will be no impartial outside midwife to guide the transitions in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen. Can they each make it without one? Only if they develop their own Nelson Mandelas ・ unique civic leaders

Page 44 nyt-short-notyet.txt or coalitions who can honor the past, and contain its volcanic urges, but not let it bury the future. ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1128 The Tweets of War: What's Past Is Postable ... By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER A Twitter stream aims to convey what World War II felt like to ordinary people who had no idea how it would end. ===== notyet Hitler spent decades plotting his campaign for world domination. Alwyn Collinson, 24, a recent graduate in Renaissance history from Oxford University, hatched his own plan to invade Poland in a mere five days.

On Aug. 26 Mr. Collinson was just a marketing manager at a magazine in Oxford toying with the notion of starting some kind of a real-time Twitter project that would get people's attention ・ maybe something like Orson Welles's 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, but that wouldn't scare them to death.

Then suddenly he hit on the idea of tweeting the biggest terrestrial war of all time, and on Aug. 31 ・ roughly 72 years to the hour after Hitler's tanks moved across the frontier ・ the Twitter feed RealTimeWWII was under way.

Since then the dominoes have fallen quickly. The number of followers jumped to 10,000 from about 300 by mid-September, after the project was featured on the blog The Next Web. By Nov. 9, the same date in 1939 that two British spies were captured by the SS at the Dutch border town of Venlo, the total had hit 45,000. Last week Mr. Collinson had more than 140,000 followers, dwarfing the numbers for similar feeds like @ukwarcabinet (based on documents from the National Archives in Britain detailing Winston Churchill's cabinet debates in 1941).

Volunteers have started translating the RealTimeWWII feed into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Turkish, with talks under way for versions in French, Dutch and German.

"The amount of interest has amazed me," Mr. Collinson said recently in a telephone interview. "I don't have any pretensions to grand historical scholarship. I just want to get people interested."

He seems to have chosen an effective medium. "Those who forget history are doomed to re-tweet it," declares the tag line of TwHistory, an educational Web site that began in 2009 with a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg in salvoes of 140 characters or less. So, apparently, are those who remember it.

One can hardly spend an hour on Twitter without getting caught up in a blow-by-blow account of the Civil War, Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1911 polar expedition or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, not to mention a welter of biographical offerings from the likes of Paul Revere, John Quincy Adams, Churchill and Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century London diarist, who has amassed more than 22,000 followers. Pepys's maid, Jane Birch, even has a feed ・ or at least she did until last March, when she abruptly quit after posting complaints about her employer's incessant snoring and incontinent dog.

Mr. Collinson puts an appealingly modest face on his wildly immodest project. Last Tuesday, while Hitler was berating his generals for their lack of faith in his ultimate triumph ・ "dramatic irony stuff," Mr. Collinson said ・ he was busy putting the finishing touches on a marketing schedule for Daily Information, the magazine where he holds down a job while pumping out up to 40 war-related tweets a day, timed as much as possible to the precise hour. (The social media tool SocialOomph helps him schedule posts for times when he's supposed to be working or sleeping.)

"World War II gives me something to do with my time," he said. "The office job keeps me grounded in the real world."

When the project began, Mr. Collinson relied mainly on "a few authoritative books," he said, along with whatever he could find via Google. But over time his readers have led him to some far-flung and obscure sources. One reader sent him an article from a Polish newspaper describing an assassination attempt against Hitler in Oct. 1939 that went unmentioned in the timelines he was consulting. Others sent links to relatives' wartime diaries, posted on little-read blogs.

Mr. Collinson said his goals are to educate his followers about the basic sequence of events and give a sense of what the war felt like to ordinary people who had no idea how it would end.

"I still get dozens of tweets every day from people who say, 選 forgot I was following World War II, and I suddenly thought the Germans were about to invade Holland,' " Mr. Collinson said. "That's exactly the effect I want: to convey the

Page 45 nyt-short-notyet.txt fear, the uncertainty, the shock. That's what it was like for the people who lived through it."

Professional historians have been mostly sympathetic to Mr. Collinson's approach.

"People in the past weren't living in the past, they were living in their own present," Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale and the author of "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin," said in an e-mail. "These kinds of tweets restore to the past the authentically confusing character of the present."

Max Hastings, whose new book, "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945," was one of Mr. Collinson's initial sources, concurred. "I don't think this can substitute for the sort of coherent narrative and analysis only books can provide," he said. "But it offers a sense of immediacy and pace that a younger audience, especially, finds attractive."

