Some quick articles from the Times...
Sep. 16th, 2005 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on Gaza, which hasn't gone away yet.
Gazans Revel as They Sift Through Ex-Settlements
By STEVEN ERLANGER
NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip, Sept. 12 - Throughout the abandoned Israeli settlements of Gaza, Monday was a carnival of celebration, political grandstanding and widespread scavenging for a Palestinian population whose occupiers vanished overnight, as the Israeli Army pulled its last soldier out of Gaza at 6:50 a.m.
But hours before the divisional commander, Aviv Kochavi, became the last Israeli soldier to leave, thousands of Palestinians had entered the once-forbidden settlements that, together with their military infrastructure, consumed about 30 percent of the densely populated Gaza Strip.
The celebrations were orchestrated in part by the rival factions within Palestinian society - Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Fatah, the mainspring of the Palestinian Authority. Their flags of black, green and yellow were more numerous than the Palestinian flag, and were prominent on abandoned Israeli military outposts and public buildings.
Hamas, which is running hard for votes in January's legislative elections, paraded through numerous settlements, with armed and often masked men on loudspeaker trucks. Hamas posters and graffiti proclaimed the victory of resistance. Islamic Jihad, which is not running, did the same, as did armed members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a Fatah contingent.
Some who came did so to see the land they had worked before the 1967 war, when Israel took Gaza from Egypt; others honored friends who had died in attacks on the Israeli settlers; still others came to salvage whatever could be ripped away and sold from the large piles of rubble the Israelis had left behind.
Donkey carts were piled with bathroom fixtures, pieces of metal, skeins of wire and long pieces of wood, to feed home ovens. Men, women and children worked with a seriousness of purpose, trying to take home some little personal benefit from the return of lands many feel will somehow, as usual, end up in the hands of the wealthy or well connected.
By the light of burning egg crates, Samir Abu Hattah whacked away at window glass with a metal pole, shouting, "Go to hell, Zionists!"
Then he directed a group of young men to start pulling down the electrical wiring, aluminum window frames and doors of an agricultural warehouse here in Neve Dekalim.
"I feel a great sense of victory today," said Mr. Hattah, 40, who lives across the tall concrete wall in the Khan Yunis refugee camp and who used to work in this settlement before the second Palestinian uprising began in 2000. "The Zionists built it and then they destroyed it," he said with satisfaction. "The lesson I've learned, and I will pass it on to my sons, is that no matter how long it takes, the occupiers will leave because of resistance."
Behind him, a settlement synagogue built in the shape of a huge Star of David was smoldering, fires inside sending smoke through the edges of the star. Atop the building, in the dim smoky moment before dawn, one could see a huge green flag of Hamas, with a smaller Palestinian flag flying below it.
A few minutes later, a large black flag of Islamic Jihad was flying just under the Hamas flag, above the Palestinian one.
Five minutes later, the Palestinian flag had been taken down altogether.
Israel had leveled all the other buildings in the settlements in an agreement with the Palestinians but chose, at the last minute, not to destroy the synagogues because a number of Israeli conservatives argued that it was wrong for Jews to destroy synagogues. As a result, settlement synagogues were standing and vulnerable to vandalism.
As daylight brightened, more Palestinians poured into the former settlements, which are still surrounded by huge fortifications and electronic fences. Some went sightseeing, some went salvaging, some went to swim from beaches that had been closed to them. They were joined by hundreds of schoolchildren in uniform who were given the day off as a holiday. Three people were reported drowned.
Ahmad el-Kurd, the new Hamas mayor of Deir Al Balah, cheek by jowl with the former settlement of Kfar Darom, said his joy was mixed as he remembered how much he loved, as a boy, the unspoiled dunes that were fenced off for Kfar Darom. "If they could only give me back the land as it was 38 years ago," he said. "Now, it's only piles of rubble."
In Kfar Darom, there was an extensive march of armed fighters, but the synagogue there was protected from burning by security forces who made a kind of headquarters out of it. Palestinian officials said they expected to pull down the remaining synagogues themselves, and a bulldozer began the task in Netzarim.
He was happy today, Mr. Kurd said, but his happiness was also tempered "because of the continuing occupation of Jenin and Nablus and Jerusalem, which are also part of Palestine." And until Israel resolved the question of how to allow Palestinians and their goods to enter and exit freely from Gaza, to Egypt and to the West Bank, he said, "Israel remains an occupier," a position supported by the Palestinian Authority.
"If there is no freedom of movement, don't consider the Palestinians free," Mr. Kurd said. "We will not accept Gaza as a big prison."
The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says that the life of Gaza is up to the Palestinians now, and that only security considerations are preventing a resolution of the issue of Israel's continued control over Gaza's border with Egypt. The Israelis have proposed a complicated six-month provisional procedure, which the Palestinians reject. For their part, the Israelis have so far rejected a proposal by the Western mediator, James D. Wolfensohn, to allow Palestinians to pass through Rafah to Egypt with European officials supervising the process on behalf of Israel.
Thousands of Palestinians slipped through gaps in the border wall on Monday and crossed from Gaza to Egypt at Rafah in a scene of chaos and jubilation, with tearful family reunions and one man reportedly shot dead. Witnesses said an Egyptian soldier shot and killed a Palestinian who crossed into Rafah, but the Egyptian government denied the report, insisting the victim must have died from a stray bullet fired by those celebrating the withdrawal of Israeli border guards.
"I categorically deny this report, which is completely baseless," said Suleiman Awad, official spokesman of President Hosni Mubarak. "It's inconceivable that Egyptian soldiers should have opened fire on the Palestinians after letting 3,000 cross the border for family reunions."
The leader of Hamas's military wing in the sprawling Khan Yunis camp, Abu Moath, came with his armed entourage to take a look at Neve Dekalim. He had not been here in a very long time, he said, and recognized little among the piles of rubble, atop which young men dug for metal scraps, plastic chairs and an old washing machine.
Asked about Israel's last-minute decision not to destroy the last 24 synagogues in Gaza but to ask the Palestinians to protect them, Abu Moath scoffed. "They must be destroyed as symbols of Israel and the occupation," he said. "They promised to destroy them, and we are only carrying out the ruling of their own court." As he spoke, two of his entourage showed their colleagues the car batteries they had found.
On the wall of a synagogue here was a Hamas slogan: "Push them out as they pushed you out!" And nearby, there was another: "Yes for freedom! No for Jews! - Hamas."
Fatma Abu Reziq, whose large, poor Khan Yunis family was profiled in The New York Times in June, said she was one of the first Palestinians into Neve Dekalim, arriving at about 3 a.m., even before the last Israeli tank rumbled away. "People were afraid at first, and then they saw people like me get in, and they became brave," she said.
Even she, she said blushing, had salvaged a few items from this settlement to brighten her home, a few hundred yards across the no man's land from the towering cement wall that still cuts off Khan Yunis from Neve Dekalim. "Now that the Israelis are gone, our lives will be better and quieter," she said. "I can't describe my happiness to see the flag of Palestine flying here."
One on clocks, Versailles, and history.
Synchronizing the Present and Past in a Timeless Place
By MARLISE SIMONS
VERSAILLES, France, Sept. 5 - Once a week, Bernard Draux, a discreet Frenchman, joins the secret life of Versailles, a palace where even without its long-gone kings much still happens away from the public eye.
Mr. Draux is the chateau's official clockmaker and timekeeper. His task is to wind and repair close to 100 antique clocks that once served Europe's most glittering court.
Every Monday, when the monumental palace is closed, he sets out on his solitary mission with a small set of precision tools and a heavy bundle of keys, opening up contraptions that are often as baroque as the chateau itself.
There are gilded clock faces, fixed onto bronze camels or marble elephants. Some have music boxes hidden inside. Grand 18th-century pieces, which remarkably have survived theft and revolution, record not just the hour, date and month but also the movements of the planets.
None of this seems to faze Mr. Draux, 49, a man with a mournful face and a heavy mustache, whose own modest wristwatch runs on a battery.
There he was, on a recent round, cantering through the chateau's labyrinth of back stairs, slipping in and out of salons and alcoves as if this were a visit to an old family home. He made frequent stops, tugging deftly at a weight here, nudging a pendulum there.
