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Jewish Prayers Are Modernized in New Book
During the Jewish “Days of Awe,” culminating with Yom Kippur, many Conservative Jews will be turning the pages of a prayer book that no longer regards God as “awesome.”
The word, which has become an all-purpose exclamation that spread from Valley Girls to much of American teenagerdom, has lost its spiritual punch and dignity, say the authors of a new book for the High Holy Days that tries to bring the prayers in tune with contemporary times.
The authors prefer “awe-inspiring.”
“If you say God is awesome, you are immediately in street language, rather than inspiring language,” said Rabbi Edward Feld, who headed the committee that over 12 years wrote and translated the new book.
This mahzor, as the prayer book for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is known, is the Conservative movement’s first updating in nearly 40 years. Called Lev Shalem, Hebrew for “whole heart,” it hews close to the text’s traditional Hebrew, but adds translations, commentaries and optional readings to adapt the book to modern sensibilities.
The writing was partly driven by an awareness that Jews who come to synagogue on the High Holy Days may not be as knowledgeable as weekly synagogue-goers and may be more ambivalent about their faith. It also includes transliterations of every widely sung prayer for those who cannot read Hebrew.
“It went a long way toward meeting people where they actually are,” said Rabbi Gordon Tucker of Temple Israel in White Plains, N.Y.
He added, “The richness of the margins in this mahzor spoke to them.”
During Yom Kippur’s Yizkor memorial for dead relatives, which this year falls on Saturday, the new prayer book will for the first time include a prayer for a deceased “partner”— an effort to include gay Jews — and also one for “a parent who was hurtful.”
“His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and dismay,” the passage says.
The revised mahzor includes works by modern poets like Yehuda Amichai and at least two by Gentiles— Denise Levertov and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Given that the movement has become more egalitarian, ordaining women as rabbis since 1985, the mahzor also includes more language that is gender-neutral and names female Biblical figures like Hannah and Miriam as models of righteous heroism.
So far, 120,000 mahzors have been ordered by 125 of the 850 Conservative congregations worldwide, said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly. The book can also be bought on Amazon.
While the pages are more crowded with the added commentary, Rabbi Feld said he thought the new mahzor would feel congenial in an Internet age.
“People are used to multitasking and hypertext and are able to absorb multiple flows of information,” he said.
Louis D. Levine, 70, a Temple Israel member, said he missed some lines deleted from the Avinu Malkeinu prayer, particularly one asking God to avenge spilled Jewish blood.
“I’m not a warmongering, right-wing nut,” Mr. Levine said, “but that line represented a real historical response to the horrors visited upon Israel.”
Still, such misgivings were few, and Mr. Levine said he was pleased that his wife, Pat, a convert, told him that “for the first time she understood what some of the prayers were all about.”
Roma, on Move, Test Europe’s ‘Open Borders’
BUCHAREST, Romania — This city is full of stark, Soviet-era housing blocks, and the grimmest among them — gray towers of one-room apartments with communal bathrooms and no hot water — are given over to the Roma population.
Roma like Maria Murariu, 62, who tends to her dying husband in a foul-smelling room no bigger than a jail cell. She has not found work in five years.
“There is not much for us in Romania,” she said recently, watching her husband sleep. “And now that we are in the European Union, we have the right to go to other countries. It is better there.”
Thousands of Romania’s Roma, also known as Gypsies, have come to a similar conclusion in recent years, heading for the relative wealth of Western Europe, and setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” are.
A summit meeting of European leaders on Thursday degenerated into open discord over how to handle the unwanted immigrants. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vowed to keep dismantling immigrant camps and angrily rejected complaints from European Commission officials that the French authorities were illegally singling out Roma for deportation.
Migration within the 27 nations of the European Union has become a combustible issue during the economic downturn. The union’s latest expansion, which brought in the relatively poor nations of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, has renewed concern that the poor, traveling far from home in search of work, will become a burden on wealthier countries. The migration of the Roma is also raising questions about the obligations of Romania and Bulgaria to fulfill promises they made when they joined the union. Romania, for instance, mapped out a strategy for helping the Roma, but financed little of it. Mr. Sarkozy has demanded that the Romanian government do more to aid the Roma at home.
Much of Western Europe has reacted with hostility to itinerant Roma, who often have little education or practical skills. Some Roma have found marginal jobs collecting scrap iron or painting houses. But others have signed up for welfare or drifted into begging and petty thievery, living in unsightly camp sites.
In recent weeks, Mr. Sarkozy has tried to revive his support on the political right by deporting thousands of them, offering 300 euros, about $392, to those who go home voluntarily, and bulldozing their encampments.
The European Commission has threatened legal action against Paris over the deportation, calling it disgraceful and illegal.
The dispute peaked at lunch Thursday between Mr. Sarkozy and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission, the European Union’s executive body.
“There was a big argument — I could also say a scandal — between the president of the European Commission and the French president,” said the Bulgarian prime minister, Boyko Borisov, according to the Bulgarian daily Dnevnik.
Mr. Sarkozy denied a major rift, and remained unswayed. “We will continue to dismantle the illegal camps, whoever is there,” he said at a news conference. “Europe cannot close its eyes to illegal camps.”
Expulsions seem unlikely to offer a long-term solution. Many of the deported Roma are already planning their return.
Privately, some Romanian officials snicker over the French action. “They are just giving the Roma a paid vacation,” one official said.
Still, advocates for the Roma hope that the latest conflict will force the European Union to get serious about helping the Roma, who are openly reviled in most Eastern and Central European countries where they have lived in large numbers for centuries, most often under appalling conditions.
“There is nothing to focus the minds of policy makers like an army of poor people heading your way,” said Bernard Rorke, the director of Roma Initiatives for the nonprofit Open Society Foundation.
There is little reliable data on the Roma population. Originally from India, the Roma were virtual slaves until the 19th century, working for aristocrats and in monasteries.
When democracy took hold, they were freed. But they were landless, uneducated and dark-skinned, and they had few prospects.
Human rights activists say that Roma women are often sent to separate maternity wards. Their children, when they attend school, are frequently steered into classes for the mentally handicapped.
In Romania, one census counted 500,000 Roma. But some advocates say the number is closer to two million.
Those who make it out of abject poverty rarely admit their ancestry — a factor that makes it harder for Roma to combat the discrimination they face, advocates say.
In the years that Romania was negotiating to get into the European Union, it promised programs to help the Roma integrate into Romanian society.
But government officials concede that few materialized. “I think you will see the current administration do better,” said Ilie Dinca, the director of the Romanian National Agency for Roma.
Budget cutbacks have hurt the few successful efforts that exist. Hundreds of mediators hired to help the Roma get their children into school and receive health benefits have been fired recently.
“What you see here these days is terrible conditions,” said Nicolae Stoica, who runs Roma Access, an advocacy group. “They have no hope of getting jobs. If they get 20 euros a month from collecting scrap metal, that’s a lot. How can we tell them not to go to France and beg on the streets?”
Flortina Ghita, 21, said her family once lived in a building in the center of Constanta, Romania’s second largest city. But city officials evicted them, saying the buildings had structural damage. The family now lives in shacks made of carpets, scraps of corrugated tin and plastic sheeting set up not far from railroad tracks. The only source of water is a train station more than a mile away.
