Big Sponge on Campus

[cool article on the "newest" dorm at MIT, across the field and next to CTP.]

Big Sponge on Campus
By PAGAN KENNEDY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/magazine/18MIT.html

Simmons Hall, M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass.
Built 2002, 350 students and staff members

From afar, the building looks like a three-letter word that I can't quite read, rendered in sci-fi letters against the sky. It's only as I get closer, walking over the springy grass of M.I.T.'s athletic fields, that I notice the small square windows that pock just about every surface of the new dorm. M.I.T. hired a maverick architect, Steven Holl, to create a groundbreaking design. He says his inspiration for the building was a sea sponge.

I think it looks more like Lego. The sections of building are pieced together in blocks and punctuated with primary colors, giving it the air of a snapped-together gizmo -- which is appropriate for the premier high-tech university in the country. ''How do you represent your community to the world?'' William Mitchell, the school's dean of architecture and planning, asks me rhetorically. ''The message of the building is innovation, pushing the boundaries.'' That message did not come cheap. The school spent more than $68 million for its new dorm.

''We inherited a master plan that was a large brick wall,'' Holl says. He wanted, instead, to create a building that was an antiwall, full of gaps so that you could see through to the community beyond the campus. ''I went out and bought sea sponges for everyone who was working on the building,'' he says, in order to help them think porous.

The building has already won a number of awards, contributing to its status. Admirers have been making pilgrimages to study the unique construction; it was pieced together out of prefab sections combining window, wall and structural elements. Students roll their eyes as they tell me about the tour buses that have been pulling up in front ever since the building opened last fall. ''We kick architects out all the time,'' says Jay Humphries, a senior. ''They sneak past the front desk and walk into people's rooms. It's like, 'Dude, who are you?'''

On the inside, Simmons Hall could pass for any upscale dorm, until you notice the bulges that stick out of the otherwise flat walls. The building is shot through with sinuous grottos that reach several stories high, winding among dorm rooms, puffing out walls as necessary. Nikki Johnson, a Simmons resident, leads me into one of the crevasses that function as student lounges. She stands by, bored in the way only a college junior can be bored, as I gaze up at walls that curl like smoke toward a vast skylight. ''Wow, wow, wow,'' is all I can say. Holl's inspiration suddenly makes sense. We could be standing inside a hole in a giant sea sponge. The room is way too gorgeous for undergrads. A supermodel named Inge should live here, posing against the undulating walls with a wineglass half-forgotten in her hand. ''There's a great feeling of space in here, but it's really pretty small,'' Johnson says. She points out that there's no room for a couch in front of the TV. ''You get 20 kids in here, it's crowded.''

In her room, one wall is taken up entirely by windows -- nine of them, each the size of a checkerboard. According to Holl, with so many windows to open and close, ''you have more feeling that you're in control of your space.'' Unfortunately, the modular furniture in the rooms inspires the opposite mood. Because it is heavy and because the pieces have to be bolted into place, special maintenance crews have to be called in to haul it around. Students are not allowed to move their desks or beds or shelves. ''You have your chance at the beginning of the year'' to arrange the furniture, Johnson says, and then that's it.

She leads me down to the dining hall, where one wall is given over to a vast plate-glass window so that the room seems to unfurl into the green fields beyond. Unmindful of their elegant surroundings, kids wear sweat pants and eat in a hurry: they're off to study artificial intelligence and build robots.

Ian Brelinsky, a freshman, says he followed the progress of Simmons Hall for years while he was in high school -- that's how much he loved M.I.T. He says it's great that the school is using Simmons to promote a cool image.

But most of the students seem to relish enumerating Simmons's faults. It is, of course, the nature of undergraduates to complain -- as melodramatically as possible. ''I cry every day,'' Lauri Kauppila says, pouring out a tale of a freezing-cold bedroom and hanging his head to indicate the extremes of his suffering.

Jay Humphries praises another recently built M.I.T. dorm, 70 Pacific Street, for providing all the amenities the students wanted for a fraction of the price of Simmons. ''How much did each one of those cost?'' Humphries asks his table companions, pointing up to the perforated wooden panels on the ceiling. ''It all looks cool, but the students would rather be able to make the place their own. Why can't I put my own chair in a lounge?'' Staring up at those computer-modeled, fussed-over panels, I feel sorry for these students trapped inside one of the most beautiful dorms in the world.

nd suddenly I'm filled with a rush of love for a building that I never thought much about until now: my college dorm, a classic cinder-block bunker that had the architectural feel of a no-tell motel. The building was so indestructible, so ugly, that we were free to have our way with it. We taped tampons all over the ceiling, spelling out the words ''End Rape Culture.'' The dorm stunk of bong water, cafeteria hamburgers, incense and sweat. If someone bottled that smell and sold it in a cut-glass atomizer for $1,000, I'd buy it. Adulthood waited ahead, and in that distant future, we might have white rugs and coffee tables that required coasters. Until then, we would live without design.

Now, in the Simmons dining hall, I ask some kids, ''So, is it true you're not allowed to rearrange the furniture in your room?''

''Oh, we manage to get around those restrictions,'' a guy says, and I imagine illicit teams of undergrads, half-drunk, heave-ho-ing furniture around as moonlight streams in through nine windows.

Someday -- when the designer chairs are all busted and tampons protrude from the wooden panels in the ceilings -- this is going to be one hell of a dorm.

Pagan Kennedy, a frequent contributor to the magazine, last wrote about the musician Conor Oberst.

Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights

Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/politics/16IMAG.html

WASHINGTON, May 15 — George W. Bush's "Top Gun" landing on the deck of the carrier Abraham Lincoln will be remembered as one of the most audacious moments of presidential theater in American history. But it was only the latest example of how the Bush administration, going far beyond the foundations in stagecraft set by the Reagan White House, is using the powers of television and technology to promote a presidency like never before.

Officials of past Democratic and Republican administrations marvel at how the White House does not seem to miss an opportunity to showcase Mr. Bush in dramatic and perfectly lighted settings. It is all by design: the White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles and the importance of backdrops.

On Tuesday, at a speech promoting his economic plan in Indianapolis, White House aides went so far as to ask people in the crowd behind Mr. Bush to take off their ties, WISH-TV in Indianapolis reported, so they would look more like the ordinary folk the president said would benefit from his tax cut.

"They understand the visual as well as anybody ever has," said Michael K. Deaver, Ronald Reagan's chief image maker. "They watched what we did, they watched the mistakes of Bush I, they watched how Clinton kind of stumbled into it, and they've taken it to an art form."

The White House efforts have been ambitious — and costly. For the prime-time television address that Mr. Bush delivered to the nation on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used to illuminate sports stadiums and rock concerts, sent them across New York Harbor, tethered them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty and then blasted them upward to illuminate all 305 feet of America's symbol of freedom. It was the ultimate patriotic backdrop for Mr. Bush, who spoke from Ellis Island.

For a speech that Mr. Bush delivered last summer at Mount Rushmore, the White House positioned the best platform for television crews off to one side, not head on as other White Houses have done, so that the cameras caught Mr. Bush in profile, his face perfectly aligned with the four presidents carved in stone.

And on Monday, for remarks the president made promoting his tax cut plan near Albuquerque, the White House unfurled a backdrop that proclaimed its message of the day, "Helping Small Business," over and over. The type was too small to be read by most in the audience, but just the right size for television viewers at home.

"I don't know who does it," Mr. Deaver said, "but somebody's got a good eye over there."

That somebody, White House officials and television executives say, is in fact three or four people. First among equals is Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer who was hired by the Bush campaign in Austin, Tex., and who now works for Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Mr. Sforza created the White House "message of the day" backdrops and helped design the $250,000 set at the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraq war.

Mr. Sforza works closely with Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman whom the Bush White House hired after seeing his work in the 2000 campaign. Mr. DeServi, whose title is associate director of communications for production, is considered a master at lighting. "You want it, I'll heat it up and make a picture," he said early this week. Mr. DeServi helped produce one of Mr. Bush's largest events, a speech to a crowd in Revolution Square in Bucharest last November.

To stage the event, Mr. DeServi went so far as to rent Musco lights in Britain, which were then shipped across the English Channel and driven across Europe to Romania, where they lighted Mr. Bush and the giant stage across from the country's former Communist headquarters.

A third crucial player is Greg Jenkins, a former Fox News television producer in Washington who is now the director of presidential advance. Mr. Jenkins manages the small army of staff members and volunteers who move days ahead of Mr. Bush and his entourage to set up the staging of all White House events.

"We pay particular attention to not only what the president says but what the American people see," Mr. Bartlett said. "Americans are leading busy lives, and sometimes they don't have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals as communicators. So we take it seriously."

The president's image makers, Mr. Bartlett said, work within a budget for White House travel and events allotted by Congress, which for fiscal 2003 was $3.7 million. He said he did not know the specific cost of staging Mr. Bush's Sept. 11 anniversary speech, or what the White House was charged for the lights. A spokeswoman at the headquarters of Musco Lighting in Oskaloosa, Iowa, said the company did not disclose the prices it charged clients.

White House communications operatives in previous administrations said many costs of presidential trips were paid for by whoever was deemed the official host of a trip — typically a federal agency, a city or a company. Trips deemed political are paid for by the parties.

"The total cost of a trip is ultimately shared across a wide spectrum of agencies and hosts," said Joshua King, who was director of production of presidential events in the Clinton administration. "To get to who really pays for presidential events would keep a team of accountants very busy."

The most elaborate — and criticized — White House event so far was Mr. Bush's speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that Mr. Sforza embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Mr. Bush's landing in a flight suit and his early evening speech.

Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call "magic hour light," which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.

"If you looked at the TV picture, you saw there was flattering light on his left cheek and slight shadowing on his right," Mr. King said. "It looked great."

The trip was attacked by Democrats as an expensive political stunt, but White House officials said that Democrats needed a better issue for taking on the president. A New York Times/CBS News nationwide poll conducted May 9-12 found that the White House may have been right: 59 percent of those polled said it was appropriate, and not an effort to make political gain, for Mr. Bush to dress in a flight suit and announce the end of combat operations on the aircraft carrier.

But even this White House makes mistakes. One of the more notable ones occurred in January, when Mr. Bush delivered a speech about his economic plan at a St. Louis trucking company. Volunteers for the White House covered "Made in China" stamps with white stickers on boxes arrayed on either side of the president. Behind Mr. Bush was a printed backdrop of faux boxes that read "Made in U.S.A.," the message the administration wanted to convey to the television audience.

