The Times in Print for November 15, 2008
big fat quick post from the NYTimes & DMN...
will try to post links...
Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage
By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON
Mormons played an extraordinary role in the passage of a California ballot measure that once seemed close to defeat.
The Saturday Profile: As a Memoirist, a Chilean Diplomat Takes Off the White Gloves
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
High School Rugby Team Breaks Down Barriers
Mexico Crash Inquiry Points to Pilot Error in Turbulence
By ELISABETH MALKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/world/americas/15mexico.html?scp=3&sq=interior%20minister&st=cse
Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage
By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON
Hospital Flooded in Storm to Cut Its Staff by a Third
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Dallas Schools Used False Hiring Data
By GRETEL C. KOVACH
Police Defend Shooting of Man Swinging a Chair
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
As First Plan Stalls, Mayor Tries New Push for Green Taxis
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Arts, Briefly: Silverman Book Deal
Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/hoop-wins-bike-rack-design-contest/?scp=1&sq=bike%20racks&st=cse
November 14, 2008, 11:20 AM
‘Hoop’ Wins Bike-Rack Design Contest
By SEWELL CHAN
| A simple circle, resting on the ground with a bar bisecting it. That concept, called “Hoop” — the brainchild of Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve, designers based in Copenhagen — is the winner of the CityRacks Design Competition and will be used as the new standard bicycle rack installed on New York City’s sidewalks, officials announced on Friday. Nearly 5,000 such racks are to be installed over the next three years./.../
Update | Several readers asked how the winning bike-rack design, the “Hoop,” will be attached to the ground. City Room asked Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, for a response. He replied in an e-mail message, “The final securing mechanism hasn’t been decided, but we are evaluating the sturdiest and most cost-effective method. One option is to bolt it and add a protective flange at the base. The other is to fasten it to the ground using subsurface mounting components.”
comment.. one would think attachment and installation would be critical in integral to the design process!!
be sure to read the reader comments! average New Yorkers seem more in touch with "D"esign requirements!
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/10-finalists-picked-in-bike-rack-contest/
September 30, 2008, 4:49 PM
10 Finalists Picked in Bike-Rack Contest
By SEWELL CHAN
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/new-bike-racks-courtesy-of-david-byrne/?scp=3&sq=bike%20racks&st=cse
August 19, 2008, 4:54 PM
New Bike Racks, Courtesy of David Byrne
By SEWELL CHAN
Latest Marvel: Packages That Open Without a Saw
By BRAD STONE and MATT RICHTEL
Retailers are creating alternatives to infuriating plastic “clamshell” packages and cruelly complex twist ties.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/technology/internet/15packaging.html?ref=todayspaper
Impregnable packaging has incited such frustration among consumers that an industry term has been coined for it — “wrap rage.” It has sent about 6,000 Americans each year to emergency rooms with injuries caused by trying to pry, stab and cut open their purchases, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/sports/othersports/15rugby.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all
Jim Lo Scalzo for The New York Times
Playing a “white person’s game,” an all-black rugby team from a Washington charter school has cleared racial hurdles and learned valuable life lessons.
By WILL BARDENWERPER
Published: November 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/magazine/16rice-t.html
Welcome to My World, Barack
What the World Needs Now Is . . . Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice contemplates the state of the world — past, present and future.
Interviews by HELENE COOPER and SCOTT L. MALCOMSON
Published: November 13, 2008
On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will inherit a world very different from the one his predecessor found in January 2001. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has faced great challenges and nurtured grand ambitions; it has tried hard to remake the world. Condoleezza Rice has been a central player in that effort since becoming the candidate Bush’s chief foreign-policy adviser in 2000, so we arranged to interview her at the State Department late last month. The interview turned into a wide-ranging discussion of where this government has taken the United States and what sort of world it will leave for the next president. The editors have culled the highlights of her remarks in the text that follows. We also spoke with other administration foreign-policy makers — Christopher Hill and Daniel Fried of the State Department and Gen. James L. Jones, former supreme allied commander, Europe — whose remarks supplement and illuminate those of Rice.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/arts/design/15taxi.html?scp=1&sq=taxidermy&st=cse
From Ashes, Reviving a Place of Wild Dreams
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: November 14, 2008
PARIS — When a fire ripped through Deyrolle, the beloved taxidermy establishment here, early one morning last February, it was as if a dagger had been plunged into the heart of Paris.