Why, he was asked, was such an effort being made to record the time in such a timeless place?
"Eh bien, the clocks belong here," he said with an irrefutable air. "They have two functions. They must preserve their beauty and they must work properly. It doesn't look good when clocks are not accurate."
But it is not quite punctuality - the French like a little leeway here - that perpetuates the task of the official timekeeper. France gives much weight to traditional skills, even as it adopts its share of American-style mass-produced consumer goods.
Mr. Draux's task may be one of a kind, but it offers a glimpse of the enormous energy and cost the country puts into preserving its heirlooms, its great museums and, with those, many here believe, the national cultural identity.
Arguably, the tradition of cherishing traditional workmanship and heritage is as much part of Europe as it is of France. But the French articulate more loudly their need to preserve distinction and often warn that globalized manufacture and trade, if left unfettered, may end up covering the world with a blanket of sameness.
The government employs a legion of men and women - their numbers vary according to the projects under way - adept at carving antique wood or stone, repairing stucco or wrought iron, or rehabilitating yards of ancient frames and weavings. Such trades, and the unfashionable patience they require, may gain little public applause elsewhere, but here they rank as high as patriotism.
Investing in history has its rewards. As one of the world's main tourist destinations, France received 75 million visitors in 2004. Versailles is seen by 10 million people a year.
Curators say the palace, with its 700 rooms and thousands of windows, statues, chandeliers and curlicues, has been high maintenance ever since the 1660's when the Sun King, Louis XIV, first moved in. Today a staff of 900 looks after it, although hundreds more are now involved in the museum's most ambitious renovation project. The grand overhaul began in 2003 and is expected to take 17 years and more than $450 million in government and private money.
Mr. Draux hopes the restoration will include some of the exceptional clocks that are in storage, awaiting repair.
Clocks may not loom large in the lore about the extravagance of the royalty here, but by many accounts there was little free time.
"Clocks were very important here, even in the 17th century, because life at the court was full of rigor and rituals," said Mathieu da Vinha, a historian at the Versailles Research Center. "There were fixed times for the rising of the king, for prayers, for government meetings, for meals, for walks, for the hunt, for the concerts and so on. Everyone had to be on their toes."
Louis XIV had not one, but four clockmakers working for him, he said. "When he traveled, the clockmakers, and many clocks, went with him."
That accounts for the legacy of the timepieces here, and for the work of Mr. Draux, who learned his craft from his father and grandfather. "Each clock here is unique because they were made like a work of art, before the age of mass production," he said.
He stopped at the oldest clock, marked 1706, shining his flashlight on a complex array of weights, toothed wheels, bolts and pivots.
"Each one is so different, I don't really know a clock until I have taken it apart," he murmured. "And of course there are no instructions."
He activated the clock's music box and a mechanical show that usually is blocked "because it causes traffic jams in this room." As the small hammers sounded midday, a pair of eagles flapped their wings and a miniature king on a throne popped out. "Hear that sound," he said. "It's still in great form."
Mr. Draux showed his awe before the clock of Passement, named after its maker, an engineer and astronomer. It was crowned with a glass sphere. Inside it, golden rings registered the movements of the planets. "This is a perpetual calendar, it can show the date until the year 9999," he said.
Did he know how to repair it? No, he said, "fortunately, there's been no need."
He moved along, sidestepping the staff applying beeswax to the interminable palace floors. It seemed easy to forget the time here. But Mr. Draux was pressing on, because he still had to fix a few laggards.
As if to show he was not living in the past, Mr. Draux said he also looked after two giant electric clocks in the Stade de France, Paris's main sports stadium. But he does draw the line against modernity somewhere.
"I will not use a cellphone," he said. "That's too stressful. In my job, I have to concentrate."
Still more (from previous posts, that is) on 9/11.
Marking Four Years Since 9/11 While Mourning a Fresher Loss
By MICHAEL WILSON
The nation marked the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks yesterday in familiar ways - the readings of long lists of victims, the black bands worn across shined badges, the framed portraits clutched by loved ones - even while struggling with its latest tragedy, the death and devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
The day of grief was remembered against a backdrop of new loss. And it was all but impossible to isolate one event from the other. Speakers, from a ceremony at ground zero to a worship service in Washington, paused to honor the hurricane's victims, while rescue workers slogging through New Orleans observed moments of silence for their fallen colleagues now four years gone.
A few blocks from where hijackers slammed two jetliners into the two towers of the World Trade Center, a rudimentary collection jar - a cardboard box with a slit cut into the top - on the countertop of a deli asked for donations, not for Lower Manhattan, but for the Hurricane Katrina survivors. "Fancy Food will match every dollar you give," it promised.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his short address at ground zero, referred to the deadly storm, as well as to the July 7 terrorist bombings in London: "Today, as we recite the names of those we lost, our hearts turn as well toward London, our sister city, remembering those she has just lost as well. And to Americans suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, our deepest sympathies go out to you this day."
Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey of New Jersey, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani also made brief remarks at the ceremony, which lasted more than four hours under a bright, sunny sky.
In Washington, not far from where American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, President Bush and Laura Bush attended a morning service at St. John's Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, along with Vice President Dick Cheney and Lynne Cheney.
The Rev. Dr. Luis León, quoting Ernest Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms" in his sermon, spoke of becoming strong again in broken places, namely New York and New Orleans. Later in the day, the president made his third visit to the gulf region since the hurricane.
Near Shanksville, Pa., at the site where the fourth airliner crashed after passengers stormed the hijackers in the cockpit, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said, "They were innocent lives taken by incredible evil," according to Agence France-Presse.
In New Orleans, police officers from New York City paused in post-hurricane streets yesterday morning to read the names of their colleagues who were killed on 9/11.
"We said we'd never forget," Inspector Michael V. Quinn said. "What we showed here today is that we still remember those who lost their lives on Sept. 11."
Hard work in New Orleans eased the pain of the day for some. Officer Joseph Stynes, who works in the Bronx Anticrime Unit in New York, said thoughts of the anniversary had not occurred to him until the ceremony began. "I was thinking about things down here, more so, than what happened there."
Elsewhere in New Orleans, about 50 emergency management workers and military officers participated in a brief but emotional ceremony at City Hall, where generators provided a limited power supply and scores of city, military and emergency workers from all over the country spend each night on cots or on the floor.
"We can't imagine the level of devastation that has hit your city," said John Paczkowski, the emergency management director for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who escaped from 1 World Trade Center minutes before the building collapsed.
To be sure, the anniversary ceremonies maintained the same focus of remembrance as in years past. Ground zero became, from before 8 a.m. until after 1 p.m., an island of emotion. Listening to the hypnotic rhythm of first, middle and last names read from lecterns near the pit, it seemed at times impossible that four years had passed, as voice after voice cracked with emotion.
For the first time, siblings of the victims read the names, a new face of pain; parents and children have read in past years. The siblings threaded personal remarks among the names: "I miss talking with you. I miss laughing with you." "Shake it easy, Sal." "We miss you, bro. Be safe." "Help Katrina hurricane victims also."
Many of the family members wore T-shirts, buttons or signs with their relatives' pictures on them. A few American flags were sprinkled throughout the crowd, but most family members just wore the gold-and-white ribbons that city officials gave them at check-in.
The family of Manuel Del Valle Jr., a firefighter, gathered his framed photograph and their F.D.N.Y. shirts that bear his name and made their way first to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, which opens early on Sept. 11 for family members, and then hurried toward ground zero on the subway to get there before 8:46 a.m. A cousin, Marisol Torres, 39, wore a sheen of dust from the cemetery on her black shoes.
"I think it becomes more of a ritual, but your feelings don't go away," she said. "It's still fresh. It's still raw."
Jessica Correa, 21, lost her brother Danny, 25, who was an intern at Marsh & McLennan and was finishing his bachelor's degree at Berkeley College in Paramus, N.J. "He was just getting started," she said. "He could have been the brightest star." Mr. Correa had a daughter named Katrina, who is now 8.