The White House takes great pride in the backdrops, which are created by Mr. Sforza, and has gone so far as to help design them for universities where Mr. Bush travels to make commencement addresses. Last year, the White House helped design a large banner for Ohio State as part of the background for Mr. Bush; last week, the White House collaborated with the University of South Carolina to make Sforzian backdrops for a presidential commencement speech in the school's new Carolina Center.

"They really are good," said Russ McKinney, the school's director of public affairs, as he listened to the president.

Television camera crews, meanwhile, say they have rarely had such consistently attractive pictures to send back to editing rooms.

"They seem to approach an event site like it's a TV set," said Chris Carlson, an ABC cameraman who covers the White House. "They dress it up really nicely. It looks like a million bucks."

Even for standard-issue White House events, Mr. Bush's image makers watch every angle. Last week, when the president had a joint news conference with Prime Minister José Mariá Aznar of Spain, it was staged in the Grand Foyer of the White House, under grand marble columns, with the Blue Room and a huge cream-colored bouquet of flowers illuminated in the background. (Mr. Sforza and Mr. DeServi could be seen there conferring before the cameras began rolling.) The scene was lush and rich, filled with the beauty of the White House in real time.

"They understand they have to build a set, whether it's an aircraft carrier or the Rose Garden or the South Lawn," Mr. Deaver said. "They understand that putting depth into the picture makes the candidate or president look better."

Or as Mr. Deaver said he learned long ago with Mr. Reagan: "They understand that what's around the head is just as important as the head."

Queens Ponders Post-Modern Life

Queens Ponders Post-Modern Life
By JOSEPH BERGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/nyregion/16QUEE.html

It breezed into the neighborhood like a Hollywood film crew. Its big-name stars drew crowds of the curious, creating lucrative opportunities for the resourceful.

But after Monday, the stars — the dueling modernists Matisse and Picasso — will be packed away, and by September 2004 the Museum of Modern Art will return to its newly expanded home in Manhattan.

Everyone in Long Island City, of course, knows that the Modern's charmed visit to Queens will end. But they still wonder whether the museum will leave anything enduring behind. Will it help reshape a raw Queens neighborhood, known for its factories and warehouses and the gridlock around the Queensboro Bridge, into the next SoHo or TriBeCa?

Cultural institutions have long been seen as a shrewd way to invigorate neighborhoods. Lincoln Center transformed the decaying West Side of Manhattan. Newark is betting on its performing arts center to bring foot traffic back to a devastated downtown.

Long Island City, whose seven other scattered museums have allowed it to style itself as a museum district just a 15-minute subway ride from Times Square, hoped for a similar jolt of electricity from the Modern. But museum officials made clear from the beginning that the world-class collection was just passing through. Its royal blue building in Queens, in a revamped Swingline stapler factory on Queens Boulevard and 33rd Street, was intended for storage and study. Its use as an exhibition hall began last summer and is supposed to last for only two and a half years, until the museum's headquarters on West 53rd Street are refurbished.

For the moment, the Modern has indisputably enriched the surrounding industrial streets, particularly since the "Matisse Picasso" exhibition opened on Feb. 13 and doubled attendance to more than 4,000 people a day. The hot-dog vendors and fruit peddlers arrayed alongside the lines of visitors as well as the restaurants a few blocks east in Sunnyside are making far more money. Manna from heaven, they might call it.

Hemsin, a once quiet Turkish restaurant on Queens Boulevard, now has lines of diners waiting for its shish kebab and baba ganoush. Hilmi Yurdusever, 34, one of the restaurant's partners, had to hire three waiters and is hoping to use his bonanza to open another restaurant in Manhattan.

"The quality of people has come up," he said last week of his clientele. "Before I had ordinary people. Now I'm meeting vice presidents, presidents and executive officers."

Down the block, Dazies, an Italian restaurant and a 30-year Sunnyside institution, has tripled business and created the MoMA Cocktail, a bluish drink made with Bacardi orange rum, Grand Marnier, blue Curaçao and a drop of orange juice.

Most of the museums in western Queens, like the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center — a Modern affiliate since 1999 — the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum and the Sculpture Center and the Museum for African Art, report sharp surges in attendance as a result of culture vultures unsated by the riches of "Matisse Picasso." The African art museum joined with Noguchi in draping a banner across the street from the Modern and the African museum offers free admission and cups of coffee to the exhibit's ticketholders. Carlyn Mueller, public relations director for the African art museum, said 200 extra visitors a day have been counted.

"It was important that we get the right traffic," she said, "have new visitors spread the word about the Museum for African Art and its relationship to Matisse's and Picasso's work." (One example: Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" features tribal masks as faces on some of its five angular nudes.)

There are also more than a few cases of clever entrepreneurship in the neighborhood. Michele Bonelli, a veteran painter, was urged by a real estate agent to hang 17 colorful motion studies in the oblong lobby of a cosmetics factory next door to the Modern. The gesture has produced at least two sales.

But there are skeptics. Mike Matthews, president of the company that produces the Electro-Harmonix sound modifiers used by many rock bands, said of the neighborhood, "Once this special exhibit is over, it will become dead again, though I hope not." Mr. Matthews, a genial cigar chomper, lives in an apartment, complete with whirlpool, that he set up in his factory. As something of a nighthawk, he knows how desolate the streets become once the workers leave.

In fact, most businesses in Long Island City are manufacturers or commercial enterprises like Citigroup and MetLife that have not directly benefited from the museum. Don Valentine, the manager of Branded Leather, which makes black motorcycle jackets for a rarefied coterie of customers that include Hell's Angels and F.B.I. agents, said visitors to the museum stop by his ground-floor retail shop, but few buy. "The museum crowd," Mr. Valentine said, "is not very into motorcycles."

Despite such demurrals, Mitchell L. Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University, said he thought that the museum's brief tenure had made many more people aware of Long Island City. Now the neighborhood must find ways of keeping the momentum alive, perhaps with another blockbuster. "Once you've proven you can get people to come there, now you've got to get people to stay there," he said.

Helen M. Marshall, the Queens borough president, has been urging the Modern to retain part of the 160,000-square-foot building as permanent exhibition space. But Glenn D. Lowry, the Modern's director, said that possibility "is very highly unlikely." In a telephone interview, Mr. Lowry said a satellite operation would cost millions of dollars and compete with the Manhattan site. Then why, he was asked, did the museum tantalize Queens with an event like "Matisse Picasso"?

"I wish I could tell you it was a strategy, but it was dumb luck," he said, citing an accident of timing.

Ms. Marshall and the others see a Modern satellite as a linchpin of a museum district, one that is currently joined by a weekend bus loop and reaches the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.

A museum district would continue to attract people like Stacie Webb of Harrison, N.Y., and her sister Nora Jacob of Orange, Calif. On a visit last week, they were dazzled by "Matisse Picasso" in the morning, savored Hemsin for lunch, then delighted in the spare Noguchi sculptures nearby.

Gayle Baron, president of the Long Island City Business Development Corporation, said the neighborhood would never be the same after this exhibit. "Nothing ever goes the way it was after a whirlwind," she said.

The museum's presence, she said, has spurred trends already enhancing the neighborhood. More than 1,000 artists have settled in Long Island City, drawn by cheap light-flooded lofts, million-dollar views of Midtown and a gold mine of art materials among the metal fabricators and lumberyards. Two apartment towers known as Queens West have gone up along the East River, housing that is essential for street life. The city has rezoned 37 blocks surrounding the 48-story Citigroup tower to allow more office and residential uses.

The Modern has also been changed by its encounter with Queens. Bret Eynon, an administrator at La Guardia Community College, practically next door to the museum, said officials at the Modern, through programs with the college, were cultivating the kinds of visitors that the museum seeks. Immigrants, for example, make up 74 percent of the college's 13,000 students.

Borough officials like Veronique LeMelle, director of culture and tourism, say it must be remembered that the Modern was never Long Island City's only attraction.

"If we were a one-horse show, then yes, it would go back to what it was," said Ms. LeMelle, adding that the Modern "is an integral part of the revitalization, but it's not the only part."

Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It

Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It
By WARREN ST. JOHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/fashion/18BLOG.html

Rick Bruner's awakening to the power of the written word came by way of a throwaway line, typed one afternoon in the cerulean glow of his I.B.M. ThinkPad.

Mr. Bruner, a 37-year-old Manhattan marketing consultant, keeps a Web log, an online diary known as a blog. After coming in for some sporting abuse from a friend who told him blogging was a waste of time, Mr. Bruner wrote in his blog that the friend "was fat and runs like a girl," adding that he was sure the friend would not be offended "because he doesn't read blogs." With a push of a button, the comment was published on Mr. Bruner's site, www.bruner.net/blog, and accessible to anyone with a computer.

A few days later, though, that friend's curiosity about blogs was awakened after all. He quickly found Mr. Bruner's site and was "deeply aggrieved," Mr. Bruner said. Their friendship barely survived the episode.

"It was a big wake-up call," Mr. Bruner said. "Sometimes it's good to have an editor."

Mr. Bruner's experience is typical of many who have waded into the thrilling and sometimes perilous world of blogging, a once marginal activity of Internet enthusiasts that has become squarely mainstream, with an estimated three million active blogs online, according to Nick Denton, the head of Gawker Media, a blog publisher.

While blogging journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and Eric Alterman get a lot of attention, a vast majority of bloggers are average citizens like Mr. Bruner, who draw from their personal experiences — and often the personal experiences of relatives, friends and colleagues — to create a kind of memoir in motion that details breakups and work and family issues with sometimes startling candor.

While personal blogs have been around for years, their proliferation has caused a wrinkle in the social fabric among people in their teens, 20's and early 30's. Inundated with bloggers, they are finding that every clique now has its own Matt Drudge, someone capable of instantly turning details of their lives into saucy Internet fare.

"It's like all your friends are reporters now," said Douglas Rushkoff, a blogger and author of "Media Virus" and other books about the impact of technology on society.

In the rush to publish, many bloggers are running headlong into some of the problems conventionally published memoirists know too well: hurt feelings, newly wary friends and relatives, and the occasional inflamed employer.

"All writing is a form of negotiation between the reader and writer over what constitutes responsibility," said David Weinberger, author of "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," a book about the Internet. "Because blogs are a new form, the negotiation can easily go awry."

