Let's clear out some of these articles

[conuly]

Here's an interesting article about a guy who's using squatter's rights to get houses in Florida.

At Legal Fringe, Empty Houses Go to the Needy
By CATHARINE SKIPP and DAMIEN CAVE

NORTH LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Save Florida Homes Inc. and its owner, Mark Guerette, have found foreclosed homes for several needy families here in Broward County, and his tenants could not be more pleased. Fabian Ferguson, his wife and two children now live a two-bedroom home they have transformed from damaged and abandoned to full and cozy.

There is just one problem: Mr. Guerette is not the owner. Yet.

In a sign of the odd ingenuity that has grown from the real estate collapse, he is banking on an 1869 Florida statute that says the bundle of properties he has seized will be his if the owners do not claim them within seven years.

A version of the same law was used in the 1850s to claim possession of runaway slaves, though Mr. Guerette, 47, a clean-cut mortgage broker, sees his efforts as heroic. “There are all these properties out there that could be used for good,” he said.

The North Lauderdale authorities, though, see him as a crook. He is scheduled to go on trial in December on fraud charges in a case that, along with a handful of others in Florida and in other states, could determine whether maintaining a property and paying taxes on it is enough to lead to ownership.

Legal scholars say the concept is old — rooted in Renaissance England, when agricultural land would sometimes go fallow, left untended by long-lost heirs. But it is also common. All 50 states allow for so-called adverse possession, with the time to forge a kind of common-law marriage with property varying from a few years (in most states) to several decades (in New Jersey).

The statute generally requires that properties be maintained openly and continuously, which usually means paying property taxes and utility bills.

It is not clear how many people are testing the idea, but lawyers say that do-it-yourself possession cases have been popping up all over the country — and, they note, these self-proclaimed owners play an odd role in a real-estate mess that never seems to end. Though they may cringe at the analogy, as squatters with bank accounts, these adverse possessors are like leeches, and it can be difficult to tell at times whether they are cleaning a wound already there, or making it worse.

Either way, Florida is where they thrive.

Many residents of the Sunshine State have grown accustomed to living beside a home left vacant for years. Now hundreds of these mold-filled caverns, their appliances long ago spirited off, are being claimed by strangers.

“There are all kinds of ways the people try to manipulate the system to their own financial gain,” said Jack McCabe, an independent real estate analyst with McCabe Research and Consulting. “And you are going to see it here because Florida is the capital of real estate fraud.”

Mr. Guerette, who now faces up to 15 years in prison, insists that his business is legitimate and moral. He said he got started last year, driving around working-class neighborhoods in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, looking for a particular kind of home: not just those with overgrown lawns and broken windows, but houses with a large orange sticker from the county reading “public nuisance.”

The stickers signaled owners out of touch: the county or city was unable to reach them.

Mr. Guerette filed court claims on around 100 of these properties, which appear to be in the process of foreclosure. Then he chose 20 that could be most easily renovated and sent letters to the owners and their banks — presumably overwhelmed — to make them aware of his plans.

Florida does not require notification. One state lawmaker tried and failed to close that loophole last year with a bill that never passed. But it hardly mattered. Nineteen of the owners and their banks did not respond, Mr. Guerette said.

So he set about fixing up the unclaimed properties. In some cases, he just mowed the lawn and replaced stolen air conditioners or broken windows; in other cases, like with Mr. Ferguson, he let tenants make improvements in lieu of rent.

At his peak last year, he said he managed 17 homes with renters, some of whom he found on Craigslist, others through a Christian ministry in Margate, Fla.

Copies of leases show Mr. Guerette included an addendum noting that he was not the legal owner. Tenants like Mr. Ferguson and his family, who had been homeless before moving in last year and paying $289 a month, see Mr. Guerette as a savior.

And neighbors generally agree. “There is no telling who was in and out of that house,” said Rawle Thomas, who lives next door to Mr. Ferguson and his family. “I like them, and I’d much rather have someone in there than the house empty.”

