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Month: March 2006
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Today's Papers
Unhappy Anniversary
By Justin Peters
Posted Sunday, March 19, 2006, at 4:46 AM ET
The New York Times leads with news that two private pension-reform bills under consideration in the House and Senate will drastically reduce the amount of money corporations are required to contribute to their pension plans. The Los Angeles Times leads a piece on the growing number of Republican leaders and former White House officials criticizing President Bush's unfocused domestic policies. Citing his low approval ratings and growing internecine strife, the story suggests that Bush is well on his way to lame-duck status.
The Washington Post leads a story on the ways that Washington lobbyists plan to skirt the lobbying-reform laws expected to be passed in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. Their nefarious plans include contributing to campaigns and using the Internet to foment grass-roots activism. Plus, you know, the usual bags of money with dollar signs on them.
Three years into the Iraq war, everyone is pausing to assess the extent of the damage done. A front-page LAT analysis cites recent muted comments by the administration as evidence of "a creeping redefinition of U.S. goals that increasingly allows for the possibility that the nation may remain unstable for years to come." Inside, a generous editorial gives Bush credit for the idealism behind his initial goals while regretting the pathetic prosecution of the same.
The WP commemorates the three-year anniversary by fronting a soft feature on veterans remembering their experiences in Iraq. The Sunday Outlook section gets a little more academic, with Donald Rumsfeld and George Will both writing op-eds on the war's ongoing legacy. Their respective headlines say it all: Rumsfeld's is titled "What We've Gained in 3 Years in Iraq," and Will's is called "Bleakness in Baghdad."
The NYT leaves the stock-taking to its opinion staff. A harsh editorial takes Bush to task for living in a "dream world," saying that, "Unlike the horrors of Saddam Hussein, the horrors of the present can be laid at America's doorstep." An op-ed from a former military bigwig calls for Rumsfeld's resignation as secretary of defense.
The government's pension oversight agency is saying that legislation currently under consideration in Congress will significantly weaken the private pension system. Although the legislation began as an effort to fix the current decades-old policy, lobbyists and other corporate interests have done their best to emasculate the bills by urging lawmakers to insert clauses that allow corporations, among other things, to defer payments. Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, thinks he's got the real solution: better investment advice for retirees.
The NYT off-leads a huge feature on systematic military prison abuse by a Special Ops unit called Task Force 6-26. From Camp Nama, their base at Baghdad's airport, the elite soldiers regularly abused and degraded Iraqi detainees in attempts to elicit information as to the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Whether shooting prisoners with paintball guns or punching them repeatedly in their spines, the soldiers of Task Force 6-26 adhered to an unofficial motto: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it."
Civil unrest in France raged on as more citizens took to the streets to protest a law that proposes to eliminate job security for young workers, as everybody notes. An estimated 500,000 citizens nationwide marched in solidarity with France's disaffected youth, waving signs and banners and destroying a Parisian McDonald's for good measure. The protests are problematic for Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who will have to weigh his commitment to the legislation against his presidential ambitions.
The Post fronts a piece on how the State Department is obstructing some former Iranian hostages' efforts to get reparations from the Iranian government. The State Department claims that the hostages' lawsuits violate the terms of the Algiers Accords, the agreement that freed the hostages in 1981; one very angry former hostage points out that "This administration has not been shy about breaking international agreements." Well, touché.
Everyone mentions that more than 50,000 people gathered in Belgrade to remember Slobodan Milosevic on the day of his burial. Although anti-Milosevic protesters were in evidence, the majority of the crowd vocally mourned the man known as the Butcher of Belgrade. Some fear the crowds presage a revival of Milosevic's brand of belligerent nationalism, as Serbia prepares to join the European Union.
The Post goes inside with a feature on middle-class flight from big cities on both coasts. With real-estate prices at all-time highs, middle-income families are moving to cheaper locations, leaving cities like Seattle and San Francisco increasingly polarized by class, and increasingly bereft of children. "A city without children has no future," says San Francisco mayor and Whitney Houston fan Gavin Newsom.
With a sham presidential election in Belarus scheduled for Sunday, citizens are bracing for the protests and governmental reprisals that are expected to follow Aleksandr Lukashenko's all-but-preordained reelection, the NYT reports. "Like Fidel Castro, he will be president forever," one woman said.
The LAT fronts a story on how China's insatiable desire for scrap metal is turning junkmen into rich men and fueling "one of the greatest commodity booms in modern times."
Studies suggest that drugs used to treat Parkinson's disease can have bizarre effects on users, turning otherwise sober individuals into "obsessive pleasure seekers," the WP reports. Some patients are suing the involved pharmaceutical companies to recover the money they lost gambling while taking dopamine enhancers like Mirapex and Permax.
The LAT runs a piece on Andrew Young, Wal-Mart fan. Young, a longtime civil rights leader and contemporary of Martin Luther King, is being paid by the retail behemoth to chair an organization called Working Families for Wal-Mart, intended to counter the chain's negative image. Young's take is that Wal-Mart's low prices can help revitalize inner-city neighborhoods.
Oleg Cassini, one of the first clothing designers to bring couture to the masses, died at 92. Cassini was known for dressing Jackie Kennedy and introducing the Nehru jacket to America. He was preceded in death by his brother, Cholly Knickerbocker.
Bridget Joneski's Diary? The NYT Book Review features an engaging essay on global variations on "chick lit," the girl power literary subgenre epitomized by titles like Bridget Jones' Diary. Various nations are spawning their own versions of the genre, each with a distinct spin: Polish chick lit often features dark, violent undertones while the Scandinavian version is "marked by a certain existential angst." France, however, hasn't gotten into the act, and the Times theorizes that "with a 35-hour work week, maybe they just can't relate." Oh, snap!
Justin Peters is a writer in Washington D.C. and the editor of Polite. -
Religious Politics Today
Associated Press
Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, addressing an evangelical Christian rally via teleconference, April 24, 2005.
March 19, 2006
'American Theocracy,' by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers
Review by ALAN BRINKLEY
Four decades ago, Kevin Phillips, a young political strategist for the Republican Party, began work on what became a remarkable book. In writing "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published in 1969), he asked a very big question about American politics: How would the demographic and economic changes of postwar America shape the long-term future of the two major parties? His answer, startling at the time but now largely unquestioned, is that the movement of people and resources from the old Northern industrial states into the South and the West (an area he enduringly labeled the "Sun Belt") would produce a new and more conservative Republican majority that would dominate American politics for decades. Phillips viewed the changes he predicted with optimism. A stronger Republican Party, he believed, would restore stability and order to a society experiencing disorienting and at times violent change. Shortly before publishing his book, he joined the Nixon administration to help advance the changes he had foreseen.
Phillips has remained a prolific and important political commentator in the decades since, but he long ago abandoned his enthusiasm for the Republican coalition he helped to build. His latest book (his 13th) looks broadly and historically at the political world the conservative coalition has painstakingly constructed over the last several decades. No longer does he see Republican government as a source of stability and order. Instead, he presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness. (His final chapter is entitled "The Erring Republican Majority.") In an era of best-selling jeremiads on both sides of the political divide, "American Theocracy" may be the most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years. It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.
Although Phillips is scathingly critical of what he considers the dangerous policies of the Bush administration, he does not spend much time examining the ideas and behavior of the president and his advisers. Instead, he identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration's policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.
The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion.
And while this argument may be somewhat too simplistic to explain the complicated mix of motives behind the war, it is hard to dismiss Phillips's larger argument: that the pursuit of oil has for at least 30 years been one of the defining elements of American policy in the world; and that the Bush administration — unusually dominated by oilmen — has taken what the president deplored recently as the nation's addiction to oil to new and terrifying levels. The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."
Phillips is especially passionate in his discussion of the second great force that he sees shaping contemporary American life — radical Christianity and its growing intrusion into government and politics. The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.
He points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally. The Southern Baptist Convention does not speak with one voice, but almost all of its voices, Phillips argues, are to one degree or another highly conservative. On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of "Christian Reconstructionists" who believe in a "Taliban-like" reversal of women's rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a "myth" and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine. A much larger group of Protestants, perhaps as many as a third of the population, claims to believe in the supposed biblical prophecies of an imminent "rapture" — the return of Jesus to the world and the elevation of believers to heaven.
Prophetic Christians, Phillips writes, often shape their view of politics and the world around signs that charlatan biblical scholars have identified as predictors of the apocalypse — among them a war in Iraq, the Jewish settlement of the whole of biblical Israel, even the rise of terrorism. He convincingly demonstrates that the Bush administration has calculatedly reached out to such believers and encouraged them to see the president's policies as a response to premillennialist thought. He also suggests that the president and other members of his administration may actually believe these things themselves, that religious belief is the basis of policy, not just a tactic for selling it to the public. Phillips's evidence for this disturbing claim is significant, but not conclusive.
THE third great impending crisis that Phillips identifies is also, perhaps, the best known — the astonishing rise of debt as the precarious underpinning of the American economy. He is not, of course, the only observer who has noted the dangers of indebtedness. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, frequently writes about the looming catastrophe. So do many more-conservative economists, who point especially to future debt — particularly the enormous obligation, which Phillips estimates at between $30 trillion and $40 trillion, that Social Security and health care demands will create in the coming decades. The most familiar debt is that of the United States government, fueled by soaring federal budget deficits that have continued (with a brief pause in the late 1990's) for more than two decades. But the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the "financialization" of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.
There is little in "American Theocracy" that is wholly original to Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a series of major transformations, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome, but that none should ignore.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history and the provost at Columbia University.
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Saturday, March 18, 2006
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Jenson Button, Honda; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Saturday March 18th, 2006.
Giancarlo Fisichella, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Saturday March 18th, 2006.
Giancarlo Fisichella, Renault; Michael Schumacher, Ferrari; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Saturday March 18th, 2006
Bernie Ecclestone & Ron Dennis; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Saturday March 18th, 2006.
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Fernando Alonso & Giancarlo Fisichella, Renault; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Saturday March 18th, 2006.
Fisichella storms to pole in Malaysia
By Timothy Collings Saturday, March 18th 2006, 07:05 GMT
Giancarlo Fisichella seized the third pole position of his career on Saturday by clocking the fastest time in qualifying for Sunday's Malaysian Grand Prix.
The 33-year-old Renault driver narrowly outpaced 25-year-old Briton Jenson Button, driving a Honda, to top the times with a best lap of 1:33.840. Button clocked 1:33.986.
Rising star Nico Rosberg of Germany, the 20-year-old son of former champion Keke Rosberg, was third fastest for Williams ahead of seven-times champion Michael Schumacher, in a Ferrari.
Australian Mark Webber in the second Williams was fifth, Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya sixth for McLaren Mercedes and Finn Kimi Raikkonen, in another McLaren, was seventh.
Defending world champion Spaniard Fernando Alonso was eighth for Renault on a day when engine problems hit the Ferrari team and others.
Shortly before the session began, it was confirmed that both German Michael Schumacher and his former Ferrari teammate Brazilian Rubens Barrichello, now at Honda, had required engine changes.
In addition to these two, Felipe Massa and Briton David Coulthard were also using new power-units, making four drivers in all. The Brazilian will get a second engine change before tomorrow's race.
The qualifying session began again in searing heat and high humidity. The track temperature was 48 degrees and the air temperature 37 when the session started with a humidity of 46 per cent.
The first session saw the 'elimination' of American Scott Speed, Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi, Dutchman Christijan Albers, Portugal's Tiago Monteiro and the Japanese pair Takuma Sato and Yuji Ide.
Respectively, this group took the bottom six places on the grid, from 17th to 22nd.
In effect, it meant that the Toro Rosso, Midland F1 and Super Aguri teams were assured of their roles as the backmarkers before the temperature crept up to 49 degrees.
After the opening 15 minutes, the second session saw the first major incident when Ralf Schumacher's Toyota suffered a spectacular engine failure on the pits straight.
This meant he will have to drop down the grid, but since he had clocked a time that earned him a place in the top 10 it also added to the intrigue surrounding the starting order.
The second session saw the elimination also of Massa, who wound up with the 16th best time, German Nick Heidfeld's Sauber-BMW, in 17th, Canadian Jacques Villeneuve in the second BMW, Italian Jarno Trulli's Toyota, Barrichello's Honda and Coulthard's Red Bull-Ferrari.
This left Massa to sit frustrated on the pit wall while his teammate Schumacher set about trying to go quickest while Ralf Schumacher was also unable to run because of his need for another new engine.
Massa will require another engine change for the race.
Massa and Red Bull's Coulthard suffered failures after last weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix. The problem, according to sources close to the team, was said to be cracked pistons.
Schumacher will also lose 10 places on the grid which is certain to produce an action packed race.
Malaysia qualifying breakdown Session 1 Session 2 Session 3
Pos Driver Team Pos Time Lap Pos Time Lap Pos Time Lap
1. Fisichella Renault M 11 1:35.488 3 2 1:33.623 6 1 1:33.840 13
2. Button Honda M 4 1:35.023 3 1 1:33.527 3 2 1:33.986 13
3. Rosberg Williams B 6 1:35.105 4 7 1:34.563 3 3 1:34.626 12
4. M.Schumacher Ferrari B 16 1:35.810 5 9 1:34.574 5 4 1:34.668 13
5. Webber Williams B 9 1:35.252 3 4 1:34.279 3 5 1:34.672 12
6. Montoya McLaren M 1 1:34.536 3 8 1:34.568 3 6 1:34.916 12
7. Raikkonen McLaren M 2 1:34.667 3 5 1:34.351 3 7 1:34.983 12
8. Alonso Renault M 12 1:35.514 3 3 1:33.997 6 8 1:35.747 13
9. Klien Red Bull M 7 1:35.171 6 6 1:34.537 6 9 1:38.715 4
10. R.Schumacher Toyota B 8 1:35.214 7 10 1:34.586 3 10 No time 0
11. Coulthard Red Bull M 3 1:34.839 6 11 1:34.614 6
12. Barrichello Honda M 14 1:35.526 6 12 1:34.683 8
13. Trulli Toyota B 13 1:35.517 6 13 1:34.702 6
14. Villeneuve BMW M 10 1:35.391 4 14 1:34.752 6
15. Heidfeld BMW M 15 1:35.588 4 15 1:34.783 6
16. Massa Ferrari B 5. 1:35.091 3 16. No Time 0
17. Speed Toro Rosso M 17. 1:36.297 6
18. Liuzzi Toro Rosso M 18. 1:36.581 7
19. Albers Midland B 19. 1:37.426 7
20. Monteiro Midland B 20. 1:37.819 6
21. Sato Super Aguri B 21. 1:39.011 6
22. Ide Super Aguri B 22. 1:40.720 6
Note:
qualifying results do not reflect the final grid, as the drivers marked in red will incur a penalty of at least ten places.
The final grid for the Malaysian Grand Prix will be published ahead of the race
Friday, March 17, 2006
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Giancarlo Fisichella, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Juan Pablo Montoya, McLaren-Mercedes; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Fernando Alonso, Renault; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Felipe Massa, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Scott Speed, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
McLaren steering wheel, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Kimi Raikkonen, McLaren; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Michael Schumacher, Ferrari; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Fernando Alonso, Renault; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
BMW-Sauber steering wheel, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Renault steering wheel, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Felipe Massa, Ferrari; Malaysia GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006
Malaysia Grand Prix 2006
Felipe Massa, Ferrari; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006
Juan Pablo Montoya and McLaren mechanics inspect the Ferrari, Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
MALAYSIAN GRAND PRIX
Local time: Saturday, 05:28
Today: Showers
Hi 34°C / 93°F
Lo 24°C / 76°F
Malaysian results & stats
Practice 1
Fri 11:00-12:00
Practice 2
Fri 14:00-15:00
Practice 3
Sat 11:00-12:00
Qualifying
Sat 14:00-15:00
The Race
Sun 15:00-17:00
Convert schedule to your local time
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Jarno Trulli, Toyota; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Friday March 17th, 2006.