Mr. Weinberger said the confessional nature of many blogs had "redrawn the line between what's private and public."

Heather Armstrong, a 27-year-old Web designer from Utah whose blog is at www.dooce.com, might be the ultimate example of blogging gone awry. Her parents are devout Mormons, she said, but because they are also technophobes, she felt perfectly comfortable publishing an entry on her site in which she harshly criticized her Mormon upbringing.

Unfortunately for Ms. Armstrong, her brother in Seattle stumbled across her Web site that very day and alerted her parents to the entry. After that, Ms. Armstrong said, "all hell broke loose." "Next to my parents getting divorced 20 years ago," Ms. Armstrong said, "it was the worst thing that ever happened to my family. It was shocking for everyone."

Ms. Armstrong's run-in with the perils of self-publishing did not end there. She also wrote about her job and her co-workers in her blog, often hyperbolically.

When her bosses were alerted that Ms. Armstrong was writing about her office life, they fired her, she said. She is now much more careful about what she publishes in her blog, and she had a word of caution for bloggers who write furtively about others. "If you're publishing under your own name, they'll find out," she said. "I was extremely naïve."

Being found out is no deterrent for 18-year-old Trisha Allen, a blogger from Kentucky. She has been blogging for roughly a month, and spends most of her time reporting candidly on her friends and on her relationship with her boyfriend.

A recent entry reveals that the couple are not quite ready for children — though "we have had two scares" — and that Ms. Allen's preferred form of birth control is the pill, even though, she wrote, "I am starting to hate it, because it has screwed up my menstrual cycle wickedly."

"There's not a lot I won't put on there," Ms. Allen said by telephone. Ms. Allen said her mother was aware she keeps an online journal, but does not know how to find it, and added that she relied on a doctrine of security by obscurity, hoping that in the vast universe of personal Web sites known as the blogosphere, she will be able to preserve her anonymity behind all those other blogs.

Ms. Allen said her motivation for posting personal details was simple: "I love to be the center of attention."

Indeed, for many bloggers being noticed seems to be the point. John M. Grohol, a psychologist in the Boston area who has written about bloggers, said they often offered intimate details of their lives as a ploy to build readership.

"It's like, `How do I get people to read this?' " he said. "Then you want them to keep reading it. It becomes a snowball rolling downhill that becomes very rewarding for the blogger because they're getting feedback from their friends and from random folks."

Deirdre Clemente, a blogger from Brooklyn who is now a a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, frequently uses her relationships as fodder for her blog, www.deirdreclemente.com.

That became an issue for a recent boyfriend of hers, a 34-year-old Manhattan hedge-fund manager who feared that having his name in the blog could compromise his business relationships.

During his eight-month stint as a nameless regular on Ms. Clemente's site, he said, "it was an odd feeling that there was a camera on me." Friends and relatives who knew about the site followed his relationship online, he said.

"On occasion my mother would send me an e-mail saying, `How was the play?' or, `Sounds like you had a nice weekend away,' " he said.

But as a literary trope, the boyfriend worked well. Ms. Clemente said she frequently received e-mail messages from strangers who followed the ups and downs of their relationship on her blog.

When the relationship ended, she said, "I had totally random people e-mailing me saying they were sad we broke up." She described the experience as "totally weird," but added, "As a writer, having anyone read your stuff is a compliment."

With so many self-publishing reporters out there, some say they feel a need to watch themselves, for fear that casual comments made to friends might make tomorrow morning's entry.

The proliferation of personal bloggers has led to a new social anxiety: the fear of getting blogged.

"It's personal etiquette meets journalistic rules," Mr. Denton, the blog publisher, said. "If you have a friend who's a blogger you have to say, `This is not for blogging.' It's the blogging equivalent of `This is off the record.' "

Jonathan Van Gieson, a 29-year-old theatrical producer from Brooklyn who sometimes writes about friends on his site, www.jonathanvangieson.com, said he gave his friends pseudonyms "to toe the line between simple harmless betrayal of trust and nasty actionable libel." Before starting his blog, Mr. Van Gieson said he drew a comic strip based on his friends for his college newspaper, and in describing their predicament he summed up the current lot of many in the age of blogging.

"My close friends are used to having their lives plundered," he said.

Mimi breaks her silence over JFK

Mimi breaks her silence
Says sex with JFK began in June '62
By CELESTE KATZ and DAVE GOLDINER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/84095p-76811c.html

There She Is: Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock, who had a sexual relationship with President John F. Kennedy while a White House intern, leaves her apartment on the upper East Side yesterday.

JFK's Mimi stepped out of history's shadows yesterday as new details emerged about the life of the striking woman who kept her White House affair a secret for more than four decades.

Braving a thicket of reporters, Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock, now 60, confirmed to the world how, as a prep school senior, she caught the eye of the world's most powerful man.

"From June 1962 to November 1963, I was involved in a sexual relationship with President Kennedy," Fahnestock said in a short statement. "For the last 41 years, it is a subject I have not discussed."

Fahnestock's statement indicates the affair with Kennedy continued even after a September 1963 newspaper announcement of her engagement to Anthony Fahnestock, a recent college graduate who was serving in the Army.

The couple married Jan. 5, 1964, six weeks after Kennedy's assassination Nov. 22, 1963. She wouldn't say when or why the affair ended that ill-fated month - and did her best to bury it for good.

Fahnestock, a grandmother of four, broke her silence after the Daily News tracked her down this week.

One of her oldest friends shrugged off the affair.

"Good for her," said Joan (Bitsy) Tatnall, 59. "She was a young girl, he's a glamorous guy. ... I think it was an adventure."

Facing the glare of a New York media frenzy, Fahnestock strode out of her upper East Side apartment building yesterday morning and handed out copies of her remarks before hopping into a taxi.

Visit in 1961

The then-Mimi Beardsley was a stunning prep school senior when she met the handsome President during a White House visit in 1961.

That fall, she went off to Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., as planned.

But things quickly changed when the White House called to offer her a prestigious summer internship in the press office.

Jaws dropped as Fahnestock frolicked with JFK at pool parties. She even flew on Air Force jets to accompany him on overseas trips to resorts and summit meetings.

"Obviously, she had a special relationship with the President," said Barbara Gamarekian, now 77, the White House press aide who mentioned Mimi in a 1964 interview released this week.

Mimi seemed infatuated with the charismatic JFK and her new life but found time to giggle and swap secrets with other attractive young women rumored to be sleeping with him, Gamarekian said.

The furthest thing from her mind was going back to the boredom of college English literature and writing classes. "She loved the summer job, so she didn't want to go back to school," Gamarekian recalled.

Hiding places

It didn't take long for Fahnestock to get another call to meet her lover in the White House.

Weeks after Kennedy stared down the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis, she was flown to Nassau, the Bahamas, in December 1962, where Kennedy was meeting with British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan.

When Kennedy left a few days later, aides spotted the intern hiding on the floor of a limousine in his entourage.

The affair stretched through the next summer, and she was rewarded with a staff job. College would have to wait.

By then, she was dating Anthony Fahnestock, a recent graduate of preppie Williams College who had enlisted in the Army. The couple announced their engagement after Labor Day.

Still, she maintained her special link to JFK.

A couple of days after the President delivered his speech at the Berlin Wall, Mimi called him directly to complain about being left behind in Washington. A furious Kennedy nearly fired her boss.

It is unknown whether Anthony Fahnestock, an investment banker, knew about his wife and JFK. The couple divorced, and he died of cancer in 1993. His second wife refused to say whether he knew about the affair.

"This story doesn't involve my husband," said Andrea Henderson Fahnestock, a curator at the Museum of the City of New York.

Originally published on May 16, 2003

Tension, Anger at NYT Staff Meeting Over Handling of Reporter Blair

Tension, Anger at NYT Staff Meeting Over Handling of Reporter Blair
By Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 15, 2003; 8:29 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58598-2003May15.html

Sure, we know there's terrorism in Saudi Arabia, SARS around the world, a presidential campaign at home, yadda yadda yadda. But everyone in our world – okay, everyone in our Zip code – is still buzzing about the Jayson Blair meltdown at the New York Times, to the point that we can't make it to the men's room without hearing four theories and three new rumors.

So let's lead this morning with our report on what happened at the Gray Lady yesterday, and then we'll get back to the rest of the universe:

Separately, a Times spokeswoman confirmed earlier this week that Blair has a relationship with a clerk at the paper who is a friend of Raines's wife. The New York Daily News reported that the woman, Zuza Glowacka, has worked in the Times photo department – an important fact because the Times says Blair faked some details in his stories by gaining access to the paper's computerized photo archives.

Howell Raines told a tense and somber gathering of New York Times employees yesterday that he would not resign as the newspaper's executive editor, but acknowledged that many reporters view him as "inaccessible" and "arrogant," and vowed to improve the newsroom climate.

Asked by business reporter Alex Berenson if there were any circumstances under which he would consider quitting over the handling of Jayson Blair's serial fabrications, Raines said: "My plan is to have this job and perform it with every fiber in my body as long as this man next to me," Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., allowed it. At that point, Sulzberger declared: "If he were to offer his resignation, I would not accept it."

As recounted by numerous participants, some of whom took notes, the session, attended by more than 500 people at a movie theater near the West 43rd Street newsroom, was marked both by contrition on the part of the newspaper's top editors and angry exchanges in which they appeared testy and defensive.

Joe Sexton, a metropolitan desk editor, used a profanity in demanding to know how the paper could have sent Blair, a 27-year-old reporter with a checkered record, to cover the Washington sniper case. "You guys have lost the confidence of much of the newsroom," Sexton said.

Raines told Sexton sharply not to "demagogue me" or use curse words, saying the discussion should be more civil. But he also said: "I'm sorry I don't have your trust. I hope I can win it back."

The two-hour meeting capped four days of growing tension since the Times, responding to earlier news reports, acknowledged in a four-page spread that Blair had faked or plagiarized at least 36 stories.

The fallout represents the biggest crisis of Raines's 20-month tenure, and comes just a year after he was basking in the glow of the paper having won an unprecedented seven Pulitzer Prizes. Yesterday, his strong-willed style appeared to be on trial as much as the admitted failure to detect Blair's lies.