Mrs. Ghita said her family had been told to fill out forms to get housing, but no one can read. Her son, Sorim, 5, is not in school, she said, because she cannot afford the clothing, notebooks and class fees.
Still, the Ghita family was savvy enough about Europe. Mrs. Ghita had paperwork showing that her mother had been to Belgium for medical care. “Her sister lives there and she helped us,” Mrs. Ghita said.
Experts say the Roma population has been battered by a combination of factors. Crafts that once sustained them, such as making brass pots and shoeing horses, are now obsolete. Recent European regulations standardizing the sale of livestock pushed them out of one of their few remaining businesses because they could not handle the required paperwork.
Some aspects of Gypsy culture have not helped matters, experts say. It is a clannish, strongly patriarchal society where youngsters are pushed into early marriage and education has not been much valued.
Not all Roma are poor, however. In the village of Barbulesti, about 40 miles northeast of Bucharest, there are signs of success. The village is a bright cluster of mustard- and ketchup-colored houses, with gaudy turrets and ornate gutters, many still under construction.
The village has a Roma mayor, Ion Cutitaru, 59, the only one in the country, he says. He estimates that a third of the village’s 7,000 residents have moved to Western Europe. They look for work there, he says, but beg when they can find nothing else.
“They make do,” he said, “and then they come back and build their houses.”
Twenty-eight Roma residents from Barbulesti were recently expelled from France. Among them was Ionel Costache, 30, who said he would return to France in a week or two.
“My son, who had eye problems, he got a 7,000-euro operation there that he would never have gotten here. And when you don’t have work, you can still eat with their social assistance,” he said. “France is a much better place than Romania.”
3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution
Businesses in the South Park district of San Francisco generally sell either Web technology or sandwiches and burritos. Bespoke Innovations plans to sell designer body parts.
The company is using advances in a technology known as 3-D printing to create prosthetic limb casings wrapped in embroidered leather, shimmering metal or whatever else someone might want.
Scott Summit, a co-founder of Bespoke, and his partner, an orthopedic surgeon, are set to open a studio this fall where they will sell the limb coverings and experiment with printing entire customized limbs that could cost a tenth of comparable artificial limbs made using traditional methods. And they will be dishwasher-safe, too.
“I wanted to create a leg that had a level of humanity,” Mr. Summit said. “It’s unfortunate that people have had a product that’s such a major part of their lives that was so underdesigned.”
A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.
The technology has been radically transformed from its origins as a tool used by manufacturers and designers to build prototypes.
These days it is giving rise to a string of never-before-possible businesses that are selling iPhone cases, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing and architectural models. And while some wonder how successfully the technology will make the transition from manufacturing applications to producing consumer goods, its use is exploding.
A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.
It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.
“There is nothing to be gained by going overseas except for higher shipping charges,” Mr. Summit said.
A wealth of design software programs, from free applications to the more sophisticated offerings of companies including Alibre and Autodesk, allows a person to concoct a product at home, then send the design to a company like Shapeways, which will print it and mail it back.
“We are enabling a class of ordinary people to take their ideas and turn those into physical, real products,” said J. Paul Grayson, Alibre’s chief executive. Mr. Grayson said his customers had designed parts for antique cars, yo-yos and even pieces for DNA analysis machines.
“We have a lot of individuals going from personal to commercial,” Mr. Grayson said.
Manufacturers and designers have used 3-D printing technology for years, experimenting on the spot rather than sending off designs to be built elsewhere, usually in Asia, and then waiting for a model to return. Boeing, for example, might use the technique to make and test air-duct shapes before committing to a final design.
Depending on the type of job at hand, a typical 3-D printer can cost from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Stratasys and 3D Systems are among the industry leaders. And MakerBot Industries sells a hobbyist kit for under $1,000.
Moving the technology beyond manufacturing does pose challenges. Customized products, for example, may be more expensive than mass-produced ones, and take longer to make. And the concept may seem out of place in a world trained to appreciate the merits of mass consumption.
But as 3-D printing machines have improved and fallen in cost along with the materials used to make products, new businesses have cropped up.
Freedom of Creation, based in Amsterdam, designs and prints exotic furniture and other fixtures for hotels and restaurants. It also makes iPhone cases for Apple, eye cream bottles for L’Oreal and jewelry and handbags for sale on its Web site.
Various designers have turned to the company for clothing that interlaces plastic to create form-hugging blouses, while others have requested spiky coverings for lights that look as if they could be the offspring of a sea urchin and a lamp shade.
“The aim was always to bring this to consumers instead of keeping it a secret at NASA and big manufacturers,” said Janne Kyttanen, 36, who founded Freedom of Creation about 10 years ago. “Everyone thought I was a lunatic when we started.”
His company can take risks with “out there” designs since it doesn’t need to print an object until it is ordered, Mr. Kyttanen said. Ikea can worry about mass appeal.
LGM, based in Minturn, Colo., uses a 3-D printing machine to create models of buildings and resorts for architectural firms.
“We used to take two months to build $100,000 models,” said Charles Overy, the founder of LGM. “Well, that type of work is gone because developers aren’t putting up that type of money anymore.”
Now, he said, he is building $2,000 models using an architect’s design and homegrown software for a 3-D printer. He can turn around a model in one night.
Next, the company plans to design and print doorknobs and other fixtures for buildings, creating unique items. “We are moving from handcraft to digital craft,” Mr. Overy said.
But Contour Crafting, based in Los Angeles, has pushed 3-D printing technology to its limits.
Based on research done by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, Contour Crafting has created a giant 3-D printing device for building houses. The start-up company is seeking money to commercialize a machine capable of building an entire house in one go using a machine that fits on the back of a tractor-trailer.
The 3-D printing wave has caught the attention of some of the world’s biggest technology companies. Hewlett-Packard, the largest paper-printer maker, has started reselling 3-D printing machines made by Stratasys. And Google uses the CADspan software from LGM to help people using its SketchUp design software turn their creations into 3-D printable objects.
At Bespoke, Mr. Summit has built a scanning contraption to examine limbs using a camera. After the scan, a detailed image is transmitted to a computer, and Mr. Summit can begin sculpting his limb art.
He uses a 3-D printer to create plastic shells that fit around the prosthetic limbs, and then wraps the shells in any flexible material the customer desires, be it an old bomber jacket or a trusty boot.
“We can do a midcentury modern or a Harley aesthetic if that’s what someone wants,” Mr. Summit said. “If we can get to flexible wood, I am totally going to cut my own leg off.”
Mr. Summit and his partner, Kenneth B. Trauner, the orthopedic surgeon, have built some test models of full legs that have sophisticated features like body symmetry, locking knees and flexing ankles. One artistic design is metal-plated in some areas and leather-wrapped in others.
“It costs $5,000 to $6,000 to print one of these legs, and it has features that aren’t even found in legs that cost $60,000 today,” Mr. Summit said.
“We want the people to have input and pick out their options,” he added. “It’s about going from the Model T to something like a Mini that has 10 million permutations.”