Attractive for now at least. Andrew Roberts, the author of the recent narrative history "The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War," wondered if Mr. Collinson would be able to sustain reader interest through the period known as the "phony war," also known at the time as the "bore war."

"It wasn't the most exciting time," Mr. Roberts said. "As far as the ground war was concerned, nothing happens between Oct. 18" ・ when Hitler issued a directive for the invasion of the West ・ "and the invasion of Norway and Denmark."

Mr. Collinson, however, said he's "looking forward, if that's the word," to the Soviet invasion of Finland on Wednesday, though even he is not sure he can make it all the way to the Allied victory over Japan in August 2017. "If I try to keep it going for six years, I'd go mad," he said.

Other blow-by-blow historical Twitter efforts have run aground. @PatriotCast, a feed devoted to the Revolutionary War with some 2,600 followers, abruptly ceased operations last January with the rather anticlimactic announcement that "a large shipment of gunpowder has arrived in Egg Harbor, N.J." @MonticelloTJ, a feed based on Thomas Jefferson's diaries, went silent in Sept. 2010, following weeks of bland remarks about the weather and the state of Monticello's millet field. More controversially a 10th-anniversary Sept. 11 feed put together by The Guardian in Britain shut down after a mere 16 tweets, following a public outcry.

Mr. Collinson said he is mindful of issues of taste as he approaches the Holocaust. But he's also determined to stick to his neutral, just-the-facts approach, even as the internationalization of the feed has opened his eyes to the limitations of his own British perspective.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, points out that that bias was evident from Mr. Collinson's first tweet. The Chinese, after all, date the beginning of World War II not to Hitler's invasion of Poland but to the Japanese invasion of North China in 1937.

Still, Mr. Wasserstrom said, RealTimeWWII may have laid claim to the ultimate tweetable historical event: rich in documentary sources but not yet overwhelmed by data-streams like, well, Twitter.

"You couldn't tweet something that unfolded in tweets," Mr. Wasserstrom said. "You'd just go crazy. There's something about World War II. Even though it's huge, there's something manageable about it." ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1129: OP-ED The Life Reports II ... By DAVID BROOKS Positive lessons from the senior set continue to pour in. Here are a few takeaways. ===== notyet A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me "Life Reports" ・ essays about their own lives and what they'd done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I've tried to extract a few general life lessons:

Divide your life into chapters. The unhappiest of my correspondents saw time as an unbroken flow, with themselves as corks bobbing on top of it. A man named Neil lamented that he had been "an Eeyore not a Tigger; a pessimist, not an optimist; an aimless grasshopper, not a purposeful ant; a dreamer, not a doer; a nomad, not a settler; a voyager, not an adventurer; a spectator, not an actor, player or participant." He concluded: "Neil never amounted to anything."

The happier ones divided time into (somewhat artificial) phases. They wrote things like: There were six crucial decisions

Page 46 nyt-short-notyet.txt in my life. Then they organized their lives around those pivot points. By seeing time as something divisible into chunks, they could more easily stop and self-appraise. They had more control over their fate.

Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives. It's not only that they were driven to introspection by bad events. Through self-obsession, they seemed to reinforce the very emotions, thoughts and habits they were trying to escape.

Many of the most impressive people, on the other hand, were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.

You can't control other people. David Leshan made an observation that was echoed by many: "It took me twenty years of my fifty-year marriage to discover how unwise it was to attempt to remake my wife. ... I learned also that neither could I remake my friends or students."

On the other hand, some of the most inspiring stories were about stepparents who came into families and wisely bided their time, accepting slights and insults until they were gradually accepted by their new children.

Lean toward risk. It's trite, but apparently true. Many more seniors regret the risks they didn't take than regret the ones they did.

Measure people by their growth rate, not by their talents. The best essays were by people who made steady progress each decade. Regina Titus grew up shy and sheltered on Long Island. She took demeaning clerical jobs, working with people who treated her poorly. Her first husband died after six months of marriage and her second committed suicide.

But she just kept growing. At 56, studying nights and weekends, she obtained a college degree, cum laude, from Marymount Manhattan College. She moved to Wilmington, Del., works as a docent, studies opera, hikes, volunteers and does a thousand other things. She acknowledges, "I did not have the joy of holding my baby in my arms. I did not have a long and happy marriage." But hers is a story of relentless self-expansion. I wonder how we can measure that capacity.