In other cases, though, adverse possession has been more aggressive and problematic. In Palm Beach County, Carl Heflin spent a year in jail awaiting trial on fraud, trespassing and burglary charges. But after accepting a plea agreement and the rejection of his adverse possession claims, he was arrested again on charges of trying to collect back rents on houses he had tried to possess.

“The whole time he was harassing us and threatened to burn the house down with my kids in it,” said Misty Hall, a single mother of two who rented a home from Mr. Heflin.

Sam Goren, city attorney for North Lauderdale, said any benefits were outweighed by a simple fact that adverse possessors often overlook: they are trespassing.

Michael Allan Wolf, a real estate expert at the University of Florida law school, said adverse possessors also disrupt the chain of title. Rightful owners end up having to evict tenants. The time between foreclosure and legitimate resale may be extended.

Even when adverse possessors help stabilize neighborhoods, “It is not an effective or efficient cure for the foreclosure crisis in Florida,” Professor Wolf said.

Mr. Guerette says his goals are more charitable. After several marriages, six children and some minor trouble with the law, he said, he is now a born-again Christian who sees his new company as a way to make an honest living, and solve a dire need.

His tenants confirmed that after he was arrested in April, he told them they could stop paying rent. Even if he is not allowed to keep taking homes, he said, why should needy people not be matched with homes left to decay?

“There are over 4,000 homeless in Broward, and the number is growing all the time,” he said. “I thought I could use these homes and put people into them. It could be a good thing.”

He added: “It’s not rocket science.”

Gay Couples to Sue Over U.S. Marriage Law

Joanne Pedersen tried to add her spouse to her federal health insurance on Monday. She was rejected. Again.

The problem is that while Ms. Pedersen is legally married to Ann Meitzen under Connecticut law, federal law does not recognize same-sex unions. So a health insurance matter that is all but automatic for most married people is not allowed for them under federal law.

Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Meitzen plan to file a lawsuit Tuesday against the government in an effort to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing marriages of same-sex couples.

They are plaintiffs in one of two lawsuits being filed by the legal group Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a gay rights legal organization based in Boston, and by the American Civil Liberties Union.

A similar challenge by the gay rights legal group resulted in a ruling in July from a federal judge in Boston that the act is unconstitutional. The Obama administration is appealing that decision.

The two new lawsuits, which involve plaintiffs from New York, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, expand the attack geographically and also encompass more of the 1,138 federal laws and regulations that the Defense of Marriage Act potentially affects — including the insurance costs amounting to several hundred dollars a month in the case of Ms. Pedersen and Ms. Meitzen, and a $350,0000 estate tax payment in the A.C.L.U. case.

The civil liberties union filed suit on behalf of Edith S. Windsor, whose spouse, Thea C. Spyer, died last year of aortic stenosis. The two women, New Yorkers who had been together for 44 years, married in Toronto in 2007. New York officially recognizes same-sex marriages performed in other states. Had the two been man and wife, there would have been no federal estate tax to pay.

“It’s just so unfair,” said Ms. Windsor, who is 81.

Taken together, said Mary Bonauto, the director of the Civil Rights Project for the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the cases show same-sex couples “are falling through the safety net other people count on.”

Traditionally, Ms. Bonauto noted, the federal government has left the definition of marriage to the states. “The federal government has respected those determinations, except in the instance of gay and lesbian couples marrying,” she said. The result, she said, is a violation of constitutional guarantees of equal protection.

In the Massachusetts case earlier this year, the Justice Department defended the Defense of Marriage law, and is likely to do so again as the two new cases move forward. A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, Tracy Schmaler, said, “The Justice Department has a longstanding tradition of defending acts of Congress when they are challenged in court.”

The new cases, however, could increase the pressure on President Obama to act on his repeated promises to support gay rights. Mr. Obama has called for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, saying it is discriminatory. But he has also said he supports civil unions but not same-sex marriage. Last month, however, at a meeting with liberal bloggers, he said he had been thinking “a lot” about that position, saying, “Attitudes evolve, including mine.”