Celebrating Id al-Fitr Under Watchful Eyes of China
Barbershop floors were littered with the remains of men’s haircuts and beard-trims. Women in head scarves walked the dusty streets carrying plastic bags stuffed with food from the bazaars: melons, grapes, fried sweets, Frisbee-shaped bread, chunks of freshly butchered sheep. Children with generous parents strutted around in new clothes: suits for the boys, white dresses for the girls.
So went the preparations for Id al-Fitr, the three-day festival that unfolded this weekend to mark the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
Kashgar being Kashgar, the most Islamic city in the restive desert region of Xinjiang, the occasion was also marked by more somber moments, as the Chinese authorities kept a close eye on events.
At dawn on Friday, the first day of Id, a convoy of military trucks and police cars with flashing lights rolled past the public plaza outside the Id Kah Mosque, where thousands of men and boys were congregating outdoors for morning prayers. Police officers blocked foreigners trying to go to the rooftop of the Orda Hotel, which overlooks the distinctive yellow mosque, the largest in China, to watch the prayer ceremony.
“It’s not as tense as last year, but the police are still worried about problems,” said one ethnic Uighur man who, like many in this city, spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The remote city of Kashgar, at the crossroads of Central Asia, has existed under a pall since Chinese security forces tightened their grip here after deadly ethnic rioting in July 2009 in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. But there was a respite over the weekend, as the religious festivities around Id reinforced for the Uighurs their sense of tradition and culture.
“This is a time when we are supposed to be happy and think of God,” the Uighur man said.
In recent months, the authorities in Xinjiang have let up on some of the harsh security measures they took after the rioting — Internet services have been restored, for example — but officials here still believe they have plenty of reasons to be anxious.
Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in the region, bridle at discrimination by the Han, who govern all of China. Some demand a Uighur nation called East Turkestan. Last month, an explosion in the town of Aksu killed seven people and injured 14 others, officials said. The police detained a Uighur man.
Kashgar at the start of Id appeared to be a city at peace, though, and offered a vivid taste of civilization for those traveling here from the desolate Pamir mountains of Central Asia: teeming bazaars and restaurants packed with families gorging themselves at iftar, the daily breaking of the fast at sunset. Grilled lamb kebabs, roast chicken, mutton-stuffed dumplings, oily rice called polo, doughy noodles called laghman — all were in abundance, as they were in the days when Kashgar blossomed into a Silk Road oasis town, overflowing with the wealth that comes from trade between empires.
In a new concrete home on the edge of the old city, a young woman, Guli, invited two foreigners to try freshly baked lamb-filled pastries that her family was eating at twilight. A stove burned in the courtyard.
Almost all the traditional, mud-walled dwellings around Guli’s home had been razed as part of a government plan to build new housing that began in early 2009. It appeared that at least two-thirds of the labyrinthine old city south of the Id Kah Mosque had been destroyed, leaving nothing but lots full of dust where some of the most atmospheric neighborhoods in Central Asia once stood. Guli said her home had been spared because her parents had built it just last year, at a cost of $4,400.
“The government’s plan is to make Kashgar into a developed city, like other parts of China,” she said.
She added that she did not know where her neighbors had gone, but that they would return once the government built new quarters here. “They look forward to living in new homes,” she said.
But one Uighur man said most people were opposed to the destruction of the old city. “The government is doing it no matter what people think,” he said.
He opened a picture book with an old photograph of the Id Kah Mosque. In front of it was a green park that he said had been destroyed in the mid-1990s to make way for a modern plaza. “Our history is being lost,” he said.
On Friday morning, ethnic Han policemen stood on the corners of the plaza as Uighur men carrying prayer rugs streamed there from all corners of the city for the first prayer of Id. Many had gathered before sunrise at their local mosques, then walked with their white-turbaned imams to the Id Kah Mosque.
The prayer started at 7:30, the head imam’s words flowing from mosque to loudspeaker to plaza.
At once, thousands of men bowed their heads, then knelt on the ground, surrendering to God.
The ceremony ended after a half-hour. The men poured back into the streets and alleyways. It was time to feast at home with the family, the first meal in a month that they would eat during daylight hours.
One Uighur grinned at a French man walking beside him.
“Today is a good day,” he said in English. “There are no Chinese in the streets.”
Confessing to Crime, but Innocent
Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence at his trial for rape, but one overwhelming factor put him away: he confessed.
At trial, the jury heard details that prosecutors insisted only the rapist could have known, including the fact that the rapist hit the 75-year-old victim in the head with the handle of a silver table knife he found in the house. DNA evidence would later show that another man committed the crime. But that vindication would come only years after Mr. Lowery had served his sentence and was paroled in 1991.
“I beat myself up a lot” about having confessed, Mr. Lowery said in a recent interview. “I thought I was the only dummy who did that.”
But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators.
New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.
An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions — by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.
To defense lawyers, the new research is eye opening. “In the past, if somebody confessed, that was the end,” said Peter J. Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project, an organization based in Manhattan. “You couldn’t imagine going forward.”
The notion that such detailed confessions might be deemed voluntary because the defendants were not beaten or coerced suggests that courts should not simply look at whether confessions are voluntary, Mr. Neufeld said. “They should look at whether they are reliable.”
Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.
Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,” he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.”
Of the exonerated defendants in the Garrett study, 26 — more than half — were “mentally disabled,” under 18 at the time or both. Most were subjected to lengthy, high-pressure interrogations, and none had a lawyer present. Thirteen of them were taken to the crime scene.
Mr. Lowery’s case shows how contamination occurs. He had come under suspicion, he now believes, because he had been partying and ran his car into a parked car the night of the rape, generating a police report. Officers grilled him for more than seven hours, insisting from the start that he had committed the crime.
Mr. Lowery took a lie detector test to prove he was innocent, but the officers told him that he had failed it.
“I didn’t know any way out of that, except to tell them what they wanted to hear,” he recalled. “And then get a lawyer to prove my innocence.”
Proving innocence after a confession, however, is rare. Eight of the defendants in Professor Garrett’s study had actually been cleared by DNA evidence before trial, but the courts convicted them anyway.
In one such case involving Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a murder in Poughkeepsie, prosecutors argued that the victim may have been sexually active and so the DNA evidence may have come from another liaison she had. The prosecutors asked the jury to focus on Mr. Deskovic’s highly detailed confession and convict him.
While Professor Garrett suggests that leaking facts during interrogations is sometimes unintentional, Mr. Lowery said that the contamination of his questioning was clearly intentional.
After his initial confession, he said, the interrogators went over the crime with him in detail — asking how he did it, but correcting him when he got the facts wrong. How did he get in? “I said, ‘I kicked in the front door.’ ” But the rapist had used the back door, so he admitted to having gone around to the back. “They fed me the answers,” he recalled.
Some defendants’ confessions even include mistakes fed by the police. Earl Washington Jr., a mentally impaired man who spent 18 years in prison and came within hours of being executed for a murder he did not commit, stated in his confession that the victim had worn a halter top. In fact, she had worn a sundress, but an initial police report had stated that she wore a halter top.
Steven A. Drizin, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, said the significance of contamination could not be understated. While errors might lead to wrongful arrest, “it’s contamination that is the primary factor in wrongful convictions,” he said. “Juries demand details from the suspect that make the confession appear to be reliable — that’s where these cases go south.”