Be aware of the generational bias. Many of the essayists have ambivalent attitudes toward their parents. Almost all have worshipful attitudes toward their children. I'm not sure how to explain this pattern, but I don't think it's pure egotism. Many writers mentioned that given their own flaws, they are astounded that their kids turned out so well.

Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them. For a time, our culture celebrated the rebel and the outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.

There are other patterns running through the essays. I was struck by the fact that almost nobody mentioned whether or not they were good-looking, though this must have been an important factor, especially when they were young. Many people lament the fact that they had to make the most important decisions in their 20s, at the age when they were least qualified to make them.

People get better at the art of living. By their 60s many contributors found their zone. Metaphysics is dead; very few of the writers hewed to a specific theology or had any definite conception of a divine order, though vague but uplifting spiritual experiences pepper their reflections.

Finally, the essays present disturbing quandaries. For example, we are told to live for others. But one savvy retiree writes, "Don't stay with people who, over time, grow apart from you. Move on. This means do what you think will make you feel okay ・ even if that makes others feel temporarily not okay."

Is that selfishness or hard-earned realism? That one you'll have to answer for yourself. ~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1130 As Water Levels Drop, Texas Drought Reveals Secrets of the Deep ... By MANNY FERNANDEZ As lake levels drop, objects long submerged are being revealed, attracting the attention of historians, anthropologists,

Page 47 nyt-short-notyet.txt criminal investigators and, in one case, NASA. ===== notyet MARTINS MILL, Tex. ・ For more than three years, the lake on Jack Mewbourn's ranch here held a secret at its murky bottom: A 1999 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. His grandson was the first one to notice the top of the car peeking out of the water. It wasn't luck, or even fate. It was drought.

The water level in the seven-acre lake has dropped about five feet from a lack of rain. Stand on the grass lining the lake's edge today, and in any other year you would be standing nearly waist-deep in water.

On a recent Saturday, Mr. Mewbourn, a longtime rancher in this rural unincorporated community about 90 minutes southeast of Dallas, took a boat to the middle of the lake with two of his grandsons. They confirmed that the object they thought at first might be a barrel was indeed a car. Mr. Mewbourn called a local constable, and with the help of a diver and a tow truck, the vehicle was slowly dragged out. Inside, still buckled into the driver's seat, were the remains of Brenda Kay Oliver, who had been missing since July 2008.

Ms. Oliver's relatives said she had never recovered from the trauma of her 19-year-old son's suicide. He had drowned himself in a nearby lake. The authorities believe Ms. Oliver, 55, took her own life by driving her car into Mr. Mewbourn's lake, about a mile from where her sister, the last person to see her alive, had been living at the time.

Mr. Mewbourn and the Van Zandt County constable, Pat Jordan, have found themselves in recent days calling a cruel thing like a drought a strange sort of blessing. "If it wouldn't have been for the drought," Mr. Jordan said, "she'd probably still be in the car in that lake."

The historic drought that has devastated crops and forced millions of Texans in small towns and large cities to abide by mandatory water restrictions has had at least one benefit: As lake levels have dropped around the state, objects of all kinds that had been submerged for years, decades and even centuries are being revealed.

Some of the discovered items are common debris like computer monitors, tires and sunken boats. But much of it has attracted the attention of historians, anthropologists, criminal investigators and, in one case, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Long-submerged marble tombstones from the 1880s have become visible in the receding waters of Lake Buchanan in Central Texas. Near the Texas-Louisiana border, the grave sites from an early 19th-century cemetery have turned up at one drought-stricken lake. Pat Mercado-Allinger, the director of the Texas Historical Commission's archaeology division, said one water authority estimated having roughly 200 previously unreported archaeological sites resulting from lowered lake levels.

"The drought in Texas has been so severe and so widespread, across essentially the entire state, that we're hearing reports from all over," said Ms. Mercado-Allinger, who was reluctant to discuss precise locations of many sites because of concerns for looting. "There are artifact collectors out there and looters who look for opportunities and go add to their personal collections or mine the sites. We have to be very careful."

At Lake Georgetown north of Austin, where the water level has dropped 23 feet, fishermen found a human skull at the edge of the water last month. The Georgetown police initially thought it might be related to the 2002 disappearance of a 19-year-old woman, but the skull was ultimately found to be of historical, not criminal, significance. It is believed to be the skull of an American Indian man that is hundreds or thousands of years old, and is being studied in a lab by anthropologists at Texas State University in San Marcos.