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Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Malaysian Grand Prix 2006
Giancarlo Fisichella, Renault; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Sunday March 19th, 2006.
Q& A with Giancarlo Fisichella
Sunday, March 19th 2006, 17:24 GMT
Conducted and provided by the Renault F1 Team press office
Q: Giancarlo: pole and the win. It seems you had an ideal race...
Giancarlo Fisichella: "It was the perfect afternoon for me, but it was very tough mentally and physically. I found it hard! It was really, really hot.
"I began feeling tired from mid-race onwards, but I knew it would be tough and that I had to fight all the way to the end.
"There was no other option, because I had to attack. I didn't want to lose concentration, and I am really pleased with the result."
Q: How was the car?
Fisichella: "We had a good balance all through the race, even though there was some graining after the first stop. Apart from that, the R26 handled beautifully and I was very comfortable."
Q: Were you worried about Fernando's pace towards the end?
Fisichella: "No. My engineer kept me informed of what was going on, and I was controlling my pace to stay ahead. But there was no point pushing so hard that I went off..."
Q: This was an emotional weekend for you...
Fisichella: "Yes, and that's why I am so pleased to win. I dedicate the win to my friend Pietro who died last week.
"I was also delighted to see my race engineer, Alan Permane, on the podium alongside me. Thank you to all the team, this is a fantastic result."
Q: In one sense, is this the real start to your season?
Fisichella: "Yes. It's the opposite to last year. In 2006, I had a bad first race and I have won the second. I am feeling very confident for the future now. I have a good feeling."
Fernando Alonso, Renault; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Sunday March 19th, 2006.
Fernando Alonso, Giancarlo Fisichella, Jenson Button; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Sunday March 19th, 2006
Fischella Wins 2006 Malaysian Grand Prix
Giancarlo Fisichella, Renault; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Sunday March 19th, 2006.
Giancarlo Fisichella, Flavio Briatore, Fernando Alonso; Malaysian GP, Sepang; Sunday March 19th, 2006
Fisichella leads Renault 1-2 in Malaysia
By Timothy Collings
Sunday, March 19th 2006, 08:37 GMT
Giancarlo Fisichella won Sunday's Malaysian Grand Prix with a determined and consistent drive to finish ahead of his Renault teammate Fernando Alonso.
This gave Renault the second ever 1-2 finish as a constructor - the previous time was in the 1982 French Grand Prix.
It was the third win of Italian Fisichella's career and helped the him fulfil his pledge to produce a brilliant race in memory of his close friend Pietro Saitta, who was killed in a road accident the previous Sunday.
Fisichella had dedicated his pole position triumph on Saturday to his friend.
The result gave Renault, the defending constructors' champions, their second ever one-two victory and the first since 1982 on one of their favourite circuits and confirmed them as the dominant early force in this year's title race.
Briton Jenson Button, still seeking a first win after 102 Grands Prix, came home third for Honda.
Fisichella's win hoisted him up the embryonic drivers' championship standings into close contention behind defending champion Spaniard Alonso.
Alonso. who won the season-opening race in Bahrain the previous weekend. leads the title race with 18 points. Fisichella has 10. Button and Michael Schumacher each have 11.
Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya finished fourth for McLaren-Mercedes, but his teammate Finn Kimi Raikkonen crashed out on the opening lap.
Brazilian Felipe Massa was fifth for Ferrari ahead of his vastly more experienced teammate seven times champion Schumacher, who finished sixth in his slipstream as the crossed the line.
Canadian Jacques Villeneuve was seventh for BMW and Ralf Schumacher eighth for Toyota.
The race began in searing heat - again. The track temperature was 37 degrees Celsius, the air 33 and the humidity 61 per cent, as the grid settled for the start.
As they pulled away, Fisichella took the lead and kept it going into the first corner while his Renault teammate Alonso made a dramatic move forward from seventh to third. As this happened, the 20-year-old rookie Nico Rosberg slipped back from third to seventh.
The opening lap was not completed before there was a spectacular incident in which title contender Finn Kimi Raikkonen in his McLaren-Mercedes appeared to collide with Austrian Christian Klien's Red Bull Ferrari.
He fought to control his car, but could not stay in command and spun off at turn eight into a gravel trap, the impact smashing the rear wing off his car. Raikkonen walked away unhurt.
This accident ended his day and also meant he faced a major task in rebuilding his championship challenge as he trudged away to watch the Renaults of Fisichella and defending champion Alonso control the race.
Fisichella reeled off a series of fastest laps to open up a clear lead before he pitted after 17 of the 56 laps.
By then, Klien had retired - probably due to the damage caused by his earlier impact with Raikkonen whose rear suspension was wrecked - and so, too, had Rosberg.
The impressive young German's engine blew up after six laps in a wild blaze of smoke and flames. His departure was soon followed by that of Briton David Coulthard, whose Red Bull was stuck in sixth gear.
Rosberg's Williams teammate Mark Webber also pulled out in the early laps, sparks flying from the rear of his car indicating engine expiry after 16 laps.
These incidents and the pitting of Fisichella gave Button a brief taste of the lead for Honda between laps 18 and 20 when his own need for fuel allowed the defending champion Alonso to take control.
The Spaniard led from lap 20 to the end of lap 26 when he, too, came in, and Fisichella took the ascendancy again, ahead of Button. When the field settled down, after 28 laps, Alonso set a fastest lap in third and the front three were already 11.5 seconds clear of the rest.
Remarkably, fourth place belonged at this stage to the young Brazilian Massa, who had worked his way up from 21st on the grid at the start without a pitstop.
His Ferrari teammate Michael Schumacher was in seventh place, having pitted once, a sure sign that the Italian team were returning to their competitive best after a lacklustre 2005.
Massa pitted, finally, after 29 laps, dropping to seventh when the order settled again.
At the half-distance mark, there was no doubting the power of the Renaults as Fisichella led and Alonso ran third, the pair sandwiching Button's Honda, who was hanging on in second place, 9.6 seconds behind the leading Italian.
His teammate Brazilian Rubens Barrichello endured a less-happy time. Fined earlier for speeding in the pitlane during practice, he suffered a 10-second penalty for doing the same in the race.
Following the first pitstops, the leading order was established as Fisichella led Button and Alonso, this trio running 23 seconds clear of the chasing pack with 20 laps remaining.
The second pitstops did Button no favours as he wound up running fourth behind the slower Montoya afterwards, and more than 13 seconds down on the two Renaults.
That meant Alonso, after one stop, was out in front of Fisichella, who after two was 8.2 seconds behind his teammate. Montoya was then third, but like Alonso had made only one stop.
Montoya went in and then Alonso, for his second stop, after 43 laps. It was a rapid 6.4 seconds in-and-out leaving him to resume in second place, behind Fisichella, but ahead of Button.
Michael Schumacher, driving consistently, had risen to fourth before he pitted a second time.
PROVISIONAL RACE RESULTS
The Malaysian Grand Prix
Sepang, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia;
56 laps; 310.408km;
Weather: Cloudy.Classified:
Pos Driver Team Time
1. Fisichella Renault (M) 1h30:40.529
2. Alonso Renault (M) + 4.585
3. Button Honda (M) + 9.631
4. Montoya McLaren-Mercedes (M) + 39.351
5. Massa Ferrari (B) + 43.254
6. M.Schumacher Ferrari (B) + 43.854
7. Villeneuve BMW-Sauber (M) + 1:20.461
8. R.Schumacher Toyota (B) + 1:21.288
9. Trulli Toyota (B) + 1 lap
10. Barrichello Honda (M) + 1 lap
11. Liuzzi Toro Rosso-Cosworth (M) + 2 laps
12. Albers MF1-Toyota (B) + 2 laps
13. Monteiro MF1-Toyota (B) + 2 laps
14. Sato Super Aguri-Honda (B) + 3 lapsFastest lap: Alonso, 1:34.803
Not classified/retirements:
Driver Team On lap
Heidfeld BMW-Sauber (M) 49
Speed Toro Rosso-Cosworth (M) 42
Ide Super Aguri-Honda (B) 34
Klien Red Bull-Ferrari (M) 27
Webber Williams-Cosworth (B) 16
Coulthard Red Bull-Ferrari (M) 11
Rosberg Williams-Cosworth (B) 7
Raikkonen McLaren-Mercedes (M) 1World Championship standings, round 2:
Drivers: Constructors:
1. Alonso 18 1. Renault 28
2. M.Schumacher 11 2. Ferrari 15
3. Button 11 3. McLaren-Mercedes 15
4. Fisichella 10 4. Honda 11
5. Montoya 9 5. Williams-Cosworth 5
6. Raikkonen 6 6. BMW-Sauber 2
7. Massa 4 7. Toyota 1
8. Webber 3 8. Red Bull-Ferrari 1
9. Rosberg 2
10. Villeneuve 2
11. Klien 1
12. R.Schumacher 1All timing unofficial
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Biotech Implants, Pregnancy,
Biotech Implants
The maker of the VeriChip implant, about the size of a grain of rice, is targeting hospitals in the D.C. area. (Verichip Corp. - Verichip Corp.)
Use of Implanted Patient-Data Chips Stirs Debate on Medicine vs. Privacy
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 15, 2006; A01
When Daniel Hickey's doctor suggested he have a microchip implanted under his skin to provide instant access to his computerized medical record, the 77-year-old retired naval officer immediately agreed.
"If you're unconscious and end up in the emergency room, they won't know anything about you," Hickey said. "With this, they can find out everything they need to know right away and treat you better."
Roxanne Fischer felt the same way, and she had one of the devices injected into the arm of her 83-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. "I may not be available if she ends up in the emergency room. This gives me tremendous peace of mind," Fischer said.
The two D.C. residents are among just a handful of Americans who have had the tiny electronic VeriChip inserted since the government approved it two years ago. But the chip is being aggressively marketed by its manufacturer, which is targeting Washington to be the first metropolitan area with multiple hospitals equipped to read the device, a persuasive factor for Fischer and Hickey. Within weeks, the first hospital is expected to announce plans to start routinely scanning all emergency-room patients.
Some doctors are welcoming the technology as an exciting innovation that will speed care and prevent errors. But the concept alarms privacy advocates. They worry the devices could make it easier for unauthorized snoops to invade medical records. They also fear that the technology marks a dangerous step toward an Orwellian future in which people will be monitored using the chips or will be required to have them inserted for surveillance.
"It may seem innocuous, but the government and private corporations could use these devices to track people's movements," said Liz McIntyre, who co-wrote a book warning about the dangers of such radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. "It may sound paranoid, but this is bound to be abused."
The devices, originally developed to track livestock, have been implanted in more than 6 million cats and dogs to trace lost or stolen pets. For medical identification, the device -- a microchip and a copper antenna encased in a glass capsule about the size of a grain of rice -- is inserted, usually under the skin on the back of a patient's arm, in a quick, relatively painless procedure. Each unit, which lasts indefinitely, transmits a unique 16-digit number that can be read by a handheld scanner. The number is used to locate a medical record previously stored on a secure Web site.
Using the system, emergency-room doctors could scan unconscious or incoherent patients to quickly check their blood type and find out if they are taking any medications or have allergies or other medical conditions. Nurses could identify family members and determine whether patients are organ donors or have living wills. Surgeons could scan patients on the operating table to make sure they are working on the right person.
VeriChip Corp. of Delray Beach, Fla., is selling kits containing scanners and the large-bore needles used to insert the chips, and recommending that doctors charge patients about $200 each. The company has sold about 2,500 chips worldwide for use in people, and several hundred have been implanted, including about 100 in the United States, spokesman John Procter said. So far in the United States, however, most of the chips have been implanted into the company's own employees. Suspecting that many people are hesitant to get the chips until more emergency rooms are able to scan them, the company has begun giving scanners to hospitals for free, Procter said.
Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey became the first hospital to begin routinely scanning emergency-room patients last summer, and about a dozen people in that area have now been "chipped," Procter said. About 80 other hospitals nationwide have agreed to follow, a number the company hopes will reach 200 by the end of the year.
Many of the hospitals, including three in the Washington area, have received scanners and started training their emergency-room staffs in their use, he said. Procter declined to name the hospitals until they formally announce their plans.
One area doctor has begun implanting the chips.
"I thought this would be important to offer to many of my patients," said Jonathan Musher, a Chevy Chase physician the company hired to help recruit hospitals and assemble a nationwide network of doctors offering the chips. "With this, a quick scan back and forth across their arm could make all the difference in critical life-and-death situations where seconds count."
Privacy advocates, however, worry that the devices are prone to invasion because they can be surreptitiously scanned from a distance.
"As far as I can tell, there are no security measures taken with the chip. It's not a secure chip," said Richard M. Smith, an Internet and privacy consultant in Boston. "There's nothing to stop someone from accessing the code and cloning the chip" to access records, he said.
Even though the medical information is stored in a protected computer, anyone with a password could obtain the information.
"Once the identification number is obtained, who gets to decide who gets access to the Web site?" asked Janlori Goldman of the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, who heads the Health Privacy Project, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. "Can law enforcement have access? Can public health workers have access? Can employers have access? Given the recent efforts by law enforcement and data monitoring by the government, this is exactly the kind of technology that would be attractive."
And, like any computerized database, it could be vulnerable to hackers.
"We know from many other examples that there are lots of security breaches that occur across the country," said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, another Washington research and advocacy group. "There's no reason to think this will be any different."
Company officials and other proponents say the device and accompanying system are carefully designed to protect recipients.
"The privacy of VeriChip's customers is our highest priority," said Scott Silverman, the chief executive of Applied Digital Solutions Inc., the firm's parent company. "Both the amount of information and who has authorized access to that information is determined by the user."
Others worry about how the devices will be used in the future.
"This device is intended to uniquely number humans. It's embedded in the flesh, and it's permanent. It can be read without someone's knowledge and consent," McIntyre said. "Scanners can be installed in doorways or ceiling tiles to track people's comings and goings without people even being aware it's happening. That's not so far off."
Company officials scoff at those fears.
"Some people say, 'Oh, my God. It's "1984." It's George Orwell,' " Musher said. "But this is a passive device. It's not controlling or tracking anyone."
The company is, however, marketing the devices to limit entry to secure facilities. The Mexican government is using the implants like key cards for high-security offices. And CityWatcher.com of Cincinnati, which stores surveillance-camera footage from around the country, recently started using the chips to control access to tapes. Bars in Spain and Amsterdam, meanwhile, are offering the chips to patrons who want quick entry and to run electronic tabs.
"We're just waiting for the first case where a convicted sex offender on condition of release is required to have a VeriChip implanted," Rotenberg said.
For their part, Fischer and Hickey hope the devices catch on.
"This is the wave of the future," Fischer said. "I'm looking at this from the positive side. To obtain optimal care, I think we have to take advantage of the best technology available."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
Pregnancy
Rick Friedman for The New York Times
THE THEORIST Dr. David Haig sees pregnancy as a tug of war between mother and fetus over nutrients.
Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy
Pregnancy can be the most wonderful experience life has to offer. But it can also be dangerous. Around the world, an estimated 529,000 women a year die during pregnancy or childbirth. Ten million suffer injuries, infection or disability.
To David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, these grim statistics raise a profound puzzle about pregnancy.
"Pregnancy is absolutely central to reproduction, and yet pregnancy doesn't seem to work very well," he said. "If you think about the heart or the kidney, they're wonderful bits of engineering that work day in and day out for years and years. But pregnancy is associated with all sorts of medical problems. What's the difference?"
The difference is that the heart and the kidney belong to a single individual, while pregnancy is a two-person operation. And this operation does not run in perfect harmony. Instead, Dr. Haig argues, a mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it.