What little applause there was went to Metropolitan Editor Jonathan Landman, who wrote an e-mail in April 2002: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now." That memo went only to the associate managing editor for administration and the assistant to Managing Editor Gerald Boyd, Raines said, adding that he never saw it until after Blair's resignation.

Sulzberger, the company's CEO, made no attempt to minimize the damage, saying: "If we had done this right, we wouldn't be here today. We didn't do this right. We regret that deeply. We feel it deeply. It sucks."

Boyd apologized for his mistakes but said it was "absolute drivel" to suggest that he had acted as a mentor to Blair, who, like the managing editor, is African American. "Did I pat him on the back? Did I say 'hang in there'? Yes, but I did that with everybody."

Blair had been cultivating Boyd, nominating him for a National Association of Black Journalists award and writing up the prize in an employee newsletter.

Boyd said he had had only two serious talks with Blair – one after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Blair's behavior became more erratic, and again after Blair was accused of plagiarizing an article from the San Antonio Express-News, urging him to come clean.

"This is not about a failure of minority journalists," Boyd said, or about being "too compassionate. . . . Let's not make this about race or youth or anything that divides the most talented newsroom in the country and indeed the world."

Raines sounded contrite, according to participants, when he said he knew he was viewed as pushing the newsroom too hard: "You think there's a star system. You think there's a culture of fear where editors are afraid to bring Howell bad news. Obviously that's not what I want."

Sulzberger told the staff that "if your trust in us is broken, all I can tell you is we are committed to repairing it. If it is only bent, bless you."

From the moment Berenson asked about resignation – saying it was a difficult question but one he'd ask of the boss at any other company under the circumstances – it was clear that long-simmering staff resentment was bubbling over.

Raines said that Landman had been "right all along" in warning about Blair, and Boyd acknowledged he didn't tell National Editor Jim Roberts of Blair's previous problems when the reporter was moved to the national staff to cover the sniper case and interview the families of soldiers in Iraq.

The paper's response to Landman's warning, Raines said, was for Boyd's assistant to write a "strong memo" to the personnel file, saying Blair was in danger of losing his job. It is not clear if anyone else saw the memo.

The most difficult exchanges came when the metro desk's Sexton asked why no action was taken after the strong challenges to Blair's reporting in the sniper case – including from the paper's own Washington bureau. The U.S. attorney in Maryland disputed a Blair article that said suspect John Muhammad's interrogation was cut short just as he was about to confess, and a Fairfax County prosecutor called a news conference to denounce a second piece as "dead wrong."

Raines and his team "did nothing" to verify "the authenticity or quality of his reporting," Sexton said. Why, he asked, did no senior editor demand to know the identities of Blair's unnamed sources?

Raines said it was his failure not to ask about the sources. He said he had "a political reporter's DNA," not "a police reporter's DNA." But he also said that after examining Blair's story and a Washington Post account, he believed the story about the truncated interrogation was at least partially true.

Boyd said the Fairfax prosecutor, Robert Horan, had told the Times that he didn't have a problem with Blair or the newspaper but with whatever sources were providing inaccurate information. It is not clear whether Blair made up those unnamed law enforcement sources.

A young reporter, Shaila Dewan, said it was "very demoralizing" that no other younger reporters, and no women, were given a chance to help out on the sniper coverage, when someone with Blair's baggage was chosen.

Some Times staffers say what they call Raines's "autocratic" management style – a "culture of favoritism," as one described it – helps explain why Blair was deemed untouchable. Since Raines took over in September 2001, several top editors – including the national editor, assistant national editor and two investigative editors – have either left the paper or moved to other assignments. Staffers have complained that Raines runs a top-heavy "Politburo" in which their influence was greatly reduced and managers were categorized as being either on or off the team.

During the same period, nine national reporters – including Kevin Sack, who just won a Pulitzer for the Los Angeles Times – have either quit or moved to other slots. Some have complained about pressure from Raines to travel more and file more pieces rather than pursue larger features.

One staffer asked yesterday about the departure of Sack and other seasoned reporters, who are widely seen as having been driven out by Raines. The executive editor said he had to do a better job of retaining talent.

Raines was also asked whether other Times reporters were getting a pass for sloppy or inaccurate reporting. He said it "would be wrong to start cannibalizing those achievers on our staff."

Toward the end of the meeting, piped by phone into Times bureaus around the world, Raines called it "illuminating, painful and honest."

The Times reported yesterday that the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has asked for information about Blair, but the nature of the request, and what laws might have been violated, were not disclosed.

Separately, a Times spokeswoman confirmed earlier this week that Blair has a relationship with a clerk at the paper who is a friend of Raines's wife. The New York Daily News reported that the woman, Zuza Glowacka, has worked in the Times photo department – an important fact because the Times says Blair faked some details in his stories by gaining access to the paper's computerized photo archives.

Blair told the News in a statement read over the phone this week that "I remain truly sorry for my lapses in journalistic integrity. . . . I continue to struggle with recurring issues that have caused me great pain."

The New Republic, meanwhile, enters the Jayson Blair fray:

"The policy Howell Raines and other Times executives were administering when they overlooked these things wasn't affirmative action; it was the fetishization of diversity, which is a complete perversion of affirmative action. And any fetish--any monomaniacal fixation on a single goal, whether the goal is diversity or proper grammar or having a certain type of Danish at editorial meetings--can be exploited by a pathological rogue looking to game the system. (Though it should be pointed out that the lion's share of the blame still lies with the pathological rogue, regardless of who or what made his rogue behavior possible. It should also be pointed out that we, of all publications, are not immune to pathological rogues.) . . .

"Howell Raines was apparently practicing a form of authoritarianism that isolated him from his staff and reinforced his personal fixations. And it came back to haunt him."

American Prowler's Wlady Pleszczynski scoffs at the Times investigation:

"If executive editor Howell Raines were at Enron, his name would be Kenneth Lay.

"Sunday's report of its investigation into the Blair scandal simply takes one's breath away. Let's start with what's said. The paper concedes that reporter Blair committed countless acts of plagiarism, misrepresentation, and other deviousness over the course of his meteoric Times career. It admits Blair was appointed and promoted by the paper's top guns, despite warnings from less powerful editors at the paper (which immediately puts the lie to its official claim that what the paper had here was a failure to communicate). It denies any of this had anything to do with its open championing of affirmative action, the elephant in the room it mistakes for a gnat. . . .

"As for not wanting to demonize Jayson, that's exactly what the Times has done, but without taking any responsibility for its own actions. If John Ashcroft had compiled Sunday's report, the paper would have squawked that his privacy had been violated at every turn. But with a huge score to settle and even greater embarrassment to escape, the Times gives it hard and good to its once proud project. Among other things we learn that he drank too much scotch, ran up tabs at bars, borrowed company cars and accumulated parking tickets on them (was he moonlighting at the U.N.?), smoked heavily, ate junk food, and was as sloppy in his appearance as he was in his work. On top of that, he had maxed out on his credit card. What a loser!"

We would have thought that William F. Buckley Jr. would defend Bill Bennett in the gambling flap, which seemed to be dying down. Instead, the National Review founder declares Bennett washed up:

"The sad business of William Bennett requires discouraging commentary. There is, first, the existential point, which is that Bill Bennett is through. We speak, of course, of his public life. He is objectively discredited. He will not be proffered any public post by any president into the foreseeable future. He will not publish another book on another virtue, if there is any he has neglected to write about. It is possible that the books written by him on the subject, sitting in bookstores, will work their way to the remainder houses. These are the consequences of the damage he has done to himself. It could always be that his inherent talents will prevail over undiscriminating fate. There are those who hope it will be so.

"A second question immediately arises: Has justice been done? Only in a raw parsing of the term, because what he did can correctly be deemed a private act immune from retributory sanction. It was wanton behavior, indisputably, but it was his own money being dissipated. The manner in which this was done raises eyebrows. If he had spent millions in decorating costs, his story would merely have been the tale of one more spendthrift. There is something about gambling when done other than on a scale associated with gin rummy and bridge, that is inherently censorious. Sensible criticism focuses on the unbounded character of his dissipation. When connected to stories of arrivals at casinos at three o'clock in the morning, to pump the $500 slot machines until dawn, what is depicted is addiction at pathological levels. The public thinks to reproach such conduct, not to okay it under the libertarian rubric."

Buckley complains about "the evident delight taken by what has happened to William J. Bennett. It justifies itself by spurting out that we have here the simple joy of holding hypocrisy to the flame of public ridicule. There's the procedural problem for Bennett critics who hold that private behavior is private behavior and should no more justify the impeachment of Bill Bennett than of Bill Clinton. But we cannot shake off the special animus here. What some critics are saying is that Mr. Bennett is the nation's premier secular catechist of virtue, and that the bigger they come the harder they fall."

Tough stuff, that.

It's too little, way too late for the Saudis:

"Saudi Arabia ignored repeated U.S. requests to tighten security around residential compounds housing American citizens before this week's terror attacks, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia said yesterday," reports USA Today.

"We continue to work with the Saudis on this, but they did not, as of the time of this tragic event, provide the additional security we requested,' Robert Jordan said in an interview on CBS' 'The Early Show.' Jordan said the U.S. government asked the Saudis for the security improvements 'on several occasions.'"

It was inevitable, after the New York Daily News ran the headline "JFK Had a Monica," that the former White House intern would surface:

"John F. Kennedy's intern admitted to the Daily News yesterday: 'I am the Mimi.' Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock, now 60, called it a huge weight off her shoulders to finally reveal her affair with the dashing young president four decades ago.

" 'The gift for me is that this allowed me to tell my two married daughters a secret that I've been holding for 41 years,' she said. 'It's a huge relief.'

" 'It's all true,' said Fahnestock, sitting in a pew in Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where she works as an administrator. Referring to stories in The News this week detailing the affair, she said: 'I was 19 years old. It was 1962, '63, and it's the truth.' "

Can her "Today" show appearance be far behind?

The Nation's Katrina van den Heuvel is tired of the Hillary-bashing:

"Can't the Republican Presidential Task Force come up with more imaginative ways of raising money than attacking Hillary Clinton? Last week it sent out a mass mailing seeking funds to stop any prospective Clinton presidential candidacy.

"'If Republicans don't take immediate steps to counter her,' writes Senator George Allen, chair of the Republican Senatorial Committee, 'Senator Hillary Clinton will continue to rise unimpeded to the very pinnacle of power in Washington and we will see the dawning of a new, more liberal Clinton era.'

"Spare me. The specter of Hillary Clinton as Senator--and now President--may be one of the great rightwing moneymaking gambits of our time. (Also one of the most fraudulent given Hillary's longtime centrist record.) HillaryNo.com helped Rudy Giuliani, her then assumed rival for the New York Senate, haul in an unprecedented 19 million dollars in campaign contributions. Since then, scores of rightwing writers have cashed in by pillorying Hillary. Conservative publishing houses have grown fat from Hillary-bashing. Talk radio's revenues would be cut in half without the Clintons, and Hannity, Scarborough, Savage and O'Reilly could go out of business without Hillary to kick around. . . .

"At least retailers are no longer reporting brisk sales in nine-inch Hillary voodoo dolls or doormats bearing her likeness."

The Cleveland Plain Dealer does a little fact-checking on its hometown candidate:

"Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democratic presidential candidate who has harshly criticized an economic plan reducing the taxes investors pay on dividends, co-sponsored a similar bill in 1998 when the economy was vibrant and the federal budget was in surplus.

"Kucinich, a Cleveland Democrat, said yesterday that he wouldn't vote for his own bill if it were up for consideration now."

The Raleigh News and Observer tracks the latest attack on its home-state guy:

"A conservative pro-business group is taking whacks at Sen. John Edwards, both at home in North Carolina and on the presidential campaign trail.

"Americans for Job Security sponsored a full-page ad in The News & Observer on Tuesday suggesting the politically ambitious Edwards had sold out to trial lawyers and forgotten the people he's supposed be serving back home. . . .

"Slated to run for several months, the billboards will portray Edwards as an obstacle to tort reform. One that's being planned shows pictures of donkeys and Edwards, with the following text:

"'A Montana man named Jack Ass sued the MTV show 'Jackass' for $10 million saying they plagiarized his name. . . . Next time you see him, tell John Edwards lawsuits like this are asinine.' . . .

"It's not surprising to us that a Republican-backed group that's employed [President] Bush's lawyer and has ties to [Bush political strategist] Karl Rove . . . is trying to attack John Edwards in his home state,' campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri said."

Both these stories are prime examples of how home-state reporters often provide the most telling coverage of presidential candidates – a phenomenon we wrote about in The Washington Post the other day.

Finally, Paul Krugman of the NYT and Fox's Neal Cavuto are really going at it. First, Krugman:

"Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told 'those who opposed the liberation of Iraq' – a large minority – that 'you were sickening then, you are sickening now.' Fair and balanced."

Mr. Cavuto:

"Exactly who's the hypocrite, Mr. Krugman? Me, for expressing my views in a designated segment at the end of the show? Or you, for not so cleverly masking your own biases against the war in a cheaply written column?

"You're as phony as you are unprofessional. And you have the nerve to criticize me, or Fox News, and by extension, News Corporation?

"Look, I'd much rather put my cards on the table and let people know where I stand in a clear editorial, than insidiously imply it in what's supposed to be a straight news story. And by the way, you sanctimonious twit, no one – no one – tells me what to say. I say it. And I write it. And no one lectures me on it. Save you, you pretentious charlatan."

We hate it when they hold back.

Spread of SARS Acts as a Rude Awakening for China

Spread of SARS Acts as a Rude Awakening for China
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/international/asia/13CHIN.html

BEIJING, May 12 — Only a few months ago, in what already feels like a different era, China's leaders were riding high. No one, neither critics nor partisans of the Communist Party, imagined that a viral disease was about to cause the equivalent of a national train wreck.

The party was transferring supreme power to a younger generation in the most orderly way ever. In its blooming relations with the United States and other great powers and in its successful effort to be selected as the host for the 2008 Olympics, China was gaining the global respect it always craved.

After more than two decades of relative stability and speedy growth, the country had joined the World Trade Organization. If problems of inequality and unemployment still nagged, the first quarter of 2003 was enjoying a renewed burst of rapid growth.

Now, in just a few torturous weeks, the country's politics and international relations have changed hues. The SARS epidemic and its obvious mishandling have badly humbled China's leaders at home and abroad, and jolted the society in many ways, a range of intellectuals and party officials said in interviews.

"SARS has been our country's 9/11," Xu Zhiyuan, a columnist for the Economic Observer, a newsweekly, said in an interview. "It has forced us to pay attention to the real meaning of globalization."

"China's future seemed so dazzling," he said, and that "lulled people into thinking our country was immune from the shocks of history." A recent column he wrote about the subject was titled "Farewell to a Vacation From History."

Just where the unleashed demons will lead is uncertain. But one casualty, welcomed by some scholars, may be the smug complacency many Chinese had developed about the country's political system and future.

"I think this disaster will make China's leaders more modest," said Xiao Gongqin, a historian at Shanghai Normal University.

"Everything seemed to be going so smoothly, and that allowed us to neglect our systemic shortcomings," he said in an interview. "This crisis is forcing everyone to reflect on those shortcomings, and it will sharpen people's critical sense."

Not only is SARS a serious threat to lives, but the epidemic has also exposed with embarrassing clarity — to the Chinese people and to the world — the costs of China's tight political control over information and bureaucracy.

It has thrown an equally embarrassing spotlight on the backward and disorganized state of medical care, especially in the countryside, where a majority of China's people live.

Anger overseas about the months of dissembling about the extent of SARS, which almost certainly abetted the global spread of the disease, has put Chinese leaders and diplomats on the defensive. In China, as the virus becomes more entrenched, serious economic damages are looming and Chinese travelers are in danger of becoming international pariahs.

Since the government's remarkable admission of grave mistakes on April 20, accompanied by the firing of two relatively senior officials among the many who must have known about the SARS cover-up, the top leaders have gamely worked to make up for lost time.

Hu Jintao, the president and party chief, and Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, have moved visibly around the country and filled the airwaves with exhortations to defeat the epidemic, and they appear to be winning back some public faith in the process.

If nothing more, many scholars and political experts think, a new standard of public disclosure has been set.

"For the government to be so open about an ongoing crisis is unprecedented," said Li Dongmin, director of the Social Survey Institute of China. "I hope it's a step forward to a more open society."

Even in routine party meetings, people are speaking out and raising critical questions in a way they never did before, about SARS and other issues, too, said an official of a party research institute.

The epidemic and its inconsistent official handling have been "a huge shock for the entire party," the official said. "You can sense this at internal meetings, where the atmosphere has changed and people are expressing criticisms more freely."

"The SARS epidemic is forcing us to rethink the whole theoretical framework for government that was developed under Jiang Zemin," he said, including the blindered emphasis on social stability and economic growth.

"We're seeing that growth and stability need to be balanced by social development and equity," the official said.

With his vigorous, if belated, counterattack against the disease, Mr. Hu appears to be consolidating his grip on the party and government much more quickly than many experts expected. When he succeeded Jiang Zemin in November, Mr. Jiang packed the ruling council with his protégés and stayed on as chairman of the military, and seemed a genuine rival for supreme authority.

Now, to salvage China's reputation, as well as to protect its health, Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen have brought in highly competent technocrats, previously associated with the former prime minister, Zhu Rongji, and with economic affairs, to run the Health Ministry and Beijing's anti-SARS campaign.

Wu Yi, a deputy prime minister and former trade negotiator, has been put in overall charge of fighting SARS.

Mr. Jiang remains a political force and still seems to control the military, but his near total silence on the SARS threat and that of his protégés on the Politburo have been widely noticed.

If the epidemic runs wild in coming months, political analysts say, Mr. Hu could yet lose ground. But if the medical and economic problems become too severe, the entire party leadership may be discredited and in peril, some experts say.

So far the worst predictions about the spread of SARS have not come true, at least if current disease reporting is close to accurate. China reported 75 new confirmed SARS cases today, including 48 in Beijing — lower daily numbers than were being reported a week ago. To some, they were a sign of hope that the epidemic might have crested, at least in Beijing, which is now the epicenter.

But international experts warn that information on where and how the virus has spread through Beijing remains too sketchy. They are also especially worried about the danger to interior cities and provinces, where medical monitoring and care are seriously deficient.

Almost no one expects the SARS challenge alone to force basic changes in one-party rule or to end political controls on the media.

Even the new official candor, while involving an outpouring of facts, has been carefully scripted from above, and the voluminous news reports have been shaped to flatter the leaders and present a society unified in heroic struggle.

Riots in several cities and towns, by fearful populations trying to keep SARS patients out of their neighborhoods, have not been reported in the official media. Whistle-blowers who exposed the now condemned cover-up of cases and deaths have been silenced rather than officially lauded.

The most hopeful view of some party thinkers is that long-discussed proposals to allow a modest increase in press freedom, improve public oversight of officials and promote more democracy inside the ruling party will gain new strength. Others, noting how quickly the propaganda apparatus has moved to extol the leaders' performance and pre-empt any radical critiques, say that is wishful thinking.

Years of the Dragons

Years of the Dragons
By DENNY LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/nyregion/11FEAT.html

THE night of Aug. 29, 1978, a lean, neatly dressed 23-year-old stumbled into the Fifth Precinct station house in the heart of Chinatown, bleeding from bullet wounds to his head and back. The victim was immediately recognized as the founder of the Ghost Shadows, one of Chinatown's most notorious gangs. But he refused to cooperate with the police, except to confirm that the shooting had taken place around the corner, at a mah-jongg parlor hidden beneath a restaurant on Mott Street.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, the same man, now 48 and graying, strode confidently into the Chinatown Day Care Center, a community-run nursery on Division Street. A 4-year-old in a purple down jacket darted from her seat to give her father a hug.

"Chinatown is not like before," the man remarked to a visitor as he returned the child's hug. "Chinatown is peaceful now. And there are no more gangs."

Of all the changes that have taken place in Chinatown in the last decade - the new wave of Fujianese immigrants, the shrinking of neighboring Little Italy, the gentrification of once squalid tenements - none has been as dramatic, or as historic, as its disappearing gang culture. Yin, who agreed to discuss his past on the condition that only his first name be used, played a pivotal role in this culture before serving 10 years in prison. But it is fast becoming a thing of the past.

Last year, for the first time in recent memory, not a single homicide was reported in the Fifth Precinct. The bullet-ridden alleyways of Mott and Pell Streets, the site of so many bloody turf wars, are as safe as the new Times Square. Local merchants who once coughed up thousands of dollars a year for protection money now use that money for mortgages. The cliques of menacing gang members who once recruited outside schoolyards have vanished without a trace.