In East Texas at Lake Nacogdoches, which has dropped 12 feet in the drought, residents stumbled onto a much larger object in late July. It was a spherical aluminum tank, four feet in diameter, that was cracked on top and sat in the mud at the lake's edge. NASA officials later determined that it was a piece of debris from the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, killing the seven astronauts aboard.

The debris, one of 18 cryogenic tanks used to store the oxygen and hydrogen that provided electrical power to the shuttle, was put on a truck and driven to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Only one of the 18 tanks remains missing, a NASA spokeswoman said.

At Richland-Chambers Reservoir in north-central Texas, which has decreased more than eight feet, a post-Civil-War-era cemetery of freed slaves has emerged along the shoreline. The wooden coffins and the remains of more than 20

Page 48 nyt-short-notyet.txt African-Americans, most of them children, have been found. A skull was first discovered in 2009 after the lake level dropped, but when the waters rose again, the site was submerged, forcing local amateur historians to wait.

"Everybody hates the drought, but I needed the drought," said Bruce F. McManus, chairman of the Navarro County Historical Commission. "I knew it was there."

Despite periodic rainstorms, lower temperatures and even snowfall in Amarillo late last month, Texas remains in the midst of one of its worst droughts.

From January through October, statewide rainfall totaled 10.77 inches, about 15 inches below average. The year that ended in September was the driest in Texas since at least 1895, when statewide weather records begin, breaking the previous record low set in 1956 by 2.5 inches.

"It's the most severe single-year drought on record," said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "There literally is no point of comparison."

Professor Nielsen-Gammon said that the drought would persist and that most of the state would be experiencing major drought through next summer. "We have so much rainfall to make up, it's unlikely to be made up in the spring and summer," he said.

The water levels at many of the state's man-made lakes have become a drought barometer. Lake levels have decreased statewide by as little as a few feet to as much as 50 feet or more. Some lakes are completely dry, and others are close to it. Lake E. V. Spence in West Texas, which normally has a maximum depth of 108 feet, is less than 1 percent full.

In Canton in East Texas, the drought has hurt Donna McWilliams as it has other Texans ・ she and her husband lost trees and sold off cattle because of a lack of hay ・ but it also helped her. She is the sister of Ms. Oliver, whose body was found in Martins Mill.

Ms. Oliver's relatives had mailed fliers with her picture to homeless shelters and clinics, and put them up in local restaurants and pharmacies, always hoping, always wondering.

"I guess 祖 losure' is the word," said Ms. McWilliams, 60, one of Ms. Oliver's two sisters. "Now we don't have to wonder anymore. I do think the drought is a negative, but if there's anything that can happen good out of a drought, it's this, and it's a blessing." ~~~~~~~~~~

NYT -1130 Telling of Days on the Run After Abducting Children ... By SARAH MASLIN NIR Nephra and Shanel Payne said they abducted their eight children from foster care because they learned the children were to be put up for adoption. ===== notyet The week before they abducted their eight children from a foster care center in Queens, Nephra and Shanel Payne stocked up at Costco on supplies and dry goods, like graham crackers, diapers and infant formula for Nefertiti, their 11-month-old daughter. They stashed family photos and important documents in a storage facility and crammed a basketball and a football ・ essential for traveling with a Little League team's worth of boys ・ into their car.

They had just been told, they said, that New York City's child welfare agency was planning to put their children, some of whom had been in foster care for nearly three years, up for adoption rather than reuniting them with their parents.

"It's either do something or let your kids get swallowed by a system that does not have a heart," Mr. Payne, 35, said. "To do nothing would have been more hurtful, more reckless."

The Paynes told their story during a nearly two-hour interview on Monday night, five days after their release from jail. They sat side by side in the office of Norman Steiner, the lawyer who represented them in their criminal case, their pinky fingers intertwined.

It was a brazen act ・ two parents abducting their children from foster care in broad daylight ・ and it set off an interstate manhunt and a rash of media speculation on their whereabouts and on how they had succeeded at it. But to the Paynes,

Page 49 nyt-short-notyet.txt that week on the run with their children packed first into a car and then into a van was a respite of sorts ・ a time spent singing along to Michael Jackson hits, tossing a football around and being a family.