"It was just really, really strange. It comes so close to Sept. 11, and there's a hurricane named after her," said Ms. Correa, Katrina's aunt. "It brought back so much. The posting of the names, people looking for their families, children looking for their parents. Whether it's hatred or whether it's a natural disaster, there's still lives destroyed."
Brother David Schlatter, a Franciscan friar from Wilmington, Del., stood at the corner of Cortlandt and Church Streets and rang a 5,000-pound brass bell mounted on a trailer, once for each victim of the attacks. "Throughout the centuries, humanity has used bells for special moments," he said. "It resonates deeply with the human spirit.
Five cooks from the Millenium Hilton Hotel across the street from ground zero stepped outside in their white uniforms to pay tribute to their 75 lost colleagues from the Windows onthe World restaurant in the World Trade Center. "Including my best friend," said Musleh Ahmed, 46.
It was the first time the anniversary fell on a Sunday. In St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church in Belle Harbor, Queens, the second verse of the opening hymn, "Be Not Afraid," seemed to connect Katrina and Sept. 11: "If you pass through raging waters in the sea, you shall not drown. If you walk amid the burning flames, you shall not be harmed. If you stand before the pow'r of hell and death is at your side, know that I am with you through it all."
Yesterday afternoon, more than 200 bands played what was collectively called the September Concert in 20 parks in New York City, including Central Park, Union Square and Washington Square, to "celebrate universal humanity and fill the sky with music instead of tears," in the words of Robert Varkony, 43, who helped coordinate one of the events.
Others turned to volunteerism to mark the day, some through an organization called New York Cares. Mort and Merle Price crouched down at Pier 4 in Brooklyn and pulled at the blue stem grass growing up in the two flower beds that had gone to seed. They were married 39 years ago on Sept. 11, 1966.
"It's really hard to have a celebration on a day that's so tragic, so we decided to participate in a project that would commemorate the day," Mrs. Price said.
Memorial services were also held in less predictable places around the world. In Iraq, in the town of Tikrit, insurgents fired mortars at National Guard troops, both a few hours before and a few hours after a ceremony that began at 4:46 p.m. there. At least one soldier appeared to have been injured.
In Keshcarrigan, Ireland, more than 200 people marched behind local firefighters and a bagpipe band to unveil a stone bench and plaque on a lakeshore, dedicated to the Rev. Mychal Judge, the Roman Catholic priest and Fire Department chaplain who was among the first responders to die on 9/11.
Father Judge's father, who died when the chaplain was a young boy, lived at the site before he immigrated to the United States in 1926, so the son felt a particular attachment to the place, family friends said. A cook rose early to start spit-roasting an enormous 130-pound pig in the backyard of Gerty's Pub, to feed the crowd after the formalities.
"He'd love all the fuss," said Liam Coleman, a lieutenant with the New York Fire Department, vacationing in Ireland. "He didn't mind the spotlight at all."
In Kenya, a country hit twice by Qaeda bombers, a memorial service was held in Nairobi. Ben Ole Koissaba complained that the United States has yet to collect the 14 cows that a village donated to the country in 2002. "If they aren't going to accept the gift, they should be checking the animals from time to time, or they should give them back," he said.
Back in New York, bright spotlights symbolizing the two lost towers were turned on last night, as has been the custom each year.
Earlier at ground zero, Chris Burke, the founder of Tuesday's Children, which provides counseling and assistance to children who lost parents in the attack, and who himself lost a brother, Thomas D. Burke, said this anniversary was different for another reason.
"This year, for the first time, there is laughter and smiles through the tears," he said. "The realities have sunk in. This is the time you decide whether you will mire yourself in 9/11 or if you will live and go on with the rest of your life. That's what my brother would have wanted. That's what every brother would have wanted."
He motioned to one of the white tents where the siblings had gathered as they waited to recite the names. "People are telling stories in there," Mr. Burke said. "That hasn't really happened before. This should be an affirmation of life."
On using *giggles* that penguin movie in conservative stuffs. Apparently, conservatives never heard about the gay penguins in Central Park, or about the fact that penguin couples who fail to have kids split up, or that dead baby penguins have been used by their parents as pillows, or that no loving God would ever condemn an entire species to live in Antarctica *by design*.
March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder
By JONATHAN MILLER
On the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com, an opponent of abortion wrote that the movie "verified the beauty of life and the rightness of protecting it."
At a conference for young conservatives, the editor of National Review urged participants to see the movie because it promoted monogamy. A widely circulated Christian magazine said it made "a strong case for intelligent design."
The movie is "March of the Penguins," and of all the reactions it has evoked, perhaps the most surprising is its appeal to conservatives. They are hardly its only audience; the film is the second highest grossing documentary of all time, behind "Fahrenheit 9/11."
But conservative groups have turned its stirring depiction of the mating ordeals of emperor penguins into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.
"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing."
Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: "This is the first movie they've enjoyed since 'The Passion of the Christ.' This is 'The 'Passion of the Penguins.' "
In part, the movie's appeal to conservatives may lie in its soft-pedaling of topics like evolution and global warming. The filmmakers say they did not consciously avoid those topics - indeed, they say they are strong believers in evolutionary theory - but they add that they wanted to create a film that would reach as many people as possible.
"It's obvious that global warming has an impact on the reproduction of the penguins," Luc Jacquet, the director, told National Geographic Online. "But much of public opinion appears insensitive to the dangers of global warming. We have to find other ways to communicate to people about it, not just lecture them."
In a subsequent interview for this article, he added, "My intention was to tell the story in the most simple and profound way and to leave it open to any reading."
Likewise, the only allusion to evolution in "March of the Penguins" is a line near the beginning, intoned in the English-language version by the narrator, Morgan Freeman: "For millions of years they have made their home on the darkest, driest, windiest and coldest continent on earth. And they've done so pretty much alone."
The movie goes on to follow the penguins as they trek back and forth over 70 miles of ice to their breeding ground and huddle together to protect their eggs in temperatures that average 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
To Andrew Coffin, writing in the widely circulated Christian publication World Magazine, that is a winning argument for the theory that life is too complex to have arisen through random selection.
"That any one of these eggs survives is a remarkable feat - and, some might suppose, a strong case for intelligent design," he wrote. "It's sad that acknowledgment of a creator is absent in the examination of such strange and wonderful animals. But it's also a gap easily filled by family discussion after the film."
Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, told the young conservatives' gathering last month: "You have to check out 'March of the Penguins.' It is an amazing movie. And I have to say, penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy. These things - the dedication of these birds is just amazing."
Other religious conservatives have seized on the movie as a parable of steadfast faith. In Sidney, Ohio, Ben Hunt, a minister at the 153 House Churches Network, has coordinated trips to the local theater to see the film. (He describes the organization as a Christian denomination with nine churches spread over Ohio and Minnesota.)
"Some of the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians," he said of the penguins. "The penguin is falling behind, is like some Christians falling behind. The path changes every year, yet they find their way, is like the Holy Spirit."
Mr. Hunt has provided a form on the Web site lionsofgod.com that can be downloaded and taken to the film. "Please use the notebook, flashlight and pen provided," it says, "to write down what God speaks to you as He speaks it to you."
Not all conservatives find the movie a rebuke to Darwin's theory. "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature," the columnist George F. Will asked recently, "why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?"
The American distributors of the film, Warner Independent Pictures and National Geographic Feature Films, insist that the movie is simply a tale about penguins and that any attempt to divine a deeper meaning is misguided.
"We did not have discussions of what should be in from a social, cultural or political perspective at all," said Adam Leipzig, president of National Geographic Feature Films. "We just wanted to make sure that it was accurate."
Or as Laura Kim, a vice president of Warner Independent, put it: "You know what? They're just birds."
Oh, but they have become so much more than that.
Richard A. Blake, co-director of the film studies program at Boston College and the author of "The Lutheran Milieu of the Films of Ingmar Bergman" said that like many films, "March of the Penguins" was open to a religious interpretation.
"You get a sense of these animals - following their natural instincts - are really exercising virtue that for humans would be quite admirable," he said. "I could see it as a statement on monogamy or condemnation of gay marriage or whatever the current agenda is."