Dr. Haig's theory has been gaining support in recent years, as scientists examine the various ways pregnancy can go wrong.
His theory also explains a baffling feature of developing fetuses: the copies of some genes are shut down, depending on which parent they come from. Dr. Haig has also argued that the same evolutionary conflicts can linger on after birth and even influence the adult brain. New research has offered support to this idea as well. By understanding these hidden struggles, scientists may be able to better understand psychological disorders like depression and autism.
As a biologist fresh out of graduate school in the late 1980's, Dr. Haig decided to look at pregnancy from an evolutionary point of view. As his guide, he used the work of Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University.
In the 1970's, Dr. Trivers argued that families create an evolutionary conflict. Natural selection should favor parents who can successfully raise the most offspring. For that strategy to work, they can't put too many resources into any one child. But the child's chances for reproductive success will increase as its care and feeding increase. Theoretically, Dr. Trivers argued, natural selection could favor genes that help children get more resources from their parents than the parents want to give.
As Dr. Haig considered the case of pregnancy, it seemed like the perfect arena for this sort of conflict. A child develops in intimate contact with its mother. Its development in the womb is crucial to its long-term health. So it was plausible that nature would favor genes that allowed fetuses to draw more resources from their mothers.
A fetus does not sit passively in its mother's womb and wait to be fed. Its placenta aggressively sprouts blood vessels that invade its mother's tissues to extract nutrients.
Meanwhile, Dr. Haig argued, natural selection should favor mothers who could restrain these incursions, and manage to have several surviving offspring carrying on their genes. He envisioned pregnancy as a tug of war. Each side pulls hard, and yet a flag tied to the middle of the rope barely moves.
"We tend to think of genes as parts of a machine working together," Dr. Haig said. "But in the realm of genetic conflict, the cooperation breaks down."
In a 1993 paper, Dr. Haig first predicted that many complications of pregnancy would turn out to be produced by this conflict. One of the most common complications is pre-eclampsia, in which women experience dangerously high blood pressure late in pregnancy. For decades scientists have puzzled over pre-eclampsia, which occurs in about 6 percent of pregnancies.
Dr. Haig proposed that pre-eclampsia was just an extreme form of a strategy used by all fetuses. The fetuses somehow raised the blood pressure of their mothers so as to drive more blood into the relatively low-pressure placenta. Dr. Haig suggested that pre-eclampsia would be associated with some substance that fetuses injected into their mothers' bloodstreams. Pre-eclampsia happened when fetuses injected too much of the stuff, perhaps if they were having trouble getting enough nourishment.
In the past few years, Ananth Karumanchi of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues have gathered evidence that suggests Dr. Haig was right. They have found that women with pre-eclampsia had unusually high levels of a protein called soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1, or sFlt1 for short.
Other labs have replicated their results. Dr. Karumanchi's group has done additional work that indicates that this protein interferes with the mother's ability to repair minor damage to her blood vessels. As that damage builds up, so does her blood pressure. And as Dr. Haig predicted, the protein is produced by the fetus, not the mother.
"When I first came across David Haig's hypothesis, it was absolutely cool," said Dr. Karumanchi. "And it made me feel like I might be on the right track."
Dr. Haig is now collaborating with Dr. Karumanchi and his Harvard Medical School colleagues to understand more about how exactly sFlt1 may cause pre-eclampsia. They describe their research in the latest issue of Current Topics in Developmental Biology.
Dr. Haig also made some predictions about the sorts of maternal defenses that have evolved. One of the most intriguing strategies he proposed was for mothers to shut down some of the genes in their own children.
This strategy takes advantage of the fact that most of the genes we carry come in pairs. We inherit one copy from our mother and one from our father. In most cases, these pairs of genes behave identically. But in the past 15 years, scientists have identified more than 70 pairs of genes in which the copy from one parent never makes a protein. In some cases, a parent's gene is silenced only in one organ.
Scientists do not fully understand this process, known as genomic imprinting. They suspect that it is made possible by chemical handles called methyl groups that are attached to units of DNA. Some handles may turn off genes in sperm and egg cells. The genes then remain shut off after a sperm fertilizes an egg.
Only a few of these genes have been carefully studied to understand how they work. But the evidence so far is consistent with Dr. Haig's theory. One of the most striking examples is a gene called insulin growth factor 2 (Igf2). Produced only in fetal cells, it stimulates rapid growth. Normally, only the father's copy is active. To understand the gene's function, scientists disabled the father's copy in the placenta of fetal mice. The mice were born weighing 40 percent below average. Perhaps the mother's copy of Igf2 is silent because turning it off helps slow the growth of a fetus.
On the other hand, mice carry another gene called Igf2r that interferes with the growth-spurring activity of Igf2. This may be another maternal defense gene. In the case of Igf2r, it is the father's gene that is silent, perhaps as a way for fathers to speed up the growth of their offspring. If the mother's copy of this second gene is disabled, mouse pups are born 125 percent heavier than average.
A number of other imprinted genes speed and slow the growth of fetuses in a similar fashion, providing more support for Dr. Haig's theory. And in recent years, some medical disorders in humans have been tied to these imprinted genes. Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, for example, causes children to grow oversize organs that are prone to developing tumors. Some cases of the disorder have been tied to a mutation that replaces a mother's silent copy of Igf2 with an extra copy of the father's.
"Both of the copies come from the father, and you get double the amount of Igf2, " said Dr. Haig. The extra Igf2 appeared to cause a fetus to grow too quickly, leading to the syndrome.
Dr. Haig's work is now widely hailed for making sense of imprinted genes. "Molecular biologists had it worked out in exquisite detail, but they had no idea why it existed," said Kyle Summers, a biologist at East Carolina State University. "Haig just comes in and says, 'I know why this is happening,' and explained it."
Dr. Haig has recently been exploring his theory's implications for life after birth. "I think it can influence all sorts of social behaviors," he said.
Scientists have found that some genes are imprinted in the brain after birth, and in some cases even in adulthood. "Imprinted genes and behavior are the new frontier," said Dr. Lawrence Wilkinson of the University of Cambridge. In a paper to be published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues argue that the evidence on imprinted brain genes — preliminary as it is — fits with Dr. Haig's theory. They call it "the most robust evolutionary hypothesis for genomic imprinting."
One major source of conflict after birth is how much a mother will feed any individual offspring. A baby mammal is more likely to thrive if it can get more milk from its mother. But nursing demands a lot of energy from mothers that could be used for other things, like bearing and nursing more offspring.
It turns out that a number of imprinted genes are active in the brain, where they might influence how babies behaved toward their mothers. One strong candidate for that role in mice is a gene known as GnasXI. Normally the mother's copy of the gene is silent. If the father's copy is not working, mouse pups are weak sucklers. They draw so little milk that by 9 days old, they are a quarter of the weight of normal mice. Switching off the father's copy of GnasXI may be putting a brake on the aggressive nursing of their pups.
Some genes continue to be imprinted in the brain even in healthy adults. Dr. Haig has proposed that the evolution of these genes has been shaped by the groups in which mammals live.
In many mammal species, females tend to stay in the groups where they are born and males leave. As a result, females tend to share more genes with other members of their group than males. A conflict may emerge between maternal and paternal genes over how the members of the group should act. Maternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the group. Paternal genes may favor behavior that benefits the individual.
"You have to think about resources in a different way," Dr. Wilkinson said. "Instead of thinking about foodstuffs, you have to think about social resources. Your mom and dad want different things from your behavior."
Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues are beginning to identify genes that may play this role. One, known as Nesp55, is active in mouse brains. The father's copy of the gene is silent. Dr. Wilkinson and his colleagues found that disabling the mother's Nesp55 gene makes mice less likely to explore a new environment. Normally, the mother's copy of Nesp55 may encourage the mice to take more risks on behalf of the group, whether that risk involves looking for food or defending the group. "It's a possibility, but it needs to be proved," said Dr. Wilkinson.