"The heyday of youth gangs hanging out at different buildings and gambling houses, protecting businesses, going to restaurants for 'tiger meals' and not paying - that has pretty much disappeared from Chinatown," said Peter Kwong, director of the Asian-American studies program at Hunter College and the author of "The New Chinatown" (Hill & Wang, 1996).

The Jade Squad, a now-defunct special police unit formed in the 70's to tackle the gangs, attributed the change to arrests and racketeering convictions. The reasons are more complex, touching upon such diverse factors as changing international drug routes, cultural shifts, assimilation, even the crush of buses bound for Atlantic City.

But whatever the explanation, few will forget the screams of kidnapping victims and the crackle of bullets flying through crowded Chinese restaurants that marked the era of gang domination in the neighborhood. For better or worse, gangs were embedded in Chinatown's fabric.

"It's a part of our history that we need to remember,'' another former gang member said. "Gangs were a major part of Chinatown's soul.''

The Ghosts of Mott Street

Yin, the gang member who stumbled into the Fifth Precinct station that violent night, was 15 when he started hanging out with the wrong crowd. With his lanky frame and boyish good looks, he looked like a model child, but his charismatic smile and intense manner made him a natural leader for disaffected Chinatown youths.

By that year, 1970, Chinatown was home to five gangs: Chung Yee, Liang Shan, the Flying Dragons, the White Eagles and the Black Eagles. At first, they coexisted in relative peace, their memberships small, the spoils meager. But as boundaries were drawn, giving each gang a slice of Chinatown from which to profit, turf wars flared.

Rather than join an existing gang, Yin started his own. According to a federal indictment brought against him in 1985, Yin was the founding chairman of the Ghost Shadows, a gang that terrorized Chinatown for more than two decades. His role was so critical and his influence so great, in certain circles he is still considered a legend.

With no reputation or territory of his own, Yin set his sights on Mott Street, Chinatown's spiritual heart and a strip to which the White Eagles had already laid claim. To gain notoriety and prestige, the Ghost Shadows committed dozens of high-profile crimes, ranging from the murder of rival gang members to the armed robbery of a local newspaper. The emergence of the Ghost Shadows signified a bloody new chapter in Chinatown history.

"There was a tremendous amount of street violence," said Nancy Ryan, who founded the Asian gang unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office and whose prosecution of Yin and others earned her the nickname Dragon Lady. "Nobody had seen such a thing before in Chinatown."

In one grisly incident, Yin and other Shadows were patrolling Mott Street when they spotted a White Eagle walking alone. They forced him into a car, "drove him to a pier at the East River, bound his hands behind his back with wire, and tied his feet together with twine," the indictment said. "They then threw him into the river to drown."

"If you couldn't beat them, you had to join them,'' Yin said the other day during an informal tour of old gang landmarks that offered a rare, firsthand glimpse into a world normally seen through the eyes of the police. "If I didn't fight, I wouldn't have survived.''

The takeover of Mott Street, however, was not complete until the Shadows got the official nod from the tong, or fraternal association, of the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association. Founded in 1893, On Leong is ensconced in a building with a pagoda roof at the corner of Mott and Canal Streets. From its red-lacquered balcony on which the Taiwanese flag flies proudly, one can survey the entirety of Mott Street as if from a castle on a hill.

Like most Chinatown tongs, On Leong was on the surface a legitimate enterprise, serving as a business collective, a crutch for immigrants, even a loan company. But as Chinatown knew all too well, the largest tongs were also the brains behind the gangs. In 1974, relations between On Leong and its street muscle, the White Eagles, soured. On Leong sanctioned a takeover by the 200-member Shadows, and after a quick blood bath, Mott Street was firmly identified as Ghost Shadows territory.

ABC's and FOB's

The takeover of Mott Street by the Shadows culminated a life of crime that began before the gang's leader was in high school. Yin came to New York in 1966 at the age of 11, the son of parents who were among the tidal wave of Chinese immigrants who flooded Lower Manhattan just after restrictive quotas against Asians ended in 1965. Chinatown was both new frontier and emerging ghetto. Like many of his peers, Yin lived in a cramped tenement apartment on Eldridge Street as his parents struggled to make a living.

"My parents were garment workers and didn't have time to focus on their children," said Yin, who speaks in a whispery voice and still struggles with English. "A normal job here is like 70 hours, even now. I had to make my own judgments, my own money."

As Chinatown's population exploded, so did crime. But contrary to myth, the neighborhood's gangs were not imported wholesale from Asia. The violent Chinatown underworld, vividly sketched in the 1985 Mickey Rourke film "Year of the Dragon," and in countless television cop shows, did not spread from Hong Kong like some virulent strain. A strictly American byproduct, it embodied the modern history of Chinatown.

The first gangs were formed in the early 1960's by American-born Chinese - ABC's, as they were called - to fend off attacks from non-Asian outsiders known as lo fans, and members rarely committed crimes involving their own people.

That changed around 1970 as new immigrants "fresh off the boat," or FOB's, began forming their own street gangs for more nefarious purposes. Like Yin, the younger generation came from impoverished homes, spoke little English and saw few opportunities in their adopted country except to band together socially and criminally. In this they mirrored the youth of earlier immigrant groups for whom a life of crime was often a crucial first step up the economic ladder.

"It was never my intention to come to the U.S. and get into trouble," Yin said. "My parents and I just wanted better prosperity. I just fell into the situation."

Chinese gangsters were never hard to spot. There was an unspoken uniform of tight black jeans that tapered around bare ankles, white Keds, spiky hair with dyed highlights and a beeper. Some wore black nylon bomber jackets with a colorful dragon stitched on the back.

Clouds of cigarette smoke hovered over certain basements where the tongs had set up illegal gambling parlors for poker, mah-jongg, fan-tan and pai gow. More than 15 major parlors hid in plain sight, some raking in $2 million a month.

For most of the 80's and 90's, shopkeepers regarded protection money as a cost of doing business in Chinatown. Gang members knew to dance around the topic, the better to avoid self-incrimination; some arrived bearing a mandarin orange tree, with a reciprocal donation implied.

"All the store owners knew that before their store opened, they would have to pay," said Ko-Lin Chin, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University and the author of "Chinatown Gangs: Extortion, Enterprise and Ethnicity" (Oxford University Press, 1996). "They would always sit down and negotiate a price over tea. It was very polite."

Bonuses came on the Chinese New Year, in late winter, when a half-dozen lion dances, sponsored by various tongs, snaked through Chinatown to offer blessings amid the deafening pop of firecrackers. While tourists snapped pictures, the dancers collected wads of cash stuffed in red envelopes.

Wherever large sums of money exchanged hands, the gangs sought a slice of the action. Counterfeit handbags did not originate with the gangs, but they soon began getting a cut. Massage parlors and prostitution rings offered another revenue stream. By the mid-80's, "China White" was added to the list. The gangs served as the final leg of a heroin distribution network that started in Thailand, Burma and Laos, the so-called Golden Triangle. In the early 90's, as much as half the heroin bought in the United States passed through Chinatown.

The RICO Years

Before federal authorities began clamping down on the gangs, Yin had been arrested 20 times but convicted only twice, once as a youth for homicide, which landed him in juvenile detention for 18 months, and once for disorderly conduct after refusing to pay for a movie ticket. But as the gangs expanded their operations and became more brazen, with children and non-Asians mowed down by shootouts in broad daylight, a local menace turned, literally, into a federal case. In 1985, capping a 10-year investigation, federal authorities announced their first prosecution of Chinese gangs.

Under the federal Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, 25 members of the Shadows were charged with 85 separate crimes, including 13 murders. As the ringleader, Yin was singled out for two dozen crimes, including two homicides and seven attempted murders. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

Over the next decade, a string of RICO indictments stripped every Chinatown gang and tong of their top brass. Prosecutors stepped up their efforts in 1993 when a freighter called the Golden Venture ran aground off Queens with nearly 300 Chinese immigrants aboard, underscoring in sickening fashion the link between the gangs and human smuggling.

Even as the RICO convictions ushered a regime change in Chinatown, law enforcement officials worried that the seeds for a new generation of gang warlords were being planted. Waves of new immigrants from Fujian Province were settling in Chinatown and its two new offshoots, Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens, both of which seemed ripe for the picking. What happened instead, said Mr. Chin of Rutgers, was that "Chinatown itself had changed."

Unlike Cantonese immigrants from Hong Kong and other urban centers who once dominated the social hierarchy, the Fujianese and other recent immigrants were generally rural people. "They were farmers," Mr. Chin said. "They're going to school rather than getting involved with gangs."

The criminal enterprises that begot the gangs, like gambling and heroin, had lost their economic life. Atlantic City casinos offered cheap bus rides, Asian pop stars and more glitz than any smoke-filled basement. Meanwhile, Colombian heroin traffickers had undercut Asian suppliers with lower prices and purer grades.

At the same time, new blood to replenish gang ranks had become scarce. Like Italians, Jews and Irish before them, the children and grandchildren of Cantonese immigrants had set their sights beyond the street corner. "All the gangsters I used to know are stockbrokers now," said Joe G. M. Chan, a filmmaker in his early 30's who still lives in Chinatown, his native home.

Former gang members take pains to avoid the old neighborhood. "I rarely go to Chinatown these days," said Lawrence Wu, 27, a former Tung On gang member who, in a remarkable turnaround, earned his high school equivalency degree, graduated from Queens College and became editor in chief of The Columbia Law Review.

"The one thing that sticks in my head is how tiny this world felt," said Mr. Wu, who now practices corporate law at a major firm near Grand Central Terminal. "You lived in this subculture of a subculture of a subculture. The idea of going to an arcade in Midtown was a really big deal."

A Reborn Lion

Chinatown still has a criminal underworld. Although reports of kidnapping are now rare, smuggling of illegal immigrants remains a problem. Extortion has not been eliminated; Fujianese tour bus operators, for example, recently had their tires slashed for refusing to pay up.

But these are not the old days.

"It's more like three guys who come together to commit a burglary or extortion," said Carla Freedman, the current head of the Manhattan District Attorney's Asian gang unit. "Gambling still exists, but it's more like poker night than a gambling parlor."