Deyrolle has always been more than a shop on the classy Rue du Bac. Founded 177 years ago by Jean-Baptiste Deyrolle, a well-known entomologist, Deyrolle has been a natural history emporium with the look and feel of a museum, except that just about everything was for sale.
Deyrolle’s stuffed menagerie — from black crows to big-game animals — its cases of butterflies and beetles, its signature pedagogic posters and century-old prints have made it a place of pilgrimage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/world/americas/15munoz.html?scp=1&sq=memoirist&st=cse
THE SATURDAY PROFILE
As a Memoirist, a Chilean Diplomat Takes Off the White Gloves
HERALDO MUÑOZ weighed a dilemma when he sat down to write about his past, which included slinking through Santiago, Chile, with unstable sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest, girding for the insurrection that never materialized against the infamous 1973 military coup.
In the ensuing decades, after all, Mr. Muñoz had become not only Chile’s permanent representative to the United Nations, but also the head of a Security Council antiterrorism committee. Accomplished diplomats are not supposed to wield explosive verbs, much less actual dynamite.
But in writing “The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet,” a memoir published this fall, the ambassador decided that only the complete story would suffice.
“At that time, and it’s hard to say it, but I was ready to die because I was defending a constitutional government and a cause,” Mr. Muñoz, 60, said in an interview in his airy corner office overlooking the United Nations and the East River. “That is my life, and that is when everybody was crazy in the world.”
He overcame his initial reluctance to write the book, he said, when he realized that General Pinochet had affected an entire generation in Chile and all around the world — prominent leftist politicians and advocates told him the fight over Chile had inspired them to enter public life and still shaped their outlook. It took him two years of writing evenings and weekends to finish the work.
In addition, Mr. Muñoz wanted to examine the question of whether Chile’s free-market economic miracle was really the fruit of the Pinochet period — as General Pinochet’s die-hard supporters still claim — or whether it might have occurred without such a brutally anti-Socialist regime.
Although General Pinochet unleashed free-market policies inspired by the “Chicago boys,” young Chilean disciples of Milton Friedman and other economists of the Chicago School, the dictator was forced to retrench and even to nationalize much of the banking sector with a $7 billion bailout in the early 1980s.
It was only after the defeat of General Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite and the establishment of democracy that the real economic boom occurred, Mr. Muñoz argues in the book, with the poverty level in Chile dropping to 13.7 percent in 2007 from 40 percent in 1990.
But Patricio Navia, who teaches Latin American studies at New York University, says the book underplays the extent to which modern Chile is a creature of what Pinochet wrought. “Chile today is much more what Pinochet had in mind than what Allende had in mind,” he said, referring to Salvador Allende, the Socialist president of Chile who was overthrown in the 1973 coup.
Paul E. Sigmund, a professor emeritus at Princeton and an expert on Chilean politics, said the book’s greatest value lay in its detailed descriptions of the policy fights of the Pinochet era. “He is a remarkable combination of political activist and political observer,” Mr. Sigmund said of the ambassador.
/.../
The Pinochet memoir is not the only book by Mr. Muñoz out this fall. He also wrote a critique of United States policy in Iraq, called “A Solitary War,” originally published in Spanish and drawn from his two years on the Security Council. The book laments that Americans do not recognize the value of the United Nations in assuring the United States’ central role in the world. In a rare flash of undiplomatic frankness, he pokes fun at President Bush’s Spanish accent.
To this day, Ambassador Muñoz said, Chileans of his generation do not entirely trust the United States as a force for democratic change in the world. The fight to end General Pinochet’s rule left a permanent mark on them. “It symbolized a sense of purpose, fighting for human rights and becoming politically active, never forgetting that democracy is feeble unless we are able to strengthen it,” he said. “That is a daily task.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/nyregion/15about.html?scp=1&sq=grade-a%20caper&st=cse
ABOUT NEW YORK
In 1978, a Faux Paper Was Real Genius
By JIM DWYER
Published: November 14, 2008
A spoof called “New York Times — Special Edition” was handed out in big cities around the country this week, full of news stories imagined by liberal pranksters. It was a Grade-A caper; people walked into their subways carrying a newspaper headlined, “Iraq War Ends,” thinking, well, how do you like that? Then they noticed the date on the paper was next July.