Dr. Wilkinson suspects that conflict between imprinted brain genes may add to the risk for mental disorders, from autism to depression. Because one copy of each of these genes is silenced, they may be more vulnerable. "If you ask me, do I think that imprinted genes are likely in the next 10 years to crop up as mechanisms in mental disorders, I'd say yes," he said.
Dr. Haig has enjoyed watching his theory mature and inspire other scientists. But he has also had to cope with a fair amount of hate mail. It comes from across the political spectrum, from abortion opponents to feminists who accuse him of trying to force patriarchy into biology.
"People seem to think, 'He must have a political agenda,' " Dr. Haig said. "But I'm not talking at all about conscious behaviors. I'm just interested in these mechanisms and why they evolved."
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Helicopter Tours
Helicopter Tours
Hansom cabs of the Space Age.
By Bryan Curtis
Posted Thursday, March 9, 2006, at 12:53 PM ET
I remember wishing that we could use my helicopter right then. The traffic was terrible.
—Donald Trump, from Trump: Think Like a Billionaire
A few days ago, on a sluggish afternoon in New York City, I had a Trump-like vision of helicopter flight. I didn't have any real-estate deals to close or sheiks to entertain, but I could picture myself floating above Manhattan, casting a disinterested eye on the rabble below. A few minutes later, I was standing in the office of Liberty Tours, a helicopter outfit located at 12th Avenue and West 30th Street. The office was spare, and it was full of European tourists slumped in plastic chairs. Looking out a window that faced the Hudson River, I could see that the wind was blowing hard. Every few minutes, a helicopter floated off the tarmac, jerking and wiggling as if it were being reeled up a fishing line before it discovered its bearings in midair and buzzed off confidently. I was going to take a helicopter tour.
Helicopter tours, it can now be said, are an enormously sad way to impersonate a mogul. Not to discourage you—they're quite fun—but just so you know. At Liberty Tours, most of the flights don't dip in and out of midtown office canyons as they do in iconic movie shots; the choppers keep to the Hudson, with the skyscrapers viewed over the shoulder. Nor does one feel very Trump-like wearing a yellow life preserver around the waist or enduring the chattiness of Liberty's airport-style security personnel. I had just made it through the metal detector when two attractive women walked into the lobby and bought tickets for the next flight. A security guard, named Robert, flashed me a big grin and said a bit too loudly, "It looks like you're on the wrong flight!" Before I could stop him, he had slapped me a high-five.
A few important announcements prior to your helicopter flight. First, before boarding the helicopter, you will be asked to reveal your weight. On a later flight, I watched as a young man confidently announced his weight, while his girlfriend, after several agonizing seconds of self-appraisal, said, "About the same, I guess." They must have had some afternoon together. Also of note: You don't need to duck your head dramatically as you walk under the blades. When you see the blades whirring, however, you will probably want to do this anyway. Finally, your seat on the helicopter tour is only as good as the person seated next to you. I thought I had scored big with the rear right window (the helicopter held eight people in two rows, including the pilot). Then a beefy European gentleman appeared at my left, with a shy, toothy smile that indicated that his high-end camera would be pivoting on my chest for the duration of the flight.
If your helicopter is operating properly, the whole thing will shake violently. When we took off, it felt for a moment as if we were going to shake straight down into the Hudson—the helicopter seemed to pitch forward for a moment—but then we leveled off and flew south. We made a half-circle around the Statue of Liberty and Governors Island before turning north and coming up on the city. The buildings of New York looked almost like models—perfectly made and smashed too close together. It was late afternoon, and shadows had fallen over downtown. We passed the Empire State Building, the Europeans now wildly snapping pictures, before making a U-turn at Central Park and heading south again. The whole thing took only about 15 minutes—much too short—but it was strangely entertaining. I went back with a new cast of Europeans a few days later.
If helicopters have a hold on us, it's not hard to see why. For one thing, the helicopter is the New Yorker's dream taxi. In a city where one never feels like one is making good time, there's something empowering about flying from lower Manhattan to Harlem in about three minutes. In New York, a new helicopter service will shuttle you from Wall Street directly to your gate at JFK for $140—not totally unreasonable if you've ever relied on a car service. Moreover, there is a romantic element to helicopter flight. It used to be that if you wanted to take a date on a tour through Manhattan, you would hire a hansom cab in Central Park. These days, a big spender might summon a helicopter. Liberty Tours offers a night flight for two called "Romance Over Manhattan" (prices start at $849), which the company says is ideal for marriage proposals. One wonders. Even if some men feel the urgent need to propose at great heights (atop the Empire State Building), the heli-proposal is a delicate affair. The groom-to-be must mount his case in 20 minutes or less. He must do it over the noise of the blades. If he gets turned down, there is no escape, and the flight becomes "Supreme Awkwardness Over Manhattan."
And there's something that feels dangerous about flying a helicopter. In New York there have been enough sickening crashes in the last year to make them seem as hazardous as bungee jumping. Last summer, a chopper with six European and Australian tourists dropped into the East River ("British Couple in Sky-Plunge Drama," shrieked a British paper), and then, a few days later, another helicopter, filled with senior executives from MBNA, toppled headfirst into the same waters. No one died, but a British woman named Karen Butler, who was planning on celebrating her 40th birthday flying on a helicopter, instead spent it in Bellevue Hospital in a medically induced coma. "She speaks very little about it," a friend told the Daily News a few months later. "There is still a lot of trauma for her right now."
Our own helicopter tour had just touched down safely. I stumbled onto the helipad and tried to regain my balance. Just then, I saw Robert, the security guard from earlier, waiting at the edge of the tarmac and wearing a giant smile. I wasn't sure what he wanted (maybe there were more attractive women in the lobby?), but as I walked toward him, I slipped into another reverie. Whether it was a sudden jolt of machismo or just happiness to be alive, I felt that in that short helicopter flight I had tasted a more fanciful way of living—a Trump-like existence. If I had to ride taxis and subways along with the rabble, perhaps I could at least adopt the manners of the helicopter set. I made a small gesture of this new life right then and there. I walked up to Robert and gave him a high-five.
Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer. You can e-mail him at curtisb@slate.com. -
Milosevic Is Found Dead
Milosevic Is Found Dead in Cell, U.N. Officials Say
THE HAGUE, March 11 — Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia and architect of a decade of war that took more than 250,000 lives and tore the country apart, was found dead in his cell at the United Nations detention center here on Saturday morning, the United Nations war crimes tribunal said.
The tribunal said in a statement that guards had found Mr. Milosevic, 64, dead in his bed, apparently of natural causes, while they were on their regular rounds. But the time of his death was unclear, and the Dutch police and a coroner began a full investigation. An autopsy is scheduled to be performed Sunday in the Netherlands.
Leaders in the region and in Western Europe immediately expressed regret that he would never be convicted for his role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and in three wars in the region during the 1990's.
Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch in New York who has often attended the trial, said it was "a terrible setback first and foremost for the victims of horrific crimes in the former Yugoslavia, and because it deprives the tribunal of a chance to render a verdict on his true role. That verdict would be a crucial piece of the record of what happened and who is accountable."
He added: "But Milosevic's death does not undo the legacy of the trials completed already and those that will be completed. The four years of this trial are a loss, but it does not undo more than a decade of work in establishing reference points and responsibilities."
Mr. Milosevic had been in poor health for years, and his heart ailment and high blood pressure repeatedly caused lengthy delays in his war crimes trial here on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. He refused to enter any plea, and he insisted on acting as his own lawyer, only later accepting any help from his court-appointed lawyers and often clashing with their advice. His long courtroom diatribes, often tuned to play well to a Serbian audience back home rather than the court itself, repeatedly took up whole sessions.
Mr. Milosevic was the first former head of state to stand trial for genocide before an international tribunal, and its proceedings, which began in February 2002, had already produced the longest war crimes trial in modern history. His death came as the trial was drawing to a close: he was in the final weeks of his defense, and his concluding statement was expected in late April or May. The judges' verdict was expected by the end of this year.