Yin would be happy if the Shadows were also forgotten. After 10 years behind bars, he returned to Chinatown in 1994 a different man in a different world. Today, Yin is nearly bald, his face appears gaunt, and there is little trace of his charismatic swagger. He comes across as tentative and wiser, like a man who has had too much time to think.

"I lost a lot of time," he said with regret. "I started my family when I was 45."

After trying his hand as an electrician, a travel agent and a restaurant manager, he has embarked on a new life as a real estate developer; his first building, a two-story cinder-block structure in Chinatown, is nearly complete. Paradoxically, the arm-twisting and interference-running that is emblematic of New York construction reminds him of the old days. "It's very similar,'' he said, "except one is positive, and one is negative."

In an effort to help his daughter to retain a strong Chinese identity, Yin lives on the outskirts of Chinatown with his wife of five years, a recent immigrant who manages a Chinese restaurant.

Yin grew silent as he walked past old gang apartments, former gambling parlors, the restaurant where he was shot and the pagoda roof of On Leong, as imposing as ever at Mott and Canal Streets.

Several weeks earlier, on the first day of the Chinese New Year, On Leong had resurrected its lion dance after a long absence. In a moment heavy with symbolism, the dancers turned onto Pell Street, the territory of On Leong's longtime archrival, Hip Sing. The young dancers were led upstairs into Hip Sing's inner sanctum, where secret meetings were once held to plot against On Leong and the Shadows. As far as anyone could recall, Hip Sing had never before been host to an On Leong lion dance.

For a few minutes, the lion gyrated before a ceremonial altar, beautifully arranged with incense, oranges and cabbage. As old men in suits shook hands, the lion swallowed a head of green cabbage, a symbol of wealth, and tossed it back in a show of respect. The hatchet was officially buried.

Saudis Are Shaken as Jihad Erupts at Their Front Door

Saudis Are Shaken as Jihad Erupts at Their Front Door
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/international/middleeast/16RIYA.html

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, May 15 — The mourners came pouring in to the wealthy Khozama neighborhood by the hundreds over the last three nights, the younger men kissing the deputy governor of Riyadh on the forehead as a Bedouin mark of respect, his peers bussing him on the cheeks. "May God extend his condolences," they murmur.

The deputy governor's son, Muhammad, was killed in the bombing of an upscale residential compound, struck down on Monday with such force, his father Abdullah al-Blehed said, that the first time he touched his son's mangled corpse lying on the sidewalk, he did not recognize his own firstborn.

"Those people who say they want to make jihad against the United States or Israel, what they did is pointless," said Mr. Blehed, a part owner of Al Hamra, the compound where his son died. "Jihad is not like this."

Many Saudis are reeling from the deadly explosions in the eastern suburbs of this sprawling capital, in part because at least seven of the victims were natives, and the 15 attackers probably were too. In recent years, terror attacks around the world, although carried out in the name of Islam, the faith born here, seemed distant. Jihad was something that happened elsewhere.

"This time it was different: it was an attack against your own people," said Khaled M. Batarfi, the managing editor of Al Madina, a daily newspaper. "It's huge; it's organized. It's like what happened on Sept. 11 in America but on a smaller scale — these things happen to others."

The gory scenes of charred bodies spread across their newspapers and on television are disturbing in a way other recent terrorist attacks were not.

"If this was not the Saudis' Sept. 11, it was certainly the Saudis' Pearl Harbor," said the United States ambassador, Robert W. Jordan.

Of course there had been attacks here before. At least a half-dozen bombs planted under cars in recent years killed three expatriates and maimed several others. Americans were the main victims of both the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers and a 1995 attack on a Saudi National Guard center.

Saudis, however, felt secure in their own country. Now they are not so sure.

"We're moving," said Fahd al-Blehed, 27, Muhammad's brother and his neighbor in the compound. "Those people can do anything."

It was only in recent years that Saudis started living in compounds, long a preserve of Westerners. Muhammad, 29, was a typical local resident. After spending five years in the United States, graduating from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo with a master's degree in public administration, he came home. He followed his father into both the Riyadh government and the family real estate and transportation business.

Life in the compounds is not unlike any California community college. Some of the tennis courts are air-conditioned. Swimming pools abound. Al Hamra boasted some 15 among its 428 villas, town houses and apartments. The five most expensive mansionettes, which rented for $10,000 per month, each had its own.

The Saudis who lived there — and 70 percent of the residents were Saudi — tended to be married to foreign women or have spent some years abroad. The compound was out of bounds to the religious police, sniffing for moral turpitude. Women could move around unveiled. Men could wear their soccer shorts.

When he was out walking with his wife, Fahd said, "Nobody would ask me, "Who is she? What is she doing with you?' "

Some expect the attack on Saudis who had adopted a Western lifestyle was done on purpose. "In their belief, there is no difference, because those people are befriending the infidels," Mr. Batarfi, the editor, said.

On the night of the attack, Muhammad was eating dinner with four friends, his family said. One was the son of another shareholder in the compound, another a lawyer. When they heard gunfire at the nearby gate, Muhammad ran for home, where his 2-month-old twin daughters had been left with a nanny. He never made it. His body was found some 10 yards from where a Chevrolet pickup truck packed with explosives was detonated.

The explosion also killed all his dinner companions, Muhammad's relatives said. It leveled some 25 houses. A total of 100 will need to be rebuilt. It tore the roof off the gym of the British School in the compound and wrenched doors off their hinges in another compound a few hundred yards away.

As their father describes the attack, Fahd and his younger brother Faisal, 25, tear up. With the sadness comes anger about security lapses. Fahd said the owners asked for more security for the front gate but the government provided only one armed man in a jeep — the government holding a monopoly on carrying guns.

"That won't do much against a bunch of guys trained in Afghanistan," Fahd said, making a sudden fist. "The government has to be harder on them, especially the religious people who are even brainwashing young children in mosques."

The need for a crackdown has been a common theme here this week. The country's newspapers, especially Al Watan, have been waging a campaign pointing out that it is not that great a leap from criticizing women as infidels for opening sports clubs to declaring open season on anyone fitting that description.

The newspaper used to get only hate mail for such sentiments, said its editor, Jamal Khashoggi, but it has now started receiving supportive missives, demanding a crackdown on the radicals.

Before this week, many Saudis, and especially those in government, tended to paint fanaticism as something foreign. This week, the usual statements about events "strange to our society" were absent.

The creeping recognition that it is something homegrown has made Saudis more jittery, not least because the Web sites beloved of the radical fringe are predicting more to come.

When a helpful Saudi took an undeniably Western reporter on a drive through Riyadh, the man's elderly father called to make sure the visitor had not provoked an assault.

"The thinking is: `If I go to school tomorrow, will anything happen to me? If I drive by this compound will it explode? If I go someplace with a Western friend will I be attacked?' " Mr. Batarfi said.

On Nighttime Tank Charge Into Gaza Powder Keg

On Nighttime Tank Charge Into Gaza Powder Keg
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/international/middleeast/16MIDE.html

BEIT HANUN, Gaza Strip, May 15 — Under a brilliant full moon, the Israeli Army commander took a final drag on his cigarette, then wriggled into a cramped armored personnel carrier and ordered his men on a nighttime charge into one of the Gaza Strip's most combustible neighborhoods.

The commander, a lieutenant colonel named Ron who insisted that his last name be withheld, predicted that shooting would erupt, and it did. In several sharp exchanges of fire, five Palestinians were killed, including two militants and three youths aged 12, 14 and 18, according to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. More than a dozen Palestinians were wounded as part of an operation Israel said was aimed at preventing Palestinian rocket fire.

The colonel, a slim, energetic man with a day's worth of stubble, permitted a reporter to join him in his armored vehicle for an inside look at the fighting that persists despite a new Middle East peace plan.

As commander of a special forces battalion who also received training at Fort Benning, Ga., the colonel leads some of the army's more delicate missions in Gaza. Preparing for this one, he discussed the often-conflicting demands of tracking down militants and avoiding civilian casualties.

"It's important just to hit the terrorists, not the civilians," he said before the raid. "Most of the time we succeed. But the terrorists sometimes use the women and children as human shields, and it makes our job very difficult."

The raid, among the most sustained of the conflict into Gaza, came as the Bush administration was pushing a new peace plan here, and as the first Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, said he was trying to marshal Palestinian security in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians accuse Israel of trying to undermine the plan with assassinations of militant leaders and almost daily raids into Palestinian towns.

But Israeli officials say that with Mr. Abbas still failing to act to stop the violence, they have no choice but to carry out raids like this one. The diplomatic signals may be mixed, but for Ron, the mission had a straightforward message.

"We want the people to understand that if they let the terrorists operate from their neighborhoods, we will be there," he said.

Israel said it had selected Beit Hanun, in the northeast corner of Gaza, as a target because the militant Hamas movement used the lush orange groves there for cover when launching homemade rockets at the Israeli town of Sederot, just outside Gaza's boundary fence.

The Israeli commander directed more than two dozen tanks, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and Humvees as they traversed rutted, winding roads and entered Beit Hanun in single file, with their lights out, navigating by moonlight and night-vision goggles.

The commander, who was relaxed and chatty before the operation began, became intensely focused once it started. With a 360-degree view through bulletproof-glass panels, he was constantly checking the positions of other vehicles. The radio between him and his offices rarely went silent, and he often flipped on a small flashlight to check a map book with aerial photos of Beit Hanun on a detailed grid.

After an hour of driving on deserted roads, the forces staked out positions at 3 a.m. in the dirt streets, many just wide enough to accommodate tanks. Spreading out over several blocks, they encircled two houses they said belonged to Hamas members accused of involvement in the rocket fire, and prepared to blow them up.

Speaking in Arabic, a soldier on a megaphone told residents to get out of the two houses, as well as those nearby. But Beit Hanun, like many Palestinian communities, is awash in weapons, and the call was greeted almost immediately with bursts of gunfire from elsewhere in the neighborhood, prompting shooting exchanges that lasted 15 minutes. Palestinians also hurled grenades and set off two roadside bombs, the Israelis said.

Despite the gunfights, Palestinian families emerged on the streets as ordered, with parents toting small children in their arms. The Israelis shined spotlights on them to make sure that they were unarmed, startling some children.

As the shooting died down, small bands of soldiers slipped into the two homes and the neighboring ones to confirm that they had been evacuated and to plant explosives.

A pair of blasts only minutes apart brought the two-story structures crashing down amid bright orange flashes, a shower of sparks and a gust of wind through the gun portals of the armored vehicle, bringing dust as fine as talcum powder.