Jordan Roberts, who wrote the narration for Mr. Freeman, said he was surprised that the movie had been adopted by opponents of evolution.
Though he acknowledged that "we didn't talk about the battle between evolution and creationism," he added, "I did say this has been going on for millions of years, so I did throw my hat into the ring in terms of the Bible."
As for global warming, Mr. Roberts said only, "I wish the film had more of that."
But to Mr. Medved, the talk show host, the avoidance of such issues was a strong point.
"I think the prime purpose of the movie is to touch people's hearts," he said. "It's very smart to avoid talking about intelligent design or global warming. Why bring it in?"
On salvaging items from New Orleans.
In the Ripples, Two Men Salvage the Memories
By JAMES BENNET
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 12 - An unlikely pair of second-story men has taken on a stirring mission in the urban swamp of New Orleans.
With a crowbar and a flat-bottom boat, the two have been helping people break into their own homes and steal back from the city's most audacious looters - the falling water and rising mold - some reminders of what was: an inherited painting, a homemade quilt, a colorful print made by a child's hand that has since grown much bigger.
"Here's what I've learned," said the captain, Ramsey Skipper, a building contractor whose own home is underwater and whose wife and two children have taken refuge with family members near Houston. "This chapter is over. It was a beautiful chapter in our lives. So it's important - for the kids, especially - to have something to remember."
Mr. Skipper has also learned more prosaic lessons, like how to use a grinding jerk to free a boat that has run aground on a car. He shifts all passengers to the stern and guns the reverse. "Look at the antenna," he muttered after one grounding, nodding at the telltale stalk.
He has learned that body bags, with their tubular shape and many handles, make "the best transport bags ever" for belongings, fitting right through a window.
Mr. Skipper's bowman is Laurent Guérin, a 46-year-old French-born freelance photographer who lives in Taos, N.M., and came to New Orleans to photograph the destruction. Mr. Guérin wound up, for the most part, setting his Leica cameras down to help.
"You have to be a U.S. citizen first, and a photojournalist after," he said.
To break into John Peuler's house on Louis XIV Street, Mr. Skipper pressed the bow between the white columns of the front portico. Then Mr. Guérin crouched in the bow and put a lifejacket on one shoulder. Mr. Skipper, 41, put a foot on the life jacket and grabbed the iron rail of the portico roof to haul himself up. He smashed a window, then unlocked and opened it. At other houses, when no window was in reach, Mr. Skipper clambered onto the roof, ripped off a ventilator, and wriggled his 6-foot frame through the hole.
After Mr. Peuler, 53, also scaled Mr. Guérin, he began ransacking his own bedroom. Standing nearby, Mr. Skipper spoke of how his passengers set their priorities for salvage, performing a kind of emotional triage.
"If we only kept the things we truly loved in our homes," he said, "we'd have so much space."
Mr. Peuler's sun-filled second floor seemed untroubled. But down the stairs, furniture floated in inky water a few feet from the ceiling. Above it, mold was silently climbing roofward.
On his first visit to New Orleans, Mr. Guérin, who worked in Iraq, has learned a little more about American culture.
"There are more guns here than in Baghdad!" he cried as he helped remove Mr. Peuler's hunting shotguns.
Mr. Guérin and his captain named Skipper have been working the water-logged Lakeview neighborhood, where homes recently fetched from $200,000 to more than $1 million. Mr. Skipper believes thousands of houses will have to be erased.
On their trips together, with the boat's depth meter oscillating from 2 to 13 feet, Mr. Guérin kept an eye out for hazards like downed wires and submerged fences. With a boathook he pushed aside a sailboat, the Lucky Split, that blocked an alley.
Mr. Guérin debated with Mr. Skipper over which streets were clear, pronouncing with relish names like Fleur de Lis and Marshall Foch. Mr. Skipper replied in his own, soft accent, also derived in part from Mr. Guérin's native country. They called each other "man." Mr. Skipper grew up boating in Louisiana's bayous and bays, and Mr. Guérin off the Brittany coast.
Blue-and-white street signs project just above the water, lending a jarring note of seeming coordination to the radical reshaping of the cityscape. Before the levees were repaired, tides swept Lakeview. Over the weekend, the water was impounded, still and smooth, and it formed a dark mirror for the houses, trees and sky.
"There's almost a certain beauty to it," Mr. Guérin mused. "It's very strange."
By Monday, a current pulled the water like a sheet southward, toward the pumps. The propeller was now striking some curbs as the crew ferried Dr. Leo Seoane, 36, to his house on Canal Street to find his family cat, Sharpie. The water had already drained from his elevated first floor, and Dr. Seoane and the crew entered easily.
"Oh my God," he gasped, as he looked inside his home.
A front window was smashed and Sharpie was gone, hopefully taken by an animal rescue group plying these waters. Inside, on one door, a poster showed Yoda raising a hand in a warding gesture. "This room protected by the Force," it declared. "But, sadly, not cleaned up by it."
The flood had gotten past Yoda and into the room of Dr. Seoane's two little boys, but he happily scooped up an untouched teddy bear and an Obi Wan Kenobi action figure.
His mood brightened as he collected possessions like a wedding picture and a baptismal outfit. He pressed Mr. Guérin to accept a surviving bottle of Lafitte Rothschild. "You make a Frenchman very happy," Mr. Guérin declared, before surreptitiously returning the wine, slipping it among the other salvaged items.
With the water falling fast, the two men suspended their mission Monday so Mr. Skipper could visit his family. He was arranging through Lutheran Church Charities for three more flat-bottomed boats, and he was urging an Arkansas National Guard unit to use high-clearance trucks to carry the boats and fresh crews over shallow patches.
With the outboard off, the only sound in Lakeview is the keening of dying homes; some alarm systems, falling back on their batteries, are still trying to warn departed owners that the electricity has failed. An acrid smell rises from the water.
Mr. Skipper learned the value of collecting mementos after returning to his own house, which he built, to retrieve belongings like his 7-year-old daughter's tea set. His wife had seemed depressed, he said, but lit up after he told her what he had done.
But emergency officials then pressed Mr. Skipper and Mr. Guérin to use their boat to help retrieve bodies. Mr. Guérin described how the men tore a vent off one house and saw the body of an elderly woman in the rafters. The two decided they could be of more use to the living.
Mr. Guérin moved in with Mr. Skipper in nearby Metaire, in the home of Mr. Skipper's pastor, Bradley Drew, 43. Mr. Guérin delights in informing Mr. Drew over drinks that God does not exist and that each man is all alone.
"That's tragic, man," Mr. Drew, unpersuaded, finally said toward midnight Saturday.
But Mr. Drew has learned something from the Frenchman: He wants to find a wasp-waisted espresso pot like Mr. Guérin's, which brews coffee the pastor loves.
To those who came to the improvised landing at Veterans Memorial Boulevard, longing for their homes, Mr. Skipper spoke matter-of-factly, with his granite self-assurance. He told people with one-story houses that they could probably salvage nothing. That was his message to one young man who hoped to retrieve a parrot he left before the storm.
Yet there was no doubting the depth of Mr. Skipper's feeling for his neighbors. He repeatedly expressed frustration that emergency officials had not helped residents salvage belongings, and he accepted nothing but thanks for the risks he ran. He knows how it is.
"It's O.K., I've done my crying already," he said on Saturday, as he stared from his second-floor landing down at the water and mold consuming his home, on General Diaz Street. "At least, I think I have."
Then, with evening coming on, he agreed to make a last stop, on Memphis Street, at a home belonging to an old friend of a reporter's: One more scramble up a pitched roof; another rough passage through a vent hole into thick, moldy air that burned in the throat; a sweat-soaked stuffing of too-few surviving treasures into garbage bags, and back out on the roof.
Half a moon had risen in a darkening lilac sky, and Mr. Skipper worried whether he could beat the gathering dusk to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, more than a mile away.
Swerving around signposts and wires, he opened his throttle all the way, trusting that he knew where the cars and Dumpsters lurked. Astern, the wake lifted the heavy, purple water in slow waves that caught dimming images of the lightless houses and then crashed against them.