Mr. Milosevic had complained in recent weeks that his health was worsening, and he pressed the court to allow him to seek treatment at the Bakoulev Scientific Center for Cardiovascular Surgery in Moscow, where his wife and son live. But the court denied his request, saying there was no reason that Russian doctors could not come to The Hague to treat him — a decision the Russian Foreign Ministry criticized Saturday after Mr. Milosevic's death.
On Saturday, one of his lawyers, Steven Kay, said in an interview with the BBC that he did not think that Mr. Milosevic took his own life. "We were working on the last stretch. He was determined to see this through," he said. "He was hoping for more time but the judges said no."
Mr. Kay added: "He has a history of suicide in his family — both his parents — but as far as he was concerned, his attitude to me was quite the opposite from that. He was determined to keep fighting his case."
Another legal adviser, Zdenko Tomanovic, said Saturday that in recent days, Mr. Milosevic said that someone was trying to poison him. And Mr. Tomanovic said he had demanded that the autopsy take place in Moscow rather than in The Hague.
"I insist on this request, especially bearing in mind Mr. Milosevic's claims that there were attempts to poison him in the prison," he said. "And yesterday, I also informed the Russian Embassy on behalf of Mr. Milosevic about his claims that his health was willfully destroyed."
The tribunal denied the request for an autopsy in Moscow. It said Saturday, however, that it had agreed to allow a senior pathologist from Belgrade to participate in the autopsy.
The death was the second major blow for the court in a matter of days. On March 5, Milan Babic, a convicted former politician who who had testified against Mr. Milosevic, hanged himself in his holding cell in The Hague.
Since the Security Council created the tribunal in 1993, it has indicted 161 people. Proceedings have been completed against 85 people, and close to 60 are in custody or awaiting proceedings.
But many senior figures, including the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his top commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, are still being sought. Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at The Hague, has complained that cooperation from Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, has stalled.
In a statement released by her office on Saturday, Ms. Del Ponte said: "The death of Slobodan Milosevic a few weeks before the completion of his trial will prevent justice to be done in his case. However, the crimes for which he was accused, including genocide, cannot be left unpunished. There are other senior leaders accused of these crimes, six of them still at large."
Her office said she would give a full news conference on Sunday.
The European Union insisted on Saturday that the death in no way dismissed Serbia of its responsibility to hand over war crimes suspects. After a meeting of European foreign ministers in Austria, Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik of Austria warned that Belgrade must continue to aid the effort "to come to terms with the legacy of the Balkan wars," The Associated Press reported.
The Serbian foreign minister, Vuk Draskovic, who was also at the meeting, assured that his country would continue on its course of reform. "I am not ready to establish a link between the destiny of Milosevic and the destiny of Serbia," he said, noting that Mr. Milosevic had ordered the assassination of many opposition figures, including himself, The A.P. said. He added, "I can say only that it is a pity that he did not face justice."
Across the Balkans, the death was met by emotions, from dismay among those who saw themselves as the victims of his repressive rule, to the sorrow of the now dwindling core of Serbian Socialist Party supporters, for whom Mr. Milosevic was still the nominal party leader.
In Vranje, one of handful of towns in Serbia to still be dominated by the Socialist Party, supporters lowered the Serbian flag to half staff and placed black bands across photographs on office walls.
"Too bad for the guy. He was a big Serb," said Zoran Ivanovic, a 41-year-old laborer who lives in Vranje . "Maybe he made a few mistakes, like not accepting Yugoslavia be turned into a confederation, and perhaps avoiding war. But those charges of genocide, that's baseless."
Among those who had worked to bring Mr. Milosevic to trial, there was a profound note of disappointment on Saturday.
Florence Hartmann, the spokeswoman for Ms. Del Ponte, expressed frustration that at least in a legal sense, Mr. Milosevic will not go down in history as a convicted war criminal. "This is bad for proving the real responsibility of Mr. Milosevic," she said. "There is a presumption of innocence, and now we will not get a conviction."
But Richard C. Holbrooke, a former American ambassador to the United Nations who was also a negotiator of the Dayton peace accord for Bosnia, said that amid the disappointment, there was still justice.
"The trial was too long, but the trial was the verdict," he said in an interview with the BBC on Saturday. "The Serb people came to understand the truth that he was not a nationalist, but an opportunist. A kind of rough and imperfect justice was served."
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Today's Papers
Interior Changes
By Daniel Politi
Posted Saturday, March 11, 2006, at 6:00 AM ET
The Washington Post leads with, and none of the other papers front, the discovery of peace activist Tom Fox's body in Baghdad. The 54-year-old Virginian was taken hostage last November and speculation of his death had increased when he did not appear in a tape aired earlier this week that showed the other three people who were taken with him. The Los Angeles Times leads with the Friday afternoon resignation of Gale Norton, the first female secretary of the Interior. Norton's five-year leadership of the department ended in controversy as a federal investigation is underway over her department's close dealings with über-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Throughout her tenure, environmentalists criticized her advocacy of energy exploration on public land as well as her move to reopen Yellowstone National Park to snowmobiles. Both the WP and the New York Times choose to stuff the resignation.
The NYT leads with the news that (surprise) Congress seems to have lost interest in tightening lobbying regulations. Even though the measure had momentum at the height of the Abramoff scandal, other issues have now monopolized the attention of lawmakers who do not seem to be in a rush to do anything on the issue. If a member of Congress is indicted in the Abramoff investigation, reform might once again take center stage, but for now there is a growing sense that tighter laws are not needed.
The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with President Bush saying that he regrets how the ports deal was handled and that he is concerned about the message it sends to U.S. allies, especially in the Middle East. Trade talks between the UAE and the United States were postponed in what was largely seen as an effect of the collapsed deal.
The WSJ takes advantage of the ports controversy to say that the globalization of business has run into some major roadblocks. Besides the Dubai Ports World kerfuffle, the paper also mentions other countries that want to put the brakes on foreign investment, including Korea and Bolivia. If this trend continues, it could threaten the world economy, and the United States would be particularly vulnerable because of its dependence on foreign investment.
As further fallout from the debate over DP World, the Post reports that House Republicans are planning legislation to give Congress some sort of oversight over all purchases of U.S. businesses by foreigners.
The WSJ points out that having to sell off its U.S. holdings may not really hurt DP World since it wasn't the most valuable part of its acquisition. The paper even goes as far as to suggest that it might be difficult to find a willing buyer.
There is no denying that the transfer of its U.S. assets will be a complicated process, and the Post emphasizes that no one is quite sure how it's going to work and it is unclear whether there will be an outright sale, or if DP World will merely give away management responsibilities of its U.S. operations.
The NYT says that the ports scandal could be a sign of the difficulty that President Bush will face in getting the approval of the Republican Congress for his initiatives as the midterm elections approach. But all this talk of a "rebellion" doesn't impress the NYT's editorial page: "The Republicans dumped the ports deal into the harbor because of xenophobia and electoral tactics … the idea that a happy few are charging the White House ramparts is ridiculous."
The WP goes inside with the judge in the Zacarias Moussaoui trial warning the prosecutors that they are "treading on very delicate legal ground." As they wrapped up the first week, analysts believe the judge's statement was meant to emphasize that prosecutors should focus on the lies that Moussaoui told the FBI, rather than his failure to warn them of the impending 9/11 attack. There is no precedent for sentencing someone to death for failing to speak up.
All the papers go inside with the latest from Iraq, where 19 Iraqis and one U.S. Marine died in bombings, while some clerics called for calm and forgiveness. Everyone mentions the Time magazine interview with U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad where he proposed that Iraq's leaders should hold a summit to work out a coalition.
The LAT fronts a look at the increasing tensions between Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, who is Kurdish, and its interim prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, who is a Shiite. They each try to claim true leadership of the country and often have petty fights to try and demonstrate their power.
The NYT mentions the Palestinian Authority's claim that it is facing a budget crisis. Even though it has received $70 million in the past two weeks, it is not enough to cover all of February's salaries. The Palestinian economic minister said it "remains a mystery" how they will pay the March salaries.