Jim Trainum, a former policeman who now advises police departments on training officers to avoid false confessions, explained that few of them intend to contaminate an interrogation or convict the innocent.
“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’ that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to reoffend.”
Mr. Trainum has become an advocate of videotaping entire interrogations. Requirements for recording confessions vary widely across the country. Ten states require videotaping of at least some interrogations, like those in crimes that carry the death penalty, and seven state supreme courts have required or strongly encouraged recording.
These days Mr. Lowery, 51, lives in suburban Kansas City, in a house he is renovating with some of the $7.5 million in settlement money he received, along with apologies from officials in Riley County, Kan., where he was arrested and interrogated.
He has trouble putting the past behind him. “I was embarrassed,” he said. “You run in to so many people who say, ‘I would never confess to a crime.’ ”
He does not argue with them, because he knows they did not experience what he went through. “You’ve never been in a situation so intense, and you’re naïve about your rights,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ll say to get out of that situation.”
Hybrids May Thrive Where Parents Fear to Tread
On May 15, 1985, trainers at Hawaii Sea Life Park were stunned when a 400- pound gray female bottlenose dolphin named Punahele gave birth to a dark-skinned calf that partly resembled the 2,000-pound male false killer whale with whom she shared a pool. The calf was a wholphin, a hybrid that was intermediate to its parents in some characteristics, like having 66 teeth compared with the bottlenose’s 88 and the 44 of the false killer whale, a much larger member of the dolphin family.
In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot a bear that had white fur like a polar bear’s but had brown patches, long claws and a hump like a grizzly bear’s. DNA analysis confirmed the animal was a hybrid of the two species.
While one might think that these oddities are examples of some kind of moral breakdown in the animal kingdom, it turns out that hybridization among distinct species is not so rare. Some biologists estimate that as many as 10 percent of animal species and up to 25 percent of plant species may occasionally breed with another species. The more important issue is not whether such liaisons occasionally produce offspring, but the vitality of the hybrid and whether two species might combine to give rise to a third, distinct species.
While several examples of human-bred animal hybrids are well known and can thrive in captivity including zorses (zebra-horse), beefalo (bison-beef cattle) and, of course, mules (donkey-horse), naturally occurring animal hybrids have many factors working against their longer-term success.
One of the main obstacles is that, even if members of different species might mate, when the two species are too distant genetically or carry different numbers of chromosomes, the offspring are usually inviable or infertile (like zorses and mules), and are therefore evolutionary dead ends. A second problem is that any hybrid will usually be vastly outnumbered and outcompeted by one or both parent species.
But because species hybrids create new combinations of genes, it is possible that some combinations might enable hybrids to adapt to conditions in which neither parent may fare as well. Several such examples are now known from nature. Furthermore, DNA analysis is now allowing biologists to better decipher the histories of species and to detect past hybridization events that have contributed new genes and capabilities to various kinds of organisms including, it now appears, ourselves.
The familiar sunflower has provided great examples of adaptation by hybrids. Loren H. Rieseberg of the University of British Columbia and colleagues have found that two widespread species, the common sunflower and prairie sunflower, have combined at least three times to give rise to three hybrid species: the sand sunflower, the desert sunflower, and the puzzle sunflower.
The parental species thrive on moist soils in the central and Western states, but the hybrids are restricted to more extreme habitats. The sand sunflower, for instance, is limited to sand dunes in Utah and northern Arizona and the puzzle sunflower to brackish salt marshes in West Texas and New Mexico.
The species distributions suggest that the hybrids thrive where the parents cannot. Indeed, recent field tests that examined the relative ability of the parental species to thrive in the hybrids’ habitat, and vice versa, found that the sand sunflower was better able than its parents to germinate, grow and survive in its dune habitat but fared relatively poorly in parental habitats. Similarly, the puzzle sunflower was much better at growing in salty conditions than its parents.
One lesson from the sunflowers appears to be that hybrids may succeed if they can exploit a different niche from their parents. The same phenomenon has been discovered in animal hybrids.
In the past 250 years, various forms of honeysuckle have been introduced to the Northeastern states. In the late 1990s, researchers led by Bruce McPheron of Pennsylvania State University discovered that this invasive honeysuckle was infested by a particular fruit fly species they called the Lonicera fly. When they analyzed DNA to determine its relationship to others, they were stunned to find that it was a hybrid of two closely related flies, the blueberry maggot and the snowberry maggot.
In laboratory experiments, the researchers found that the Lonicera hybrid preferred its honeysuckle host plant over its parent species’ host plants and that each parent species preferred its own host plant over the other’s. However, both parents also accepted honeysuckle. The researchers suggest that since the two parental species were thus more likely to encounter each other on honeysuckle in the wild, the newly invasive weed served as a catalyst for matings between the species and the formation of the hybrid species that now prefers honeysuckle.
The sunflower and Lonicera fly examples raise the question of whether hybridization between species has been more frequent than biologists once assumed. The most provocative report of possible hybridization came from the recent analysis of more than 60 percent of the Neanderthal genome sequence, which raised the specter of our ancestors commingling their genes with a long-diverged cousin.
Analyses of the overall genetic distance between Neanderthals and modern humans reveal that our DNA is 99.84 percent identical to that of Neanderthals. This small divergence indicates that the two lines split off from each other about 270,000 to 440,000 years ago. The fossil evidence shows that Neanderthals were restricted to Europe and Asia, whereas Homo sapiens originated in Africa. Various kinds of evidence indicate that modern humans migrated out of Africa and reached the Middle East more than 100,000 years ago and Europe by about 45,000 years ago, and would have or could have encountered Neanderthals for some time in each locale. The crucial question for paleontology, archaeology, and paleogenetics has been what transpired between the two species. To put it a little more crudely, did we date them or kill them, or perhaps both?
If the former, then there could be a bit of Neanderthal in some or all of us. The first comparisons of small sections of Neanderthal DNA did not indicate any hybridization, and the lack of interbreeding became a widely accepted conclusion. That remained the case until this year, when a much greater portion of the Neanderthal genome was obtained by Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. It now appears that 1 percent to 4 percent of the DNA sequence of Europeans and Asians, but not Africans, was contributed by Neanderthals mixing with Homo sapiens, perhaps in the Middle East 50,000 to 80,000 years ago. It is possible that some Neanderthal versions of genes enabled modern humans to adapt to new climates and habitats.
The discovery of hybrid species and the detection of past hybridizations are forcing biologists to reshape their picture of species as independent units. The barriers between species are not necessarily vast, unbridgeable chasms; sometimes they get crossed with marvelous results.
During the Jewish “Days of Awe,” culminating with Yom Kippur, many Conservative Jews will be turning the pages of a prayer book that no longer regards God as “awesome.”
The word, which has become an all-purpose exclamation that spread from Valley Girls to much of American teenagerdom, has lost its spiritual punch and dignity, say the authors of a new book for the High Holy Days that tries to bring the prayers in tune with contemporary times.
The authors prefer “awe-inspiring.”
“If you say God is awesome, you are immediately in street language, rather than inspiring language,” said Rabbi Edward Feld, who headed the committee that over 12 years wrote and translated the new book.