And an article with no subscription on transgenderism.
Gazans Revel as They Sift Through Ex-Settlements
By STEVEN ERLANGER
NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip, Sept. 12 - Throughout the abandoned Israeli settlements of Gaza, Monday was a carnival of celebration, political grandstanding and widespread scavenging for a Palestinian population whose occupiers vanished overnight, as the Israeli Army pulled its last soldier out of Gaza at 6:50 a.m.
But hours before the divisional commander, Aviv Kochavi, became the last Israeli soldier to leave, thousands of Palestinians had entered the once-forbidden settlements that, together with their military infrastructure, consumed about 30 percent of the densely populated Gaza Strip.
The celebrations were orchestrated in part by the rival factions within Palestinian society - Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Fatah, the mainspring of the Palestinian Authority. Their flags of black, green and yellow were more numerous than the Palestinian flag, and were prominent on abandoned Israeli military outposts and public buildings.
Hamas, which is running hard for votes in January's legislative elections, paraded through numerous settlements, with armed and often masked men on loudspeaker trucks. Hamas posters and graffiti proclaimed the victory of resistance. Islamic Jihad, which is not running, did the same, as did armed members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a Fatah contingent.
Some who came did so to see the land they had worked before the 1967 war, when Israel took Gaza from Egypt; others honored friends who had died in attacks on the Israeli settlers; still others came to salvage whatever could be ripped away and sold from the large piles of rubble the Israelis had left behind.
Donkey carts were piled with bathroom fixtures, pieces of metal, skeins of wire and long pieces of wood, to feed home ovens. Men, women and children worked with a seriousness of purpose, trying to take home some little personal benefit from the return of lands many feel will somehow, as usual, end up in the hands of the wealthy or well connected.
By the light of burning egg crates, Samir Abu Hattah whacked away at window glass with a metal pole, shouting, "Go to hell, Zionists!"
Then he directed a group of young men to start pulling down the electrical wiring, aluminum window frames and doors of an agricultural warehouse here in Neve Dekalim.
"I feel a great sense of victory today," said Mr. Hattah, 40, who lives across the tall concrete wall in the Khan Yunis refugee camp and who used to work in this settlement before the second Palestinian uprising began in 2000. "The Zionists built it and then they destroyed it," he said with satisfaction. "The lesson I've learned, and I will pass it on to my sons, is that no matter how long it takes, the occupiers will leave because of resistance."
Behind him, a settlement synagogue built in the shape of a huge Star of David was smoldering, fires inside sending smoke through the edges of the star. Atop the building, in the dim smoky moment before dawn, one could see a huge green flag of Hamas, with a smaller Palestinian flag flying below it.
A few minutes later, a large black flag of Islamic Jihad was flying just under the Hamas flag, above the Palestinian one.
Five minutes later, the Palestinian flag had been taken down altogether.
Israel had leveled all the other buildings in the settlements in an agreement with the Palestinians but chose, at the last minute, not to destroy the synagogues because a number of Israeli conservatives argued that it was wrong for Jews to destroy synagogues. As a result, settlement synagogues were standing and vulnerable to vandalism.
As daylight brightened, more Palestinians poured into the former settlements, which are still surrounded by huge fortifications and electronic fences. Some went sightseeing, some went salvaging, some went to swim from beaches that had been closed to them. They were joined by hundreds of schoolchildren in uniform who were given the day off as a holiday. Three people were reported drowned.
Ahmad el-Kurd, the new Hamas mayor of Deir Al Balah, cheek by jowl with the former settlement of Kfar Darom, said his joy was mixed as he remembered how much he loved, as a boy, the unspoiled dunes that were fenced off for Kfar Darom. "If they could only give me back the land as it was 38 years ago," he said. "Now, it's only piles of rubble."
In Kfar Darom, there was an extensive march of armed fighters, but the synagogue there was protected from burning by security forces who made a kind of headquarters out of it. Palestinian officials said they expected to pull down the remaining synagogues themselves, and a bulldozer began the task in Netzarim.
He was happy today, Mr. Kurd said, but his happiness was also tempered "because of the continuing occupation of Jenin and Nablus and Jerusalem, which are also part of Palestine." And until Israel resolved the question of how to allow Palestinians and their goods to enter and exit freely from Gaza, to Egypt and to the West Bank, he said, "Israel remains an occupier," a position supported by the Palestinian Authority.
"If there is no freedom of movement, don't consider the Palestinians free," Mr. Kurd said. "We will not accept Gaza as a big prison."
The Israeli government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says that the life of Gaza is up to the Palestinians now, and that only security considerations are preventing a resolution of the issue of Israel's continued control over Gaza's border with Egypt. The Israelis have proposed a complicated six-month provisional procedure, which the Palestinians reject. For their part, the Israelis have so far rejected a proposal by the Western mediator, James D. Wolfensohn, to allow Palestinians to pass through Rafah to Egypt with European officials supervising the process on behalf of Israel.
Thousands of Palestinians slipped through gaps in the border wall on Monday and crossed from Gaza to Egypt at Rafah in a scene of chaos and jubilation, with tearful family reunions and one man reportedly shot dead. Witnesses said an Egyptian soldier shot and killed a Palestinian who crossed into Rafah, but the Egyptian government denied the report, insisting the victim must have died from a stray bullet fired by those celebrating the withdrawal of Israeli border guards.
"I categorically deny this report, which is completely baseless," said Suleiman Awad, official spokesman of President Hosni Mubarak. "It's inconceivable that Egyptian soldiers should have opened fire on the Palestinians after letting 3,000 cross the border for family reunions."
The leader of Hamas's military wing in the sprawling Khan Yunis camp, Abu Moath, came with his armed entourage to take a look at Neve Dekalim. He had not been here in a very long time, he said, and recognized little among the piles of rubble, atop which young men dug for metal scraps, plastic chairs and an old washing machine.
Asked about Israel's last-minute decision not to destroy the last 24 synagogues in Gaza but to ask the Palestinians to protect them, Abu Moath scoffed. "They must be destroyed as symbols of Israel and the occupation," he said. "They promised to destroy them, and we are only carrying out the ruling of their own court." As he spoke, two of his entourage showed their colleagues the car batteries they had found.
On the wall of a synagogue here was a Hamas slogan: "Push them out as they pushed you out!" And nearby, there was another: "Yes for freedom! No for Jews! - Hamas."
Fatma Abu Reziq, whose large, poor Khan Yunis family was profiled in The New York Times in June, said she was one of the first Palestinians into Neve Dekalim, arriving at about 3 a.m., even before the last Israeli tank rumbled away. "People were afraid at first, and then they saw people like me get in, and they became brave," she said.
Even she, she said blushing, had salvaged a few items from this settlement to brighten her home, a few hundred yards across the no man's land from the towering cement wall that still cuts off Khan Yunis from Neve Dekalim. "Now that the Israelis are gone, our lives will be better and quieter," she said. "I can't describe my happiness to see the flag of Palestine flying here."
One on clocks, Versailles, and history.
Synchronizing the Present and Past in a Timeless Place
By MARLISE SIMONS
VERSAILLES, France, Sept. 5 - Once a week, Bernard Draux, a discreet Frenchman, joins the secret life of Versailles, a palace where even without its long-gone kings much still happens away from the public eye.
Mr. Draux is the chateau's official clockmaker and timekeeper. His task is to wind and repair close to 100 antique clocks that once served Europe's most glittering court.
Every Monday, when the monumental palace is closed, he sets out on his solitary mission with a small set of precision tools and a heavy bundle of keys, opening up contraptions that are often as baroque as the chateau itself.
There are gilded clock faces, fixed onto bronze camels or marble elephants. Some have music boxes hidden inside. Grand 18th-century pieces, which remarkably have survived theft and revolution, record not just the hour, date and month but also the movements of the planets.
None of this seems to faze Mr. Draux, 49, a man with a mournful face and a heavy mustache, whose own modest wristwatch runs on a battery.
There he was, on a recent round, cantering through the chateau's labyrinth of back stairs, slipping in and out of salons and alcoves as if this were a visit to an old family home. He made frequent stops, tugging deftly at a weight here, nudging a pendulum there.
Why, he was asked, was such an effort being made to record the time in such a timeless place?
"Eh bien, the clocks belong here," he said with an irrefutable air. "They have two functions. They must preserve their beauty and they must work properly. It doesn't look good when clocks are not accurate."
But it is not quite punctuality - the French like a little leeway here - that perpetuates the task of the official timekeeper. France gives much weight to traditional skills, even as it adopts its share of American-style mass-produced consumer goods.
Mr. Draux's task may be one of a kind, but it offers a glimpse of the enormous energy and cost the country puts into preserving its heirlooms, its great museums and, with those, many here believe, the national cultural identity.
Arguably, the tradition of cherishing traditional workmanship and heritage is as much part of Europe as it is of France. But the French articulate more loudly their need to preserve distinction and often warn that globalized manufacture and trade, if left unfettered, may end up covering the world with a blanket of sameness.
The government employs a legion of men and women - their numbers vary according to the projects under way - adept at carving antique wood or stone, repairing stucco or wrought iron, or rehabilitating yards of ancient frames and weavings. Such trades, and the unfashionable patience they require, may gain little public applause elsewhere, but here they rank as high as patriotism.
Investing in history has its rewards. As one of the world's main tourist destinations, France received 75 million visitors in 2004. Versailles is seen by 10 million people a year.
Curators say the palace, with its 700 rooms and thousands of windows, statues, chandeliers and curlicues, has been high maintenance ever since the 1660's when the Sun King, Louis XIV, first moved in. Today a staff of 900 looks after it, although hundreds more are now involved in the museum's most ambitious renovation project. The grand overhaul began in 2003 and is expected to take 17 years and more than $450 million in government and private money.
Mr. Draux hopes the restoration will include some of the exceptional clocks that are in storage, awaiting repair.
Clocks may not loom large in the lore about the extravagance of the royalty here, but by many accounts there was little free time.
"Clocks were very important here, even in the 17th century, because life at the court was full of rigor and rituals," said Mathieu da Vinha, a historian at the Versailles Research Center. "There were fixed times for the rising of the king, for prayers, for government meetings, for meals, for walks, for the hunt, for the concerts and so on. Everyone had to be on their toes."
Louis XIV had not one, but four clockmakers working for him, he said. "When he traveled, the clockmakers, and many clocks, went with him."
That accounts for the legacy of the timepieces here, and for the work of Mr. Draux, who learned his craft from his father and grandfather. "Each clock here is unique because they were made like a work of art, before the age of mass production," he said.
He stopped at the oldest clock, marked 1706, shining his flashlight on a complex array of weights, toothed wheels, bolts and pivots.
"Each one is so different, I don't really know a clock until I have taken it apart," he murmured. "And of course there are no instructions."
He activated the clock's music box and a mechanical show that usually is blocked "because it causes traffic jams in this room." As the small hammers sounded midday, a pair of eagles flapped their wings and a miniature king on a throne popped out. "Hear that sound," he said. "It's still in great form."
Mr. Draux showed his awe before the clock of Passement, named after its maker, an engineer and astronomer. It was crowned with a glass sphere. Inside it, golden rings registered the movements of the planets. "This is a perpetual calendar, it can show the date until the year 9999," he said.
Did he know how to repair it? No, he said, "fortunately, there's been no need."
He moved along, sidestepping the staff applying beeswax to the interminable palace floors. It seemed easy to forget the time here. But Mr. Draux was pressing on, because he still had to fix a few laggards.
As if to show he was not living in the past, Mr. Draux said he also looked after two giant electric clocks in the Stade de France, Paris's main sports stadium. But he does draw the line against modernity somewhere.
"I will not use a cellphone," he said. "That's too stressful. In my job, I have to concentrate."
Still more (from previous posts, that is) on 9/11.
Marking Four Years Since 9/11 While Mourning a Fresher Loss
By MICHAEL WILSON
The nation marked the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks yesterday in familiar ways - the readings of long lists of victims, the black bands worn across shined badges, the framed portraits clutched by loved ones - even while struggling with its latest tragedy, the death and devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
The day of grief was remembered against a backdrop of new loss. And it was all but impossible to isolate one event from the other. Speakers, from a ceremony at ground zero to a worship service in Washington, paused to honor the hurricane's victims, while rescue workers slogging through New Orleans observed moments of silence for their fallen colleagues now four years gone.
A few blocks from where hijackers slammed two jetliners into the two towers of the World Trade Center, a rudimentary collection jar - a cardboard box with a slit cut into the top - on the countertop of a deli asked for donations, not for Lower Manhattan, but for the Hurricane Katrina survivors. "Fancy Food will match every dollar you give," it promised.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his short address at ground zero, referred to the deadly storm, as well as to the July 7 terrorist bombings in London: "Today, as we recite the names of those we lost, our hearts turn as well toward London, our sister city, remembering those she has just lost as well. And to Americans suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, our deepest sympathies go out to you this day."
Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey of New Jersey, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani also made brief remarks at the ceremony, which lasted more than four hours under a bright, sunny sky.
In Washington, not far from where American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon, President Bush and Laura Bush attended a morning service at St. John's Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, along with Vice President Dick Cheney and Lynne Cheney.
The Rev. Dr. Luis León, quoting Ernest Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms" in his sermon, spoke of becoming strong again in broken places, namely New York and New Orleans. Later in the day, the president made his third visit to the gulf region since the hurricane.
Near Shanksville, Pa., at the site where the fourth airliner crashed after passengers stormed the hijackers in the cockpit, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said, "They were innocent lives taken by incredible evil," according to Agence France-Presse.
In New Orleans, police officers from New York City paused in post-hurricane streets yesterday morning to read the names of their colleagues who were killed on 9/11.
"We said we'd never forget," Inspector Michael V. Quinn said. "What we showed here today is that we still remember those who lost their lives on Sept. 11."
Hard work in New Orleans eased the pain of the day for some. Officer Joseph Stynes, who works in the Bronx Anticrime Unit in New York, said thoughts of the anniversary had not occurred to him until the ceremony began. "I was thinking about things down here, more so, than what happened there."
Elsewhere in New Orleans, about 50 emergency management workers and military officers participated in a brief but emotional ceremony at City Hall, where generators provided a limited power supply and scores of city, military and emergency workers from all over the country spend each night on cots or on the floor.
"We can't imagine the level of devastation that has hit your city," said John Paczkowski, the emergency management director for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who escaped from 1 World Trade Center minutes before the building collapsed.
To be sure, the anniversary ceremonies maintained the same focus of remembrance as in years past. Ground zero became, from before 8 a.m. until after 1 p.m., an island of emotion. Listening to the hypnotic rhythm of first, middle and last names read from lecterns near the pit, it seemed at times impossible that four years had passed, as voice after voice cracked with emotion.
For the first time, siblings of the victims read the names, a new face of pain; parents and children have read in past years. The siblings threaded personal remarks among the names: "I miss talking with you. I miss laughing with you." "Shake it easy, Sal." "We miss you, bro. Be safe." "Help Katrina hurricane victims also."
Many of the family members wore T-shirts, buttons or signs with their relatives' pictures on them. A few American flags were sprinkled throughout the crowd, but most family members just wore the gold-and-white ribbons that city officials gave them at check-in.
The family of Manuel Del Valle Jr., a firefighter, gathered his framed photograph and their F.D.N.Y. shirts that bear his name and made their way first to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, which opens early on Sept. 11 for family members, and then hurried toward ground zero on the subway to get there before 8:46 a.m. A cousin, Marisol Torres, 39, wore a sheen of dust from the cemetery on her black shoes.
"I think it becomes more of a ritual, but your feelings don't go away," she said. "It's still fresh. It's still raw."
Jessica Correa, 21, lost her brother Danny, 25, who was an intern at Marsh & McLennan and was finishing his bachelor's degree at Berkeley College in Paramus, N.J. "He was just getting started," she said. "He could have been the brightest star." Mr. Correa had a daughter named Katrina, who is now 8.