The WP fronts the chairman of the Federal Election Commission claiming "there is a growing sense" that in order for a presidential candidate to be taken seriously he or she will have to raise $100 million by the end of 2007. Although some say the figure is far too high, many do believe these upcoming elections will mark the end of public funding for campaigns and its accompanying spending limits.
The WP fronts, and the NYT goes inside with, the arrest of President Bush's former top domestic policy adviser on charges that he stole goods from several different retailers in Maryland. Claude A. Allen, who resigned last month and was considered a rising star in conservative circles, is accused of conducting several fraudulent refunds totaling more than $5,000 in the past year. Slate contributor Rachel Shteir explains how refund scams work and why they're a favorite of shoplifters.
The LAT fronts a profile of Bettie Page, one of the most famous pinups from the 1950s, who "helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s" with her provocative photographs. Although she is now 82 and her picture hasn't been in a magazine for almost half a century, she claims to be more popular now than when she first modeled. The chairman of CMG, the company that markets her image, says Page "has an international following. Only Marilyn Monroe rivals her in terms of Internet traffic." Unfortunately, the usually reclusive Page would not allow the LAT to photograph her face because "I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times."
Daniel Politi is a writer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina -
Big Love
Ginnifer Goodwin, Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Chloë Sevigny in HBO's Big Love
Boy Meets Girl, Then More Girls
HBO's Big Love and the stuffy side of polygamy.
By Daphne Merkin
Updated Friday, March 10, 2006, at 10:59 AM ET
So, you thought you'd seen everything those alienated types who create hit TV series had up their hipster sleeves. We were all fascinated with the Six Feet Under clan, dragging their twisted inner lives and even more meshugeneh realities all over their widowed mother's spotless linoleum kitchen floor, leading her to take up smoking pot. Now Tony Soprano and his stewpot of gangland cronies are back, beguiling us with their vulgar blood-spilling and messy coke-snorting ways. And, as if that weren't enough, right after The Sopranos there's Big Love, featuring Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton), a guy with multiple wives and seven children who's moved across the street into three adjacent households that share a single backyard, pretending to be the head of a normal American family under the very noses of the law-abiding folk who live in his Salt Lake City suburb.
One thing can be said for sure: If the secret desires and errant fantasies of a culture are reflected by its mass entertainment, we are living in foundering, category-challenged times. (In fact, from the looks of it, TV-land may be falling behind the curve of Real Life. In the real world, a lesbian has just been voted Homecoming King at forward-looking Hood College in Maryland, while Emily's Reasons Why Not and Love Monkey, two recently aired shows involving two single heteros looking for love—how retro can you get?—were both canceled with record speed.) The traditional paradigms of connection and romance no longer seem to be bearing up under our scrutiny, worn out by mockery and parody or plain old malaise. The "normal" family in American film and movies—the original nuclear model, that is, the one that inspired the heartwarming '70s TV show Family—appears to have gone up the waterspout, along with the traditional boy-meets-girl scenario.
Meanwhile, the marginalized and misbegotten—perverts, as J. Edgar Hoover would have called them, or inverts, as Freud did—have been gradually insinuating themselves into our hearts and minds. All the really persuasive bonding taking place these days is happening far from the Mom & Pop master bedroom. It goes on between gay men and women (Will & Grace); female friends (Sex and the City); women and women (The L Word); and, perhaps most insistently, men and men (Brokeback Mountain). And although the once-hallowed ideal of romantic pining is no longer perceived as a glorious sacrifice when a woman waits by the phone for a man to call—better she should figure out, sooner rather than later, that he's just not that into her—this sort of risible soul-mate anguish takes on a noble mystique when it occurs between two cowboys who live for their twice-yearly fishing getaways.
Given how shaky we all feel these days in our chosen moorings, it makes perfect sense that HBO has warmed to the concept behind Big Love. The really surprising thing about the series is not how steamy and illicit the populous Henrickson ménage is but how little heat it gives off—how downright tedious it manages to make polygamy seem. Paxton's amiable and hardworking Bill Henrickson is permanently put-upon; when he's not overseeing his thriving home-improvement business (note the line of work he's in), he is at the beck and call of his demanding spouses. His trio of women, disparate as they are in age and temperament (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloë Sevigny, and Ginnifer Goodwin), have one thing in common. They all want more of hubby: more of his time, more of his money, more of his help with the chores, and more of his sexual attentions. None of them can get enough, especially of the last, which drives the exhausted, testosterone-deficient Bill to pop Viagra like breath mints. The show's setup has the strange effect of inverting the terms of the unreconstructed patriarchal paradigm that the sexual politics of polygamy plays to. In Big Love's hands, the harem fantasy so beloved of hot-blooded males turns out to be one long harem nightmare; what might have been a thrilling exposé of the excessive and the aberrant boils down to being a familiar tale of the domestic fatigue that has assailed the lives of couples ever since Adam hooked up with Eve (whose turn it is to do the dishes/buy the groceries/have sex tonight), times three.
How, you might ask, has all this weariness with conventional heterosexual partnering come to pass? How have we gotten to the point where a man who has three attractive women in his revolving bed is a man who is destined to suffer? Much of the problem, I would argue, is with the basic conception of the show, which has taken the religion and—perhaps even more to the point—the lust out of polygamy in its effort to present it as just another choice in the alternative relationship smorgasbord.
The co-writers of Big Love—Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer*—have tried, in their own words, to be "nonjudgmental and humane" about the institution of polygamy, insisting that it is an "ideal template to look at marriage and family." Can they possibly mean this? Isn't this a bit like arguing that the seduction of underage boys by adult men is an ideal template from which to view homosexual life? Polygamy, whatever else it is, is both illegal and a throwback to more benighted notions of dominance and submission within family life—an assertion of the hegemony of older males over younger females. (The Mormon Church has outlawed polygamy since 1890, although it continues to be practiced by fundamentalist cults—with a population that has been estimated as anywhere from 30,000 to 100,0000—who claim allegiance to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.) For me, the really disturbing aspect of the series is not that it soft-pedals the lifestyle's darker sides—its reliance on a constant supply of young women, its tolerance of incest and pedophilia under cover of God's law, its exiling of younger men who might compete with the older males of the community for wives. It's that the show's creators—who happen to be a gay couple—have written a series that wears its values on its sleeve, albeit unwittingly, and those values are, in a word, heterophobic. They are, that is, subtly and not so subtly misogynistic (the women come across mostly as simpering dominatrixes, begging for a new car when they're not demanding that Henrickson get it up on their allotted night with him) as well as inveterately pitying of the benighted, hen-pecked, breeder male. Invisible quotation marks are everywhere you look, bracketing the very concepts of "marriage" and "family" the show purports to examine sympathetically, or at least neutrally.
The result is that polygamy never looked worse than it does here, suggesting not an end to the humdrum rhythms of marital life but an alarming extension of them. I cannot help wondering whether some of this dreary message is attributable to the simple fact that the show's creators can't quite imagine their way into figuring out what all the whoop about men and women is about. If homosexuality has gone from being the love that dare not speak its name to the love that proudly carries the torch of erotic passion, heterosexuality has gone from being the only game in town to a failed sideshow.
Indeed, there is a sense in which the homoerotic ethos has triumphed—as a persuasive cultural narrative if in no other way—while the straight narrative has gotten lost in ridicule and anxiety. But you never can tell. One of these days straight-bashing will breathe its last breath and the dysfunctional "normal" family is sure to come back into cultural fashion, if only because it's never gone away in the real world. Meanwhile, keep your eye on the two women playing footsy in the fourth episode of Big Love: Here's betting that's where the action will be.
Correction, March 10, 2006: In the original version of this article, the names of Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, co-creators of Big Love, were misspelled. This error has been corrected. Return to the sentence.
Daphne Merkin is the author of a novel, Enchantment, and a collection of essays, Dreaming of Hitler.
Hey, if both Robin Leach and Jenny McCarthy 
This weekend I had the privilege of going to the 
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