Mr. Payne, a construction worker, and his wife, 28, a beautician, were arrested on Sept. 26, seven days after they absconded with their children during a supervised visit at the Forestdale child agency in Forest Hills. The police found them on a roadside in Harrisburg, Pa., where they had just finished dinner in their van.

They were sent to New York to face eight counts each of kidnapping ・・ one per child among other charges. The kidnapping charges were eventually dismissed, and the Paynes pleaded guilty in late October to second-degree custodial interference, a misdemeanor for which they were each sentenced to 90 days in jail, later reduced to 60, and three years' probation. On the day before Thanksgiving, they were released.

Child welfare advocates deplored the couple's rash move, concerned for the safety of the children. The children, seven boys and one girl, ages 11 months to 11 years, had been removed from the Paynes' custody in March 2009 amid allegations of abuse.

The Paynes said the Administration for Children's Services had unfairly taken custody of their children after one went to school with a bloodshot eye. It was a result, they said, of a squabble among the brothers.

Child welfare officials declined to discuss the specifics of the case, citing privacy rules. Still, they said, children are not typically removed from a home because of a single issue. Agency workers must assess the children's welfare, and the decision to take custody must be approved in Family Court, the officials said.

The Paynes said that they were good parents and that they had religiously attended parenting and anger management classes prescribed by officials. They showed up at every child visit with platters of food, home-baked cakes and even a juicer , they said, and they were devastated to hear that several of their boys had been medicated for things like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They were terrified, they said, when two of their children complained of not being fed enough and showed up to visits with split lips and bruises. Agency officials said those claims were not reported.

The Paynes said they learned in mid-September that Children's Services had set a goal of adoption for the children, and it was as if a switch had flipped.

Security at the Forestdale child agency, where the visits took place, was lax at times, the Paynes said. (The center is reviewing security issues in light of the abduction.) During their Sept. 19 visit, Ms. Payne said, she simply led the children to the car waiting out back, and told them to be quick. "In my head I was like, 賎 o, go, go, go,' " she said.

"It was like a relief; we just had no more pain," her husband said. "Everything we came to New York with, we're leaving with."

Willfully oblivious to the manhunt, they listened to music ・・ not news on the radio and disassembled their cellphone. They headed toward South Carolina, where they had lived before moving to the Bronx in 2007 and where their family still had land. "Acres of land, produce growing out of the ground," Mr. Payne said, a smile reaching each side of his lean face. "It was going to be that freedom to see our kids just running around ・・ to be happy, to be safe with their mother and father."

His wife, whom he began dating after she wrote him a love letter when she was 16, continued his thought: "It would have been a dream come true, and for those seven days that's what it was like," she said. At one point, she recalled, her son Shalee, 6, awoke with a start. "He said: 選 thought this was a dream. Thank you so much for taking us,' " his mother said. "I know that what I did was right because I heard it from my son."

They got to South Carolina swiftly, stopping only to play catch and to eat at a Chinese restaurant in Virginia, but when a reporter called a relative a few days after they had arrived, they quickly left. They punched Harrisburg, where Mr. Payne had once found work, into their GPS unit and headed there. Though Nephra, the oldest son, had seen newspaper reports about the family, the parents still believed they would not be caught, they said, and had started planning to home-school the children.

They described the atmosphere in their van as "a party," their last evening a bizarre public idyll in light of the nationwide police pursuit. The boys clambered onto a stage at a park in Harrisburg and showed off break-dancing moves; Ms. Payne and the baby admired cheerleaders. They ate a chicken dinner in the van, Nefertiti refusing to budge from her father's

Page 50 nyt-short-notyet.txt chest.

Then, they said, around 10:30 p.m. came the sirens, the order to freeze, and the barrel of a gun pointing at Mr. Payne. Nefertiti howled . Mr. Payne collapsed and was hospitalized; he said he could barely move for days.

"I just felt like I messed up, I felt like my world was over," he said. "All I could hear was my baby screaming."

Police reports of the Paynes' capture described the children as disheveled, and there was speculation that they had slept in the cramped van. But the couple said the family stayed in motels, paying in cash. And they adamantly denied any abuse.

Jail was a shock. Mr. Payne said he remembered feeling he had done "something noble."

Michael Fagan, the communications director for Children's Services, said in a statement: "After a thorough investigation and careful assessment of the children, they are in the care of foster families, as they were before they were abducted by their parents."

Both parents are forbidden to see their children or to speak to them on the phone. On Dec. 15, they will return to Family Court to seek visitation rights. ~~~~~~~~~~

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