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Collection of Jonathan Becker/Random House
Created by a consortium of sharp wits, Not The New York Times was a spiritual companion to The Times.
Now, clever as it was, this week’s spoof will not do any damage to the reputation of liberals/progressives as being a little short in the humor leg. The faux paper was full of virtuous high-fiber material — universal health care, nation sets sights on building sane economy, apologies by a range of villains — and generally was all the fun of a steaming bowl of quinoa.
By way of completely unfair comparison, it should be noted that the modern standard for fake news was set in October 1978, with the publication of the one and only issue of Not The New York Times. It was a pitch-perfect replica, spiritually and physically. At that point, the actual newspaper had not been published for two months because of a strike, and the Internet did not yet exist.
After so long without the real thing, the public embraced Not The New York Times —from the first page to the last, packed with articles that were vaguely familiar. For instance, while there was no Living section with features on home decorating, there was The Having Section, which had handy how-to stories like “Insulating With Pâté: Winter Warmth With Good Taste.”
The front page carried both hard news articles and reports on important social trends.
“An Exotic Drug, ‘Cocaine,’ Appears Popular,” read one headline, deploying quotation marks around the word cocaine like a pair of tweezers. In keeping with the real newspaper’s expanding use of graphs to convey important facts at a glance, the cocaine article included a chart on its increased consumption, illustrated with little noses along a timeline. The trend was unmistakable: In 1976, one nose sufficed; by 1978, a full 15 noses were needed.
Of course, the most pressing issues of the day received the greatest attention. For instance, in real life, Pope Paul VI died in August of that year. His successor, Pope John Paul I, died 33 days after he was elected. The lead story in Not The New York Times reported that John Paul’s successor — John Paul John Paul, formerly the archbishop of Liverpool — lived only 18 minutes after his investiture.
“Pope Dies Yet Again;
Reign is Briefest Ever
Cardinals Return from Airport”
Having already picked two popes that summer, the article reported, many of the cardinals were fed up with their accommodations at the Vatican and so “were said to favor choosing John Paul John Paul’s successor in a conference call.”
In local news, a tragedy dominated the headlines: the Queensboro Bridge had collapsed under the weight of 10,000 runners in the “Rheingold Marathon.” The organizer of the race, Fred Lebow, said it was not his fault, but that of the runners. “I’ve never seen so many fat people in my life,” said the story’s Mr. Lebow. “You will remember that 5,026 runners in the field held graduate degrees. You sit around at a college for all those years, drinking beer and eating fruit pies, and you end up looking like a pig.”
Just like the real newspaper, Not The New York Times carried rich reports from correspondents around the world — “Sleepy Village’s Dull Anecdote is Grist for Reporters’ Mill” and “Rudolf Hess Riots in Spandau Prison” — along with a lively opinion section, under the lead editorial, “Whither Détente?”
Not The New York Times was masterminded by Christopher Cerf — a man of many talents, none mightier than as the composer of such “Sesame Street” classics as “Put Down the Duckie” — and the writers George Plimpton, Freddy Plimpton, Rusty Unger and Tony Hendra, who posed for the front-page picture of the short-lived pope from Liverpool. Among the contributors were Carl Bernstein, Frances FitzGerald, Michael Arlen, Jerzy Kosinski, Terry Southern and Nora Ephron.
“Frankie Fitzgerald called me to come over one night,” recalled Kevin Buckley, who had been a correspondent in Vietnam for Newsweek and was then the editor of New Times. He conjured an op-ed column in the manner of the longtime columnist James Reston, an interview with Genghis Khan — “not such a bad fellow” — that had originally appeared in October 1241 and was being rerun as the author’s favorite. It evoked a conversational tone with the powerful. “ ‘How are you, Scotty?’ asked the Khan, gnawing on a Kurd.”
This was all accomplished not only before the Internet, but before computers.
“I just remember being there that one night in a room where everyone was off in their own corners, typing madly,” Ms. Ephron said.
And what is this “typing”?
“If you need me for anything else, I’ll be useless,” Ms. Ephron said, signing off.