Five states and the District of Columbia allow same-sex marriages to be performed, but 31 states have passed laws blocking them. The issue continues to echo politically. Last week, Iowa voters removed three of the Supreme Court justices who had participated in a unanimous decision allowing same-sex marriage.

Maggie Gallagher, the chairwoman of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that opposes same-sex marriage, said court challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act showed that gay rights advocates “continue to push a primarily court-based strategy of, in our view, inventing rights that neither the founders nor the majority of Americans can recognize in our Constitution.”

To Ms. Pedersen, the question is one of justice. She and Ms. Meitzen, who married in 2008, have been together in Connecticut for 12 years. Ms. Meitzen, a social worker, has had health problems, and Ms. Pedersen, a civilian retiree from the Department of Naval Intelligence, tried to enroll her spouse in the federal employee health benefits program — a move that would save them hundreds of dollars a month.

Both women had been married before, to men, and have grown children. The fact that the law values one of their marriages over another is a source of consternation, Ms. Pedersen said.

“If we were heterosexual, we wouldn’t be talking today, because we would have the benefits,” Ms. Pedersen said. “I would just like the federal government to recognize our marriage as just as real as everybody else’s.”

Genes as Mirrors of Life Experiences

For decades, researchers have ransacked the genetic pedigrees of people with mental illness, looking for common variations that combine to cause devastating conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The search has stalled badly; while these disorders may involve genetic disruptions, no underlying patterns have surfaced — no single gene or genes that account for more than a tiny fraction of cases.

So scientists are turning their focus to an emerging field: epigenetics, the study of how people’s experience and environment affect the function of their genes.

Genes are far more than protein machines, pumping out their product like a popcorn maker. Many carry what are, in effect, chemical attachments: compounds acting on the DNA molecule that regulate when, where or how much protein is made, without altering the recipe itself. Studies suggest that such add-on, or epigenetic, markers develop as an animal adapts to its environment, whether in the womb or out in the world — and the markers can profoundly affect behavior.

In studies of rats, researchers have shown that affectionate mothering alters the expression of genes, allowing them to dampen their physiological response to stress. These biological buffers are then passed on to the next generation: rodents and nonhuman primates biologically primed to handle stress tend to be more nurturing to their own offspring, and the system is thought to work similarly in humans.

Epigenetic markers may likewise hinder normal development: the offspring of parents who experience famine are at heightened risk for developing schizophrenia, some research suggests — perhaps because of the chemical signatures on the genes that parents pass on. Another recent study found evidence that, in some people with autism, epigenetic markers had silenced the gene which makes the receptor for the hormone oxytocin. Oxytocin oils the brain’s social circuits, and is critical in cementing relationships; a brain short on receptors for it would most likely struggle in social situations.

At least one group of researchers argues that chemical markers help resolve a biological competition between maternal and paternal genes in the developing fetus. In the traditional view of reproduction, genes from the mother and father work together as collaborators, sharing the duties of creating a new life. But a novel theory holds that the genes are in fact in competition, at various points along the newly forming fetus’s genome. If the system goes awry and brain development tilts too strongly toward the father, a result can be autism, these scientists suggest; too heavily toward the mother, and the child may develop mood disorders.

“A lot of the model systems we have studied suggest that epigenetic modifications impact behavior, and also that those effects can be reversed,” said Thomas Lehner, chief of the genomics research branch of the National Institute of Mental Health.

By studying genes at the “epi” level, scientists are hoping to discover patterns that have been elusive at the level of the genes — and ideally to find targets for calibrated treatments that would not simply shut off errant genes but would gradually turn their activity up or down, like adjusting the balance on a stereo.

The National Institutes of Health is sponsoring about 100 studies looking at the relationship between epigenetic markers and behavior problems, including drug abuse, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, compared with just a handful of such studies a decade ago.

In one large study of people with schizophrenia, researchers at Johns Hopkins are analyