Predictably, progress at the meeting was limited, yielding no confirmation from North Korea about a purported offer by Kim Jong Il to drop its missile program in exchange for satellite launches in another country. North Korean officials like Paek are rarely empowered to be more than functionaries who stick to their tightly worded scripts. Said one South Korean diplomat, “Their basic emotion is still fear.”
“Our approach now should aim more at the ‘One people, two countries, two systems, and one market’ model,” South Korea Unification Minister Lee In-Young told the Seoul Shinmun newspaper in an interview published Thursday and featured on the official website of the government ministry. He likened the strategy to that which established the European Union, an organization with a common currency and largely open borders yet with individual sovereignty among its 27 members....
Newman, who majored in philosophy at New York’s City College, was an impoverished self-proclaimed anarchist who kept failing the exam that would promote him from substitute art teacher in the public schools to a regular one. Consequently, his wife, Annalee, worked two jobs, while he dreamed up schemes like concocting a system for picking winners at the horse races and running for mayor as a write-in candidate. As an artist, Newman couldn’t bring himself to commit anything to an actual canvas until he was 40 years old....
They need to work fast. According to Ng Xuan Tiep, a specialist at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum in Hanoi, half of the museum’s 6,000 works are in need of repair. “There are 50 to 70 pieces of art so heavily damaged they could be already potentially lost,” he says. “The truth is that we cannot wait anymore. Some paintings are already beyond repair.” Vietnamese painters have always been highly skilled technically, and their works from the first part of the 20th century show influences by the French impressionist masters....
It already has. Manila’s long-simmering struggle with both communist and Islamic rebels in the southern Philippines – chiefly Mindanao, the country’s second largest and poorest island – has boiled over again. For about 30 years, the government and its rural adversaries have been locked in a seemingly endless cycle of vicious fighting, ceasefires, inconclusive peace talks, followed by more fighting. Philippine President Joseph Estrada has lately cranked up the military pressure on the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a major Philippine separatist group and old government enemy....
ZAKARIA: At Greenpeace, you fought against nuclear energy. What changed? MOORE: My belief, in retrospect, is that because we were so focused on the destructive aspect of nuclear technology and nuclear war, we made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons, as if all things nuclear were evil. And indeed today, Greenpeace still uses the word “evil” to describe nuclear energy. I think that’s as big a mistake as if you lumped nuclear medicine in with nuclear weapons....
His last night as a Yankee, of course, because even with Rodriguez saying things after Friday’s game like, “It’s going to be hard to top that,” and, “I’m at peace,” the man who is four home runs away from 700 in his career continued to avoid giving direct answers to questions about whether this was the end of his baseball career. MORE: A look back at A-Rod’s turbulent career...
Controversy has trailed Moseley-Braun since the latter stages of her campaign. The most damaging incidents all seem to involve her boyfriend and campaign manager, Kgosie Matthews. In an exuberant victory speech two months ago, Moseley-Braun dubbed Matthews her “knight in shining armor.” Many of her staffers, however, took a dimmer view of his autocratic and often arbitrary behavior. After the election, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that two women staffers had anonymously accused Matthews of sexual harassment during the campaign....
The immediate horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima was plain to see–charred bodies and hideously disfigured survivors. Thousands of people who survived soon died because their germ-fighting marrow had been blasted by radiation. And those first deaths–some 180,000 people–initially seemed like just the beginning of the trauma: by 1946, experiments on mice proved that radiation can cause both cancer and genetic defects in the offspring. But now, after 50 years of what is arguably the longest and most comprehensive health study ever undertaken, the scientific consensus holds that the long-term effects on the hibakusha (survivors) and their children have been significantly less than the victims, the public and even scientists expected....
Many of those in the business of women’s health said they were perplexed and concerned by that second result. And the researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute said it would take more work to explain the increase in abortions among the poor. But those working closely with actual patients said that one word goes a long way toward explaining both the good news and the bad. Contraception. It’s been the rallying cry of those who favor keeping abortion legal for years now....
“When I was little, I knew it was something I wanted,” says Cooney. “I was really excited about the sisterhood and the bonding. I had one sister already and I wanted more.” But when Cooney arrived on the University of Missouri-St. Louis campus with a two-year-old son, she found Greek life incompatible with her busy parenting schedule. Evening meetings and events, she says, “don’t fit into a parent’s work and school schedules....
And he’s here today with a new book, A Congress of Wonders (161 pages. Counterpoint. $21), two novellas and a short story, all of which feature as prime mover that colossus of chicanery, Prof. Philander Cosmo Rexroat, B.S., M.S. and PeeAitch-Dee, herpetologist, philatelist, minister of the Gospel and licensed practitioner of colonic irrigation. In the garish precinct of Rexroat’s midway peepshow., we meet a Fallen Woman, a Lost Soul and a Boy Coming of Age....
Flash-forward to the present. Wireless, which seems to have acquired “beleaguered” as part of its name almost from the day it split off from AT&T, announced last week it was entertaining takeover offers. If things go well, the company might fetch $12.50 a share–almost 60 percent less than people paid in the spring of 2000, when telecom was in bloom. This is a tale full of irony, including the fact that selling its Wireless stake at fancy prices turns out to have been probably the smartest financial move AT&T Corp....
When I heard the city’s new science library had opened for business right around the comer from where I live in midtown Manhattan, I was very pleased and strolled over one morning for a visit. I was delighted by the sight of row upon row of computers and printers, all brand new, humming and blinking expensively. But as other visitors Filed in, I noticed the quiet hum was repeatedly interrupted by people frustrated by their unfamiliarity with computers, complaining about the bugs in the search software and griping that they couldn’t go to a librarian to reserve a computer-they had to go to a computer to reserve a computer....
No town wants this kind of notoriety–and Jasper, where the schools were integrated 30 years ago and where the mayor and several other elected officials are black, has reason to resent the media circus that’s come to town. Aside from the Byrd family, which is sitting stony-eyed behind the prosecution table, few local residents are attending the trial day by day. Jasper–the real Jasper, according to locals–can be found just across the square from the courthouse, where the Kiwanis Club was meeting for its weekly lunch while the trial unfolded....