This mahzor, as the prayer book for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is known, is the Conservative movement’s first updating in nearly 40 years. Called Lev Shalem, Hebrew for “whole heart,” it hews close to the text’s traditional Hebrew, but adds translations, commentaries and optional readings to adapt the book to modern sensibilities.
The writing was partly driven by an awareness that Jews who come to synagogue on the High Holy Days may not be as knowledgeable as weekly synagogue-goers and may be more ambivalent about their faith. It also includes transliterations of every widely sung prayer for those who cannot read Hebrew.
“It went a long way toward meeting people where they actually are,” said Rabbi Gordon Tucker of Temple Israel in White Plains, N.Y.
He added, “The richness of the margins in this mahzor spoke to them.”
During Yom Kippur’s Yizkor memorial for dead relatives, which this year falls on Saturday, the new prayer book will for the first time include a prayer for a deceased “partner”— an effort to include gay Jews — and also one for “a parent who was hurtful.”
“His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and dismay,” the passage says.
The revised mahzor includes works by modern poets like Yehuda Amichai and at least two by Gentiles— Denise Levertov and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Given that the movement has become more egalitarian, ordaining women as rabbis since 1985, the mahzor also includes more language that is gender-neutral and names female Biblical figures like Hannah and Miriam as models of righteous heroism.
So far, 120,000 mahzors have been ordered by 125 of the 850 Conservative congregations worldwide, said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly. The book can also be bought on Amazon.
While the pages are more crowded with the added commentary, Rabbi Feld said he thought the new mahzor would feel congenial in an Internet age.
“People are used to multitasking and hypertext and are able to absorb multiple flows of information,” he said.
Louis D. Levine, 70, a Temple Israel member, said he missed some lines deleted from the Avinu Malkeinu prayer, particularly one asking God to avenge spilled Jewish blood.
“I’m not a warmongering, right-wing nut,” Mr. Levine said, “but that line represented a real historical response to the horrors visited upon Israel.”
Still, such misgivings were few, and Mr. Levine said he was pleased that his wife, Pat, a convert, told him that “for the first time she understood what some of the prayers were all about.”
Roma, on Move, Test Europe’s ‘Open Borders’
BUCHAREST, Romania — This city is full of stark, Soviet-era housing blocks, and the grimmest among them — gray towers of one-room apartments with communal bathrooms and no hot water — are given over to the Roma population.
Roma like Maria Murariu, 62, who tends to her dying husband in a foul-smelling room no bigger than a jail cell. She has not found work in five years.
“There is not much for us in Romania,” she said recently, watching her husband sleep. “And now that we are in the European Union, we have the right to go to other countries. It is better there.”
Thousands of Romania’s Roma, also known as Gypsies, have come to a similar conclusion in recent years, heading for the relative wealth of Western Europe, and setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” are.
A summit meeting of European leaders on Thursday degenerated into open discord over how to handle the unwanted immigrants. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France vowed to keep dismantling immigrant camps and angrily rejected complaints from European Commission officials that the French authorities were illegally singling out Roma for deportation.
Migration within the 27 nations of the European Union has become a combustible issue during the economic downturn. The union’s latest expansion, which brought in the relatively poor nations of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, has renewed concern that the poor, traveling far from home in search of work, will become a burden on wealthier countries. The migration of the Roma is also raising questions about the obligations of Romania and Bulgaria to fulfill promises they made when they joined the union. Romania, for instance, mapped out a strategy for helping the Roma, but financed little of it. Mr. Sarkozy has demanded that the Romanian government do more to aid the Roma at home.
Much of Western Europe has reacted with hostility to itinerant Roma, who often have little education or practical skills. Some Roma have found marginal jobs collecting scrap iron or painting houses. But others have signed up for welfare or drifted into begging and petty thievery, living in unsightly camp sites.
In recent weeks, Mr. Sarkozy has tried to revive his support on the political right by deporting thousands of them, offering 300 euros, about $392, to those who go home voluntarily, and bulldozing their encampments.
The European Commission has threatened legal action against Paris over the deportation, calling it disgraceful and illegal.
The dispute peaked at lunch Thursday between Mr. Sarkozy and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the commission, the European Union’s executive body.
“There was a big argument — I could also say a scandal — between the president of the European Commission and the French president,” said the Bulgarian prime minister, Boyko Borisov, according to the Bulgarian daily Dnevnik.
Mr. Sarkozy denied a major rift, and remained unswayed. “We will continue to dismantle the illegal camps, whoever is there,” he said at a news conference. “Europe cannot close its eyes to illegal camps.”
Expulsions seem unlikely to offer a long-term solution. Many of the deported Roma are already planning their return.
Privately, some Romanian officials snicker over the French action. “They are just giving the Roma a paid vacation,” one official said.
Still, advocates for the Roma hope that the latest conflict will force the European Union to get serious about helping the Roma, who are openly reviled in most Eastern and Central European countries where they have lived in large numbers for centuries, most often under appalling conditions.
“There is nothing to focus the minds of policy makers like an army of poor people heading your way,” said Bernard Rorke, the director of Roma Initiatives for the nonprofit Open Society Foundation.
There is little reliable data on the Roma population. Originally from India, the Roma were virtual slaves until the 19th century, working for aristocrats and in monasteries.
When democracy took hold, they were freed. But they were landless, uneducated and dark-skinned, and they had few prospects.
Human rights activists say that Roma women are often sent to separate maternity wards. Their children, when they attend school, are frequently steered into classes for the mentally handicapped.
In Romania, one census counted 500,000 Roma. But some advocates say the number is closer to two million.
Those who make it out of abject poverty rarely admit their ancestry — a factor that makes it harder for Roma to combat the discrimination they face, advocates say.
In the years that Romania was negotiating to get into the European Union, it promised programs to help the Roma integrate into Romanian society.
But government officials concede that few materialized. “I think you will see the current administration do better,” said Ilie Dinca, the director of the Romanian National Agency for Roma.
Budget cutbacks have hurt the few successful efforts that exist. Hundreds of mediators hired to help the Roma get their children into school and receive health benefits have been fired recently.
“What you see here these days is terrible conditions,” said Nicolae Stoica, who runs Roma Access, an advocacy group. “They have no hope of getting jobs. If they get 20 euros a month from collecting scrap metal, that’s a lot. How can we tell them not to go to France and beg on the streets?”
Flortina Ghita, 21, said her family once lived in a building in the center of Constanta, Romania’s second largest city. But city officials evicted them, saying the buildings had structural damage. The family now lives in shacks made of carpets, scraps of corrugated tin and plastic sheeting set up not far from railroad tracks. The only source of water is a train station more than a mile away.
Mrs. Ghita said her family had been told to fill out forms to get housing, but no one can read. Her son, Sorim, 5, is not in school, she said, because she cannot afford the clothing, notebooks and class fees.
Still, the Ghita family was savvy enough about Europe. Mrs. Ghita had paperwork showing that her mother had been to Belgium for medical care. “Her sister lives there and she helped us,” Mrs. Ghita said.
Experts say the Roma population has been battered by a combination of factors. Crafts that once sustained them, such as making brass pots and shoeing horses, are now obsolete. Recent European regulations standardizing the sale of livestock pushed them out of one of their few remaining businesses because they could not handle the required paperwork.