A short distance away, the scenario was repeated, with another bout of shooting preceding the demolitions of two more houses the soldiers said belonged to Hamas men.

The Israeli practice of tearing down the homes of militants has been criticized by Palestinians, who call it collective punishment. The Israelis see it as deterrence.

Israeli troops made no arrests, but remained in the area, and periodic clashes continued throughout the day. Young men set up burning tire barricades in the streets and threw stones at the Israeli armor; unseen gunmen occasionally opened fire.

"Until this moment, we feel like we are in jail," Sufian Hamad, a Beit Hanun resident, said tonight. "We are surrounded by tanks."

He told his seven children to resist the temptation to peek out the window, saying the 12-year-old boy who died was shot while looking at the troops.

Palestinians said that the army had blocked ambulances for several hours, and that the boy, Muhammad Zaneen, who was hit in the head, had had to be carried from the combat zone. Israel denied the charge.

The Israeli colonel was remorseful about the youths who were killed. "It's a terrible feeling," he said. "It's the last thing I want to happen. I can only hope that we have made it difficult for the Palestinians to fire rockets from this area."

These up-close confrontations, which are commonplace, are inherently jittery. When troops turn a dark corner, as they did today, they may be greeted by a family of 10 in pajamas, or a barrage of gunfire from militants laying an ambush.

At dawn, the army's hulking D-9 bulldozers systematically flattened the large orange groves that the military says Hamas has been using as a launching pad.

Five bulldozers took down hundreds of mature orange trees like huge lawn mowers trimming an overgrown yard. The bulldozers were so powerful, oranges were flung from their branches as the trees were pressed to the ground.

"With these trees gone, we now have a clear line of sight from our positions, and the terrorists can't hide," the colonel said.

But Marwan al-Shawa, whose family owns the land, was furious at the destruction. "The Israelis are just doing this for revenge," he said.

Over the last year, Israeli forces have maintained an almost permanent presence in and around Palestinian cities in the West Bank. But quick in-and-out raids have been the norm in Gaza, where the army is wary of getting bogged down in the congested towns.

Nevertheless, Maj. Gen. Doron Almog said the troops would remain in Beit Hanun, because of the recent increase in rocket and mortar fire. Israel says it will not tolerate the attacks, which have caused injuries but no deaths so far.

SARS Scare at J.F.K. Brings Fast Response From Doctors

SARS Scare at J.F.K. Brings Fast Response From Doctors
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/science/sciencespecial/16JFK.html

On Wednesday afternoon, the van from Kennedy International Airport's medical center dropped off a passenger at a terminal, and a young man from Pakistan, spotting the medical emblem on the shuttle, walked up and tapped on its window.

The traveler, wearing a gray suit, a stylish haircut and a very weary expression, told the driver that he felt ill, with a fever and a cough.

He said that he wanted to see a doctor or nurse — maybe he just needed some Tylenol, he said — but that he had a flight to catch at 4:30, two hours later.

That chance encounter quickly escalated into a frightening series of steps as doctors sought to rule out SARS, the new pneumonia that has killed hundreds and disrupted entire nations. The man was immediately isolated, his only contacts for the next several hours were with people swathed in masks, gloves and gowns, and he was hospitalized overnight, despite his initial objections.

Almost from the outset, the doctors thought that SARS was unlikely but that this was the unusual case they could not rule out — in part because of the man's inconsistent accounts of his travels and symptoms. By yesterday morning, they were more confident that it was not SARS, his fever was gone by midday, and he was released from Mary Immaculate Hospital in Jamaica, Queens — irked and delayed, but better.

"Most likely it is some garden-variety virus," said Dr. Steven C. Garner, who treated the man and who is the chief medical officer of St. Vincent Catholic Medical Centers, which includes the airport center. "But you do the least harm by following the protocol."

The episode illustrated the heightened vigilance of doctors, nurses and others in the face of the disease, and offered a rare glimpse of the step-by-step precautions taken in the few cases in the region that look as though they might be SARS.

First, the shuttle driver donned gloves, a gown and a mask, and told his new passenger that he, too, had to slip on a mask and gloves before climbing aboard. At the medical center, the new patient was taken through the ambulance entrance, to avoid infecting the half-dozen patients in the waiting room. He was taken to an examination room and ordered to stay there, mask still in place, and a sign was posted on the door saying, "Caution, airborne and contact precautions." The man declined to be interviewed by a reporter who happened to be at the airport medical center, and doctors withheld his name and some details of his history to protect his privacy.

When SARS first burst on the scene, the medical center handled about 50 inquiries a day from passengers and airport workers who thought they might have it, or might have been exposed. That fear got in the way of the center's ordinary work, providing vaccinations to travelers and airline workers, treating injuries and providing primary care to people who live nearby. Things have calmed down, officials say. There are now about five calls or visits a day about SARS.

Wednesday's visit was different, and unsettling even to medical professionals who know they are the front line of defense against an outbreak, and have prepared for it. This was the sort of thing the center sees perhaps once a month, Dr. Garner said — a case that, at first glance, could be SARS.

"One of my doctors, I asked him to go in and get some preliminary vitals, and he was reluctant," Dr. Garner said.

The young man had a 102.4-degree temperature and a cough. He gave varying accounts of his recent ailments, including conflicting versions of how long he had run a fever. A chest X-ray showed no obvious signs of current pneumonia — though the SARS-related pneumonia can be hard to spot at first — but revealed scarring from an earlier pneumonia.

And the man's travel story kept changing. At first, doctors said, he said he was about to fly to Pakistan, but later he said he had just arrived from Pakistan. At one point, he said he had recently been in western Asia, but he later retracted that. He said he needed to be in another American city for an important event yesterday, but then he said the event was two days away. He swore he had not been to China, the center of the epidemic, but given the man's evasiveness, medical center officials said they could not be sure.

The doctors called officials at the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, who agreed that the man's case was probably not SARS but that he should be held overnight. The patient agreed, so officially, this was not a case of the department ordering someone held in isolation against his will — something that has happened just once so far in a suspected SARS case.

An ambulance took the man to Mary Immaculate, where he was put in an isolation room with an air-circulation system intended to prevent the spread of germs to other parts of the hospital. Blood samples and throat swabs were taken, both for tests at the hospital and for shipping to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta — at this point, the only place in the country that can conduct the tests that can definitively establish a case of SARS.

American Air Again Warns of Bankruptcy

American Air Again Warns of Bankruptcy
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/business/16AIR.html

American Airlines said yesterday in a securities filing that it might have to file for bankruptcy protection from creditors despite having extracted nearly $4 billion in annual cost cuts.

The glum warning came on the same day that American, the world's largest airline, said that it had obtained more than $175 million in annual concessions from more than 100 suppliers, vendors and aircraft lessors. The airline said it would give those companies three million shares of common stock in AMR, its parent.

Those savings mean American is near to achieving the $4 billion in annual concessions it said it needed to return to profitability. The largest chunk comes from $1.8 billion in annual labor savings, most from unionized workers. American won the union agreements last month after a contentious voting process during which Donald J. Carty, the former chief executive, resigned over issues of compensation.

As part of its labor cost cuts, American told its flight attendants' union on Wednesday that it would lay off more than 3,100 flight attendants on July 1, leaving 19,600 on the payroll.

Tara Baten, a spokeswoman for American, said Gerard J. Arpey, the new chief executive, and other managers were working to obtain still more savings from vendors and suppliers. American is $25 million short of its $4 billion goal.

But the company clearly has doubts that even the $4 billion in annual savings will help it avert bankruptcy. In the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, American said that "the company may nonetheless need to initiate a filing under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code because its financial condition will remain weak and its prospects uncertain."

"Among other things," the securities filing said, "the following factors have had and/or may have a negative impact on the company's business and financial results: the continued weakness of the U.S. economy; the residual effects of the war in Iraq; the fear of another terrorist attack; the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak; the inability of the company to satisfy the liquidity requirements or other covenants in certain of its credit arrangements"; and "the inability of the company to access the capital markets for additional financing."

Though domestic passenger traffic has shown slight year-to-year growth in recent weeks, international traffic remains weak, according to statistics from the Air Transport Association.

Jim Corridore, an analyst at Standard & Poor's, said American's self-assessment was accurate, given the bleak travel climate.

"My position for some time is, even after they got the employee concessions, they're still not out of the woods," Mr. Corridore said.

"Their past losses have been such over the past few years that I fear they won't be able to survive until the industry turns up again," he added. "I don't know if they can survive until 2005."

In April, AMR reported a first-quarter loss of $1.04 billion. It lost a total of nearly $5.2 billion in 2001 and 2002.

John Ward, the president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, said in a message on the union's Web site that the round of layoffs in July meant American would have cut more than 6,000 flight attendants from its payroll since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"The morale is, as expected, pretty awful," Mr. Ward wrote.

If morale among workers continues to deteriorate, then that could present serious problems for American, industry experts said. Disaffected workers could affect service, causing travelers to switch to other airlines.

In the summer of 2000, for example, the pilots at United Airlines, a unit of UAL, refused to work overtime — what the company called a work slowdown — because the pilots felt threatened by United's bid to merge with US Airways.

Citing a recent improvement in bookings, United said yesterday that it would restore 162 daily flights next month.

The airline is also recalling 1,527 laid-off flight attendants for June, the flight attendants' union said on its Web site. United confirmed the recall of flight attendants.

Has Technology Lost Its 'Special' Status?

Has Technology Lost Its 'Special' Status?
By STEVE LOHR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/16/technology/16TECH.html

Searching for the elusive recovery in technology spending has resembled walking toward a horizon that just keeps receding. Improvement lies just over the next hill, most technology executives keep saying, but the present looks pretty murky.

But with signs emerging that some sort of technology recovery may be under way, Craig R. Barrett, chief executive of Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker, was still echoing the prevailing wisdom yesterday. "We continue to be optimistic about the future, but cautious about tomorrow," he said.

Certainly Wall Street believes a rebound is at hand. The shares of the 100 largest technology companies have climbed 22 percent so far this year, according to Merrill Lynch & Company.

Beyond the timing of any short-term recovery, however, is the longer-term question about the future of information technology: Is it still a growth industry?

The question is stirring a lively debate among industry analysts, investors and economists. The answer will be important not only for technology companies, but for the economy as a whole. The