"It was just really, really strange. It comes so close to Sept. 11, and there's a hurricane named after her," said Ms. Correa, Katrina's aunt. "It brought back so much. The posting of the names, people looking for their families, children looking for their parents. Whether it's hatred or whether it's a natural disaster, there's still lives destroyed."
Brother David Schlatter, a Franciscan friar from Wilmington, Del., stood at the corner of Cortlandt and Church Streets and rang a 5,000-pound brass bell mounted on a trailer, once for each victim of the attacks. "Throughout the centuries, humanity has used bells for special moments," he said. "It resonates deeply with the human spirit.
Five cooks from the Millenium Hilton Hotel across the street from ground zero stepped outside in their white uniforms to pay tribute to their 75 lost colleagues from the Windows onthe World restaurant in the World Trade Center. "Including my best friend," said Musleh Ahmed, 46.
It was the first time the anniversary fell on a Sunday. In St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Church in Belle Harbor, Queens, the second verse of the opening hymn, "Be Not Afraid," seemed to connect Katrina and Sept. 11: "If you pass through raging waters in the sea, you shall not drown. If you walk amid the burning flames, you shall not be harmed. If you stand before the pow'r of hell and death is at your side, know that I am with you through it all."
Yesterday afternoon, more than 200 bands played what was collectively called the September Concert in 20 parks in New York City, including Central Park, Union Square and Washington Square, to "celebrate universal humanity and fill the sky with music instead of tears," in the words of Robert Varkony, 43, who helped coordinate one of the events.
Others turned to volunteerism to mark the day, some through an organization called New York Cares. Mort and Merle Price crouched down at Pier 4 in Brooklyn and pulled at the blue stem grass growing up in the two flower beds that had gone to seed. They were married 39 years ago on Sept. 11, 1966.
"It's really hard to have a celebration on a day that's so tragic, so we decided to participate in a project that would commemorate the day," Mrs. Price said.
Memorial services were also held in less predictable places around the world. In Iraq, in the town of Tikrit, insurgents fired mortars at National Guard troops, both a few hours before and a few hours after a ceremony that began at 4:46 p.m. there. At least one soldier appeared to have been injured.
In Keshcarrigan, Ireland, more than 200 people marched behind local firefighters and a bagpipe band to unveil a stone bench and plaque on a lakeshore, dedicated to the Rev. Mychal Judge, the Roman Catholic priest and Fire Department chaplain who was among the first responders to die on 9/11.
Father Judge's father, who died when the chaplain was a young boy, lived at the site before he immigrated to the United States in 1926, so the son felt a particular attachment to the place, family friends said. A cook rose early to start spit-roasting an enormous 130-pound pig in the backyard of Gerty's Pub, to feed the crowd after the formalities.
"He'd love all the fuss," said Liam Coleman, a lieutenant with the New York Fire Department, vacationing in Ireland. "He didn't mind the spotlight at all."
In Kenya, a country hit twice by Qaeda bombers, a memorial service was held in Nairobi. Ben Ole Koissaba complained that the United States has yet to collect the 14 cows that a village donated to the country in 2002. "If they aren't going to accept the gift, they should be checking the animals from time to time, or they should give them back," he said.
Back in New York, bright spotlights symbolizing the two lost towers were turned on last night, as has been the custom each year.
Earlier at ground zero, Chris Burke, the founder of Tuesday's Children, which provides counseling and assistance to children who lost parents in the attack, and who himself lost a brother, Thomas D. Burke, said this anniversary was different for another reason.
"This year, for the first time, there is laughter and smiles through the tears," he said. "The realities have sunk in. This is the time you decide whether you will mire yourself in 9/11 or if you will live and go on with the rest of your life. That's what my brother would have wanted. That's what every brother would have wanted."
He motioned to one of the white tents where the siblings had gathered as they waited to recite the names. "People are telling stories in there," Mr. Burke said. "That hasn't really happened before. This should be an affirmation of life."
On using *giggles* that penguin movie in conservative stuffs. Apparently, conservatives never heard about the gay penguins in Central Park, or about the fact that penguin couples who fail to have kids split up, or that dead baby penguins have been used by their parents as pillows, or that no loving God would ever condemn an entire species to live in Antarctica *by design*.
March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder
By JONATHAN MILLER
On the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com, an opponent of abortion wrote that the movie "verified the beauty of life and the rightness of protecting it."
At a conference for young conservatives, the editor of National Review urged participants to see the movie because it promoted monogamy. A widely circulated Christian magazine said it made "a strong case for intelligent design."
The movie is "March of the Penguins," and of all the reactions it has evoked, perhaps the most surprising is its appeal to conservatives. They are hardly its only audience; the film is the second highest grossing documentary of all time, behind "Fahrenheit 9/11."
But conservative groups have turned its stirring depiction of the mating ordeals of emperor penguins into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.
"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing."
Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: "This is the first movie they've enjoyed since 'The Passion of the Christ.' This is 'The 'Passion of the Penguins.' "
In part, the movie's appeal to conservatives may lie in its soft-pedaling of topics like evolution and global warming. The filmmakers say they did not consciously avoid those topics - indeed, they say they are strong believers in evolutionary theory - but they add that they wanted to create a film that would reach as many people as possible.
"It's obvious that global warming has an impact on the reproduction of the penguins," Luc Jacquet, the director, told National Geographic Online. "But much of public opinion appears insensitive to the dangers of global warming. We have to find other ways to communicate to people about it, not just lecture them."
In a subsequent interview for this article, he added, "My intention was to tell the story in the most simple and profound way and to leave it open to any reading."
Likewise, the only allusion to evolution in "March of the Penguins" is a line near the beginning, intoned in the English-language version by the narrator, Morgan Freeman: "For millions of years they have made their home on the darkest, driest, windiest and coldest continent on earth. And they've done so pretty much alone."
The movie goes on to follow the penguins as they trek back and forth over 70 miles of ice to their breeding ground and huddle together to protect their eggs in temperatures that average 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
To Andrew Coffin, writing in the widely circulated Christian publication World Magazine, that is a winning argument for the theory that life is too complex to have arisen through random selection.
"That any one of these eggs survives is a remarkable feat - and, some might suppose, a strong case for intelligent design," he wrote. "It's sad that acknowledgment of a creator is absent in the examination of such strange and wonderful animals. But it's also a gap easily filled by family discussion after the film."
Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, told the young conservatives' gathering last month: "You have to check out 'March of the Penguins.' It is an amazing movie. And I have to say, penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy. These things - the dedication of these birds is just amazing."
Other religious conservatives have seized on the movie as a parable of steadfast faith. In Sidney, Ohio, Ben Hunt, a minister at the 153 House Churches Network, has coordinated trips to the local theater to see the film. (He describes the organization as a Christian denomination with nine churches spread over Ohio and Minnesota.)
"Some of the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians," he said of the penguins. "The penguin is falling behind, is like some Christians falling behind. The path changes every year, yet they find their way, is like the Holy Spirit."
Mr. Hunt has provided a form on the Web site lionsofgod.com that can be downloaded and taken to the film. "Please use the notebook, flashlight and pen provided," it says, "to write down what God speaks to you as He speaks it to you."
Not all conservatives find the movie a rebuke to Darwin's theory. "If an Intelligent Designer designed nature," the columnist George F. Will asked recently, "why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?"
The American distributors of the film, Warner Independent Pictures and National Geographic Feature Films, insist that the movie is simply a tale about penguins and that any attempt to divine a deeper meaning is misguided.
"We did not have discussions of what should be in from a social, cultural or political perspective at all," said Adam Leipzig, president of National Geographic Feature Films. "We just wanted to make sure that it was accurate."
Or as Laura Kim, a vice president of Warner Independent, put it: "You know what? They're just birds."
Oh, but they have become so much more than that.
Richard A. Blake, co-director of the film studies program at Boston College and the author of "The Lutheran Milieu of the Films of Ingmar Bergman" said that like many films, "March of the Penguins" was open to a religious interpretation.
"You get a sense of these animals - following their natural instincts - are really exercising virtue that for humans would be quite admirable," he said. "I could see it as a statement on monogamy or condemnation of gay marriage or whatever the current agenda is."