Some aspects of Gypsy culture have not helped matters, experts say. It is a clannish, strongly patriarchal society where youngsters are pushed into early marriage and education has not been much valued.
Not all Roma are poor, however. In the village of Barbulesti, about 40 miles northeast of Bucharest, there are signs of success. The village is a bright cluster of mustard- and ketchup-colored houses, with gaudy turrets and ornate gutters, many still under construction.
The village has a Roma mayor, Ion Cutitaru, 59, the only one in the country, he says. He estimates that a third of the village’s 7,000 residents have moved to Western Europe. They look for work there, he says, but beg when they can find nothing else.
“They make do,” he said, “and then they come back and build their houses.”
Twenty-eight Roma residents from Barbulesti were recently expelled from France. Among them was Ionel Costache, 30, who said he would return to France in a week or two.
“My son, who had eye problems, he got a 7,000-euro operation there that he would never have gotten here. And when you don’t have work, you can still eat with their social assistance,” he said. “France is a much better place than Romania.”
3-D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution
Businesses in the South Park district of San Francisco generally sell either Web technology or sandwiches and burritos. Bespoke Innovations plans to sell designer body parts.
The company is using advances in a technology known as 3-D printing to create prosthetic limb casings wrapped in embroidered leather, shimmering metal or whatever else someone might want.
Scott Summit, a co-founder of Bespoke, and his partner, an orthopedic surgeon, are set to open a studio this fall where they will sell the limb coverings and experiment with printing entire customized limbs that could cost a tenth of comparable artificial limbs made using traditional methods. And they will be dishwasher-safe, too.
“I wanted to create a leg that had a level of humanity,” Mr. Summit said. “It’s unfortunate that people have had a product that’s such a major part of their lives that was so underdesigned.”
A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another, much the same way a pastry chef makes baklava with sheets of phyllo dough.
The technology has been radically transformed from its origins as a tool used by manufacturers and designers to build prototypes.
These days it is giving rise to a string of never-before-possible businesses that are selling iPhone cases, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing and architectural models. And while some wonder how successfully the technology will make the transition from manufacturing applications to producing consumer goods, its use is exploding.
A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.
It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods.
“There is nothing to be gained by going overseas except for higher shipping charges,” Mr. Summit said.
A wealth of design software programs, from free applications to the more sophisticated offerings of companies including Alibre and Autodesk, allows a person to concoct a product at home, then send the design to a company like Shapeways, which will print it and mail it back.
“We are enabling a class of ordinary people to take their ideas and turn those into physical, real products,” said J. Paul Grayson, Alibre’s chief executive. Mr. Grayson said his customers had designed parts for antique cars, yo-yos and even pieces for DNA analysis machines.
“We have a lot of individuals going from personal to commercial,” Mr. Grayson said.
Manufacturers and designers have used 3-D printing technology for years, experimenting on the spot rather than sending off designs to be built elsewhere, usually in Asia, and then waiting for a model to return. Boeing, for example, might use the technique to make and test air-duct shapes before committing to a final design.
Depending on the type of job at hand, a typical 3-D printer can cost from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Stratasys and 3D Systems are among the industry leaders. And MakerBot Industries sells a hobbyist kit for under $1,000.
Moving the technology beyond manufacturing does pose challenges. Customized products, for example, may be more expensive than mass-produced ones, and take longer to make. And the concept may seem out of place in a world trained to appreciate the merits of mass consumption.
But as 3-D printing machines have improved and fallen in cost along with the materials used to make products, new businesses have cropped up.
Freedom of Creation, based in Amsterdam, designs and prints exotic furniture and other fixtures for hotels and restaurants. It also makes iPhone cases for Apple, eye cream bottles for L’Oreal and jewelry and handbags for sale on its Web site.
Various designers have turned to the company for clothing that interlaces plastic to create form-hugging blouses, while others have requested spiky coverings for lights that look as if they could be the offspring of a sea urchin and a lamp shade.
“The aim was always to bring this to consumers instead of keeping it a secret at NASA and big manufacturers,” said Janne Kyttanen, 36, who founded Freedom of Creation about 10 years ago. “Everyone thought I was a lunatic when we started.”
His company can take risks with “out there” designs since it doesn’t need to print an object until it is ordered, Mr. Kyttanen said. Ikea can worry about mass appeal.
LGM, based in Minturn, Colo., uses a 3-D printing machine to create models of buildings and resorts for architectural firms.
“We used to take two months to build $100,000 models,” said Charles Overy, the founder of LGM. “Well, that type of work is gone because developers aren’t putting up that type of money anymore.”
Now, he said, he is building $2,000 models using an architect’s design and homegrown software for a 3-D printer. He can turn around a model in one night.
Next, the company plans to design and print doorknobs and other fixtures for buildings, creating unique items. “We are moving from handcraft to digital craft,” Mr. Overy said.
But Contour Crafting, based in Los Angeles, has pushed 3-D printing technology to its limits.
Based on research done by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, Contour Crafting has created a giant 3-D printing device for building houses. The start-up company is seeking money to commercialize a machine capable of building an entire house in one go using a machine that fits on the back of a tractor-trailer.
The 3-D printing wave has caught the attention of some of the world’s biggest technology companies. Hewlett-Packard, the largest paper-printer maker, has started reselling 3-D printing machines made by Stratasys. And Google uses the CADspan software from LGM to help people using its SketchUp design software turn their creations into 3-D printable objects.
At Bespoke, Mr. Summit has built a scanning contraption to examine limbs using a camera. After the scan, a detailed image is transmitted to a computer, and Mr. Summit can begin sculpting his limb art.
He uses a 3-D printer to create plastic shells that fit around the prosthetic limbs, and then wraps the shells in any flexible material the customer desires, be it an old bomber jacket or a trusty boot.
“We can do a midcentury modern or a Harley aesthetic if that’s what someone wants,” Mr. Summit said. “If we can get to flexible wood, I am totally going to cut my own leg off.”
Mr. Summit and his partner, Kenneth B. Trauner, the orthopedic surgeon, have built some test models of full legs that have sophisticated features like body symmetry, locking knees and flexing ankles. One artistic design is metal-plated in some areas and leather-wrapped in others.
“It costs $5,000 to $6,000 to print one of these legs, and it has features that aren’t even found in legs that cost $60,000 today,” Mr. Summit said.
“We want the people to have input and pick out their options,” he added. “It’s about going from the Model T to something like a Mini that has 10 million permutations.”
Celebrating Id al-Fitr Under Watchful Eyes of China
Barbershop floors were littered with the remains of men’s haircuts and beard-trims. Women in head scarves walked the dusty streets carrying plastic bags stuffed with food from the bazaars: melons, grapes, fried sweets, Frisbee-shaped bread, chunks of freshly butchered sheep. Children with generous parents strutted around in new clothes: suits for the boys, white dresses for the girls.
So went the preparations for Id al-Fitr, the three-day festival that unfolded this weekend to mark the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
Kashgar being Kashgar, the most Islamic city in the restive desert region of Xinjiang, the occasion was also marked by more somber moments, as the Chinese authorities kept a close eye on events.