E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
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A version of this article appeared in print on November 15, 2008, on page A17 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/opinion/15bate.html?scp=1&sq=antibiotic&st=cse
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Wrong Message in a Bottle
By ROGER BATE
Published: November 15, 2008
Washington
IN late September, the authorities in Belgium seized more than two million counterfeit painkillers and antimalarial drugs that had been manufactured in India and were en route to Africa. It was the largest seizure ever of fake pharmaceuticals in Europe.
The incident shines a light on one of the most pressing problems in delivering life-saving medicines to the world’s poorest patients: the proliferation of low-quality and counterfeit products, many of which are dangerous. If aid organizations are serious about combating the spread of deadly diseases in the developing world, they must do more to ensure the safety and quality of drugs.
Thirty percent of the world’s population lacks access to essential medicines, according to the World Health Organization. In some Asian and African countries, the number is as high as 50 percent. And this problem cannot by solved by supplying bogus medicines.
“Better to have lack of access,” Dora Akunyili, the head of Nigeria’s drug watchdog agency told me, “than access to counterfeits and substandard medicines.” In 1988, Ms. Akunyili’s sister died from taking fake insulin to treat her diabetes.
Imports of bad medicines like those seized in Belgium are only part of the problem. To deal with the scarcity of drugs, many poor governments have turned to local production. The international aid community has generally approved this move, because local manufacturing expands the supply, cuts down on transportation costs and creates jobs. But local producers often make low-quality drugs.
In Senegal, a 2002 study found that 21 out of 22 samples of the antibiotic ampicillin (of unknown origin) lacked the active ingredient and appeared to contain only flour. Thirty-eight percent to 52 percent of artesunate pills (an antimalarial drug) in Southeast Asia have been found to contain no active ingredient. The W.H.O. estimates that 20 percent of the Indian drug supply is either fake or adulterated. And one of my own studies found that 35 percent of malaria drugs in Africa are substandard.
That such a large share of the developing world’s drug supply is subpar should come as no surprise. Even countries with stringent regulatory systems sometimes turn up bad pharmaceuticals.
Just this year, at least 95 Americans died after taking heparin (a blood thinner) manufactured in China that had been contaminated with oversulfated chondroitin sulfate, an inexpensive substance that mimics heparin in basic chemical tests. And in September, the F.D.A. blocked the import of more than 30 drugs made by the Indian company Ranbaxy, citing its failure to meet acceptable manufacturing standards.
The W.H.O. keeps a list of essential drugs, and its Drug Prequalification Program does its best to keep a separate list of safe suppliers of these drugs, which aid organizations refer to when buying medicines for developing countries. But this list is both short and unreliable; in 2004, several H.I.V. drugs produced by Indian drug companies were taken off the list because of insufficient evidence that they were effective.
Many poor countries now allow local drug makers to produce cheaper copies of patented drugs through what are called “compulsory licenses.” But this strategy has led to the manufacture of poor-quality medicine. Thailand has issued many compulsory licenses to enable a state-financed company, the Government Pharmaceutical Organization, to make various patented medicines, including antiviral drugs used to treat AIDS. But the drugs it has made have been of such poor quality that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria stopped buying them.
Many poor countries lack the regulatory structure needed to monitor safety and effectiveness. Some do not even have laws against selling substandard drugs, and none have sophisticated agencies like the F.D.A. with the trained inspectors and laboratories needed to analyze pharmaceuticals. It is essential that poor countries establish the laws, agencies and scientific capacity they need to oversee drug manufacturing and conduct random checks on imports and local drugs.
There are three things that aid organizations could do to help: They should give technical and financial support to governments’ sincere efforts to maintain strict drug inspection standards. They should always refuse to subsidize any low-quality drugs. And in countries that consistently fail to ensure that locally produced pharmaceuticals are safe and effective, aid agencies should insist that only brand-name and generic products approved by stringent drug agencies like the F.D.A. be distributed.
Since taking over drug quality control in Nigeria seven years ago, Dora Akunyili has reduced the amount of substandard pharmaceuticals to 16 percent, from more than half. And if Nigeria can improve drug quality so drastically, other countries can, too. Thousands of lives depend on their efforts.
Roger Bate, a director of the health advocacy group Africa Fighting Malaria, is the author of “Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade.” He is also a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which receives some support from pharmaceutical companies.
More Articles in Opinion »
A version of this article appeared in print on November 15, 2008, on page A21 of the New York edition.