Jordan Roberts, who wrote the narration for Mr. Freeman, said he was surprised that the movie had been adopted by opponents of evolution.
Though he acknowledged that "we didn't talk about the battle between evolution and creationism," he added, "I did say this has been going on for millions of years, so I did throw my hat into the ring in terms of the Bible."
As for global warming, Mr. Roberts said only, "I wish the film had more of that."
But to Mr. Medved, the talk show host, the avoidance of such issues was a strong point.
"I think the prime purpose of the movie is to touch people's hearts," he said. "It's very smart to avoid talking about intelligent design or global warming. Why bring it in?"
On salvaging items from New Orleans.
In the Ripples, Two Men Salvage the Memories
By JAMES BENNET
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 12 - An unlikely pair of second-story men has taken on a stirring mission in the urban swamp of New Orleans.
With a crowbar and a flat-bottom boat, the two have been helping people break into their own homes and steal back from the city's most audacious looters - the falling water and rising mold - some reminders of what was: an inherited painting, a homemade quilt, a colorful print made by a child's hand that has since grown much bigger.
"Here's what I've learned," said the captain, Ramsey Skipper, a building contractor whose own home is underwater and whose wife and two children have taken refuge with family members near Houston. "This chapter is over. It was a beautiful chapter in our lives. So it's important - for the kids, especially - to have something to remember."
Mr. Skipper has also learned more prosaic lessons, like how to use a grinding jerk to free a boat that has run aground on a car. He shifts all passengers to the stern and guns the reverse. "Look at the antenna," he muttered after one grounding, nodding at the telltale stalk.
He has learned that body bags, with their tubular shape and many handles, make "the best transport bags ever" for belongings, fitting right through a window.
Mr. Skipper's bowman is Laurent Guérin, a 46-year-old French-born freelance photographer who lives in Taos, N.M., and came to New Orleans to photograph the destruction. Mr. Guérin wound up, for the most part, setting his Leica cameras down to help.
"You have to be a U.S. citizen first, and a photojournalist after," he said.
To break into John Peuler's house on Louis XIV Street, Mr. Skipper pressed the bow between the white columns of the front portico. Then Mr. Guérin crouched in the bow and put a lifejacket on one shoulder. Mr. Skipper, 41, put a foot on the life jacket and grabbed the iron rail of the portico roof to haul himself up. He smashed a window, then unlocked and opened it. At other houses, when no window was in reach, Mr. Skipper clambered onto the roof, ripped off a ventilator, and wriggled his 6-foot frame through the hole.
After Mr. Peuler, 53, also scaled Mr. Guérin, he began ransacking his own bedroom. Standing nearby, Mr. Skipper spoke of how his passengers set their priorities for salvage, performing a kind of emotional triage.
"If we only kept the things we truly loved in our homes," he said, "we'd have so much space."
Mr. Peuler's sun-filled second floor seemed untroubled. But down the stairs, furniture floated in inky water a few feet from the ceiling. Above it, mold was silently climbing roofward.
On his first visit to New Orleans, Mr. Guérin, who worked in Iraq, has learned a little more about American culture.
"There are more guns here than in Baghdad!" he cried as he helped remove Mr. Peuler's hunting shotguns.
Mr. Guérin and his captain named Skipper have been working the water-logged Lakeview neighborhood, where homes recently fetched from $200,000 to more than $1 million. Mr. Skipper believes thousands of houses will have to be erased.
On their trips together, with the boat's depth meter oscillating from 2 to 13 feet, Mr. Guérin kept an eye out for hazards like downed wires and submerged fences. With a boathook he pushed aside a sailboat, the Lucky Split, that blocked an alley.
Mr. Guérin debated with Mr. Skipper over which streets were clear, pronouncing with relish names like Fleur de Lis and Marshall Foch. Mr. Skipper replied in his own, soft accent, also derived in part from Mr. Guérin's native country. They called each other "man." Mr. Skipper grew up boating in Louisiana's bayous and bays, and Mr. Guérin off the Brittany coast.
Blue-and-white street signs project just above the water, lending a jarring note of seeming coordination to the radical reshaping of the cityscape. Before the levees were repaired, tides swept Lakeview. Over the weekend, the water was impounded, still and smooth, and it formed a dark mirror for the houses, trees and sky.
"There's almost a certain beauty to it," Mr. Guérin mused. "It's very strange."
By Monday, a current pulled the water like a sheet southward, toward the pumps. The propeller was now striking some curbs as the crew ferried Dr. Leo Seoane, 36, to his house on Canal Street to find his family cat, Sharpie. The water had already drained from his elevated first floor, and Dr. Seoane and the crew entered easily.
"Oh my God," he gasped, as he looked inside his home.
A front window was smashed and Sharpie was gone, hopefully taken by an animal rescue group plying these waters. Inside, on one door, a poster showed Yoda raising a hand in a warding gesture. "This room protected by the Force," it declared. "But, sadly, not cleaned up by it."
The flood had gotten past Yoda and into the room of Dr. Seoane's two little boys, but he happily scooped up an untouched teddy bear and an Obi Wan Kenobi action figure.
His mood brightened as he collected possessions like a wedding picture and a baptismal outfit. He pressed Mr. Guérin to accept a surviving bottle of Lafitte Rothschild. "You make a Frenchman very happy," Mr. Guérin declared, before surreptitiously returning the wine, slipping it among the other salvaged items.
With the water falling fast, the two men suspended their mission Monday so Mr. Skipper could visit his family. He was arranging through Lutheran Church Charities for three more flat-bottomed boats, and he was urging an Arkansas National Guard unit to use high-clearance trucks to carry the boats and fresh crews over shallow patches.
With the outboard off, the only sound in Lakeview is the keening of dying homes; some alarm systems, falling back on their batteries, are still trying to warn departed owners that the electricity has failed. An acrid smell rises from the water.
Mr. Skipper learned the value of collecting mementos after returning to his own house, which he built, to retrieve belongings like his 7-year-old daughter's tea set. His wife had seemed depressed, he said, but lit up after he told her what he had done.
But emergency officials then pressed Mr. Skipper and Mr. Guérin to use their boat to help retrieve bodies. Mr. Guérin described how the men tore a vent off one house and saw the body of an elderly woman in the rafters. The two decided they could be of more use to the living.
Mr. Guérin moved in with Mr. Skipper in nearby Metaire, in the home of Mr. Skipper's pastor, Bradley Drew, 43. Mr. Guérin delights in informing Mr. Drew over drinks that God does not exist and that each man is all alone.
"That's tragic, man," Mr. Drew, unpersuaded, finally said toward midnight Saturday.
But Mr. Drew has learned something from the Frenchman: He wants to find a wasp-waisted espresso pot like Mr. Guérin's, which brews coffee the pastor loves.
To those who came to the improvised landing at Veterans Memorial Boulevard, longing for their homes, Mr. Skipper spoke matter-of-factly, with his granite self-assurance. He told people with one-story houses that they could probably salvage nothing. That was his message to one young man who hoped to retrieve a parrot he left before the storm.
Yet there was no doubting the depth of Mr. Skipper's feeling for his neighbors. He repeatedly expressed frustration that emergency officials had not helped residents salvage belongings, and he accepted nothing but thanks for the risks he ran. He knows how it is.
"It's O.K., I've done my crying already," he said on Saturday, as he stared from his second-floor landing down at the water and mold consuming his home, on General Diaz Street. "At least, I think I have."
Then, with evening coming on, he agreed to make a last stop, on Memphis Street, at a home belonging to an old friend of a reporter's: One more scramble up a pitched roof; another rough passage through a vent hole into thick, moldy air that burned in the throat; a sweat-soaked stuffing of too-few surviving treasures into garbage bags, and back out on the roof.
Half a moon had risen in a darkening lilac sky, and Mr. Skipper worried whether he could beat the gathering dusk to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, more than a mile away.
Swerving around signposts and wires, he opened his throttle all the way, trusting that he knew where the cars and Dumpsters lurked. Astern, the wake lifted the heavy, purple water in slow waves that caught dimming images of the lightless houses and then crashed against them.
And an article with no subscription on transgenderism.