At dawn on Friday, the first day of Id, a convoy of military trucks and police cars with flashing lights rolled past the public plaza outside the Id Kah Mosque, where thousands of men and boys were congregating outdoors for morning prayers. Police officers blocked foreigners trying to go to the rooftop of the Orda Hotel, which overlooks the distinctive yellow mosque, the largest in China, to watch the prayer ceremony.
“It’s not as tense as last year, but the police are still worried about problems,” said one ethnic Uighur man who, like many in this city, spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The remote city of Kashgar, at the crossroads of Central Asia, has existed under a pall since Chinese security forces tightened their grip here after deadly ethnic rioting in July 2009 in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. But there was a respite over the weekend, as the religious festivities around Id reinforced for the Uighurs their sense of tradition and culture.
“This is a time when we are supposed to be happy and think of God,” the Uighur man said.
In recent months, the authorities in Xinjiang have let up on some of the harsh security measures they took after the rioting — Internet services have been restored, for example — but officials here still believe they have plenty of reasons to be anxious.
Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in the region, bridle at discrimination by the Han, who govern all of China. Some demand a Uighur nation called East Turkestan. Last month, an explosion in the town of Aksu killed seven people and injured 14 others, officials said. The police detained a Uighur man.
Kashgar at the start of Id appeared to be a city at peace, though, and offered a vivid taste of civilization for those traveling here from the desolate Pamir mountains of Central Asia: teeming bazaars and restaurants packed with families gorging themselves at iftar, the daily breaking of the fast at sunset. Grilled lamb kebabs, roast chicken, mutton-stuffed dumplings, oily rice called polo, doughy noodles called laghman — all were in abundance, as they were in the days when Kashgar blossomed into a Silk Road oasis town, overflowing with the wealth that comes from trade between empires.
In a new concrete home on the edge of the old city, a young woman, Guli, invited two foreigners to try freshly baked lamb-filled pastries that her family was eating at twilight. A stove burned in the courtyard.
Almost all the traditional, mud-walled dwellings around Guli’s home had been razed as part of a government plan to build new housing that began in early 2009. It appeared that at least two-thirds of the labyrinthine old city south of the Id Kah Mosque had been destroyed, leaving nothing but lots full of dust where some of the most atmospheric neighborhoods in Central Asia once stood. Guli said her home had been spared because her parents had built it just last year, at a cost of $4,400.
“The government’s plan is to make Kashgar into a developed city, like other parts of China,” she said.
She added that she did not know where her neighbors had gone, but that they would return once the government built new quarters here. “They look forward to living in new homes,” she said.
But one Uighur man said most people were opposed to the destruction of the old city. “The government is doing it no matter what people think,” he said.
He opened a picture book with an old photograph of the Id Kah Mosque. In front of it was a green park that he said had been destroyed in the mid-1990s to make way for a modern plaza. “Our history is being lost,” he said.
On Friday morning, ethnic Han policemen stood on the corners of the plaza as Uighur men carrying prayer rugs streamed there from all corners of the city for the first prayer of Id. Many had gathered before sunrise at their local mosques, then walked with their white-turbaned imams to the Id Kah Mosque.
The prayer started at 7:30, the head imam’s words flowing from mosque to loudspeaker to plaza.
At once, thousands of men bowed their heads, then knelt on the ground, surrendering to God.
The ceremony ended after a half-hour. The men poured back into the streets and alleyways. It was time to feast at home with the family, the first meal in a month that they would eat during daylight hours.
One Uighur grinned at a French man walking beside him.
“Today is a good day,” he said in English. “There are no Chinese in the streets.”
Confessing to Crime, but Innocent
Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence at his trial for rape, but one overwhelming factor put him away: he confessed.
At trial, the jury heard details that prosecutors insisted only the rapist could have known, including the fact that the rapist hit the 75-year-old victim in the head with the handle of a silver table knife he found in the house. DNA evidence would later show that another man committed the crime. But that vindication would come only years after Mr. Lowery had served his sentence and was paroled in 1991.
“I beat myself up a lot” about having confessed, Mr. Lowery said in a recent interview. “I thought I was the only dummy who did that.”
But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators.
New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.
An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions — by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.
To defense lawyers, the new research is eye opening. “In the past, if somebody confessed, that was the end,” said Peter J. Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project, an organization based in Manhattan. “You couldn’t imagine going forward.”
The notion that such detailed confessions might be deemed voluntary because the defendants were not beaten or coerced suggests that courts should not simply look at whether confessions are voluntary, Mr. Neufeld said. “They should look at whether they are reliable.”
Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.
Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,” he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.”
Of the exonerated defendants in the Garrett study, 26 — more than half — were “mentally disabled,” under 18 at the time or both. Most were subjected to lengthy, high-pressure interrogations, and none had a lawyer present. Thirteen of them were taken to the crime scene.
Mr. Lowery’s case shows how contamination occurs. He had come under suspicion, he now believes, because he had been partying and ran his car into a parked car the night of the rape, generating a police report. Officers grilled him for more than seven hours, insisting from the start that he had committed the crime.
Mr. Lowery took a lie detector test to prove he was innocent, but the officers told him that he had failed it.
“I didn’t know any way out of that, except to tell them what they wanted to hear,” he recalled. “And then get a lawyer to prove my innocence.”
Proving innocence after a confession, however, is rare. Eight of the defendants in Professor Garrett’s study had actually been cleared by DNA evidence before trial, but the courts convicted them anyway.
In one such case involving Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a murder in Poughkeepsie, prosecutors argued that the victim may have been sexually active and so the DNA evidence may have come from another liaison she had. The prosecutors asked the jury to focus on Mr. Deskovic’s highly detailed confession and convict him.
While Professor Garrett suggests that leaking facts during interrogations is sometimes unintentional, Mr. Lowery said that the contamination of his questioning was clearly intentional.
After his initial confession, he said, the interrogators went over the crime with him in detail — asking how he did it, but correcting him when he got the facts wrong. How did he get in? “I said, ‘I kicked in the front door.’ ” But the rapist had used the back door, so he admitted to having gone around to the back. “They fed me the answers,” he recalled.
Some defendants’ confessions even include mistakes fed by the police. Earl Washington Jr., a mentally impaired man who spent 18 years in prison and came within hours of being executed for a murder he did not commit, stated in his confession that the victim had worn a halter top. In fact, she had worn a sundress, but an initial police report had stated that she wore a halter top.
Steven A. Drizin, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, said the significance of contamination could not be understated. While errors might lead to wrongful arrest, “it’s contamination that is the primary factor in wrongful convictions,” he said. “Juries demand details from the suspect that make the confession appear to be reliable — that’s where these cases go south.”
Jim Trainum, a former policeman who now advises police departments on training officers to avoid false confessions, explained that few of them intend to contaminate an interrogation or convict the innocent.
“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’ that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to reoffend.”
Mr. Trainum has become an advocate of videotaping entire interrogations. Requirements for recording confessions vary widely across the country. Ten states require videotaping of at least some interrogations, like those in crimes that carry the death penalty, and seven state supreme courts have required or strongly encouraged recording.
These days Mr. Lowery, 51, lives in suburban Kansas City, in a house he is renovating with some of the $7.5 million in settlement money he received, along with apologies from officials in Riley County, Kan., where he was arrested and interrogated.
He has trouble putting the past behind him. “I was embarrassed,” he said. “You run in to so many people who say, ‘I would never confess to a crime.’ ”
He does not argue with them, because he knows they did not experience what he went through. “You’ve never been in a situation so intense, and you’re naïve about your rights,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ll say to get out of that situation.”
Hybrids May Thrive Where Parents Fear to Tread
On May 15, 1985, trainers at Hawaii Sea Life Park were stunned when a 400- pound gray female bottlenose dolphin named Punahele gave birth to a dark-skinned calf that partly resembled the 2,000-pound male false killer whale with whom she shared a pool. The calf was a wholphin, a hybrid that was intermediate to its parents in some characteristics, like having 66 teeth compared with the bottlenose’s 88 and the 44 of the false killer whale, a much larger member of the dolphin family.
In 2006, a hunter in the Canadian Arctic shot a bear that had white fur like a polar bear’s but had brown patches, long claws and a hump like a grizzly bear’s. DNA analysis confirmed the animal was a hybrid of the two species.
While one might think that these oddities are examples of some kind of moral breakdown in the animal kingdom, it turns out that hybridization among distinct species is not so rare. Some biologists estimate that as many as 10 percent of animal species and up to 25 percent of plant species may occasionally breed with another species. The more important issue is not whether such liaisons occasionally produce offspring, but the vitality of the hybrid and whether two species might combine to give rise to a third, distinct species.
While several examples of human-bred animal hybrids are well known and can thrive in captivity including zorses (zebra-horse), beefalo (bison-beef cattle) and, of course, mules (donkey-horse), naturally occurring animal hybrids have many factors working against their longer-term success.
One of the main obstacles is that, even if members of different species might mate, when the two species are too distant genetically or carry different numbers of chromosomes, the offspring are usually inviable or infertile (like zorses and mules), and are therefore evolutionary dead ends. A second problem is that any hybrid will usually be vastly outnumbered and outcompeted by one or both parent species.
But because species hybrids create new combinations of genes, it is possible that some combinations might enable hybrids to adapt to conditions in which neither parent may fare as well. Several such examples are now known from nature. Furthermore, DNA analysis is now allowing biologists to better decipher the histories of species and to detect past hybridization events that have contributed new genes and capabilities to various kinds of organisms including, it now appears, ourselves.
The familiar sunflower has provided great examples of adaptation by hybrids. Loren H. Rieseberg of the University of British Columbia and colleagues have found that two widespread species, the common sunflower and prairie sunflower, have combined at least three times to give rise to three hybrid species: the sand sunflower, the desert sunflower, and the puzzle sunflower.
The parental species thrive on moist soils in the central and Western states, but the hybrids are restricted to more extreme habitats. The sand sunflower, for instance, is limited to sand dunes in Utah and northern Arizona and the puzzle sunflower to brackish salt marshes in West Texas and New Mexico.
The species distributions suggest that the hybrids thrive where the parents cannot. Indeed, recent field tests that examined the relative ability of the parental species to thrive in the hybrids’ habitat, and vice versa, found that the sand sunflower was better able than its parents to germinate, grow and survive in its dune habitat but fared relatively poorly in parental habitats. Similarly, the puzzle sunflower was much better at growing in salty conditions than its parents.
One lesson from the sunflowers appears to be that hybrids may succeed if they can exploit a different niche from their parents. The same phenomenon has been discovered in animal hybrids.
In the past 250 years, various forms of honeysuckle have been introduced to the Northeastern states. In the late 1990s, researchers led by Bruce McPheron of Pennsylvania State University discovered that this invasive honeysuckle was infested by a particular fruit fly species they called the Lonicera fly. When they analyzed DNA to determine its relationship to others, they were stunned to find that it was a hybrid of two closely related flies, the blueberry maggot and the snowberry maggot.
In laboratory experiments, the researchers found that the Lonicera hybrid preferred its honeysuckle host plant over its parent species’ host plants and that each parent species preferred its own host plant over the other’s. However, both parents also accepted honeysuckle. The researchers suggest that since the two parental species were thus more likely to encounter each other on honeysuckle in the wild, the newly invasive weed served as a catalyst for matings between the species and the formation of the hybrid species that now prefers honeysuckle.
The sunflower and Lonicera fly examples raise the question of whether hybridization between species has been more frequent than biologists once assumed. The most provocative report of possible hybridization came from the recent analysis of more than 60 percent of the Neanderthal genome sequence, which raised the specter of our ancestors commingling their genes with a long-diverged cousin.
Analyses of the overall genetic distance between Neanderthals and modern humans reveal that our DNA is 99.84 percent identical to that of Neanderthals. This small divergence indicates that the two lines split off from each other about 270,000 to 440,000 years ago. The fossil evidence shows that Neanderthals were restricted to Europe and Asia, whereas Homo sapiens originated in Africa. Various kinds of evidence indicate that modern humans migrated out of Africa and reached the Middle East more than 100,000 years ago and Europe by about 45,000 years ago, and would have or could have encountered Neanderthals for some time in each locale. The crucial question for paleontology, archaeology, and paleogenetics has been what transpired between the two species. To put it a little more crudely, did we date them or kill them, or perhaps both?
If the former, then there could be a bit of Neanderthal in some or all of us. The first comparisons of small sections of Neanderthal DNA did not indicate any hybridization, and the lack of interbreeding became a widely accepted conclusion. That remained the case until this year, when a much greater portion of the Neanderthal genome was obtained by Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. It now appears that 1 percent to 4 percent of the DNA sequence of Europeans and Asians, but not Africans, was contributed by Neanderthals mixing with Homo sapiens, perhaps in the Middle East 50,000 to 80,000 years ago. It is possible that some Neanderthal versions of genes enabled modern humans to adapt to new climates and habitats.
The discovery of hybrid species and the detection of past hybridizations are forcing biologists to reshape their picture of species as independent units. The barriers between species are not necessarily vast, unbridgeable chasms; sometimes they get crossed with marvelous results.
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"Experts say the Roma population has been battered by a combination of factors. Crafts that once sustained them, such as making brass pots and shoeing horses, are now obsolete. Recent European regulations standardizing the sale of livestock pushed them out of one of their few remaining businesses because they could not handle the required paperwork."
raised thoughts about the world becoming more and more dependent on academic education and having fewer and fewer niches for people who for whatever reason don't acquire that type of education/skills or aren't inclined in that direction.
Going on to read the article on 3-D printing, I saw this quote:
"A California start-up is even working on building houses. Its printer, which would fit on a tractor-trailer, would use patterns delivered by computer, squirt out layers of special concrete and build entire walls that could be connected to form the basis of a house.
It is manufacturing with a mouse click instead of hammers, nails and, well, workers. Advocates of the technology say that by doing away with manual labor, 3-D printing could revamp the economics of manufacturing and revive American industry as creativity and ingenuity replace labor costs as the main concern around a variety of goods."
Reading that after the thoughts I mentioned above made me consider how this article presents doing away with manual labour in the production process as a good thing - ~creativity instead of manual labour~ - but it's not necessarily a good thing for people whose strengths and interests are more on the practical/physical side of things. (Not sure that phrasing came out right, but I hope the point comes across.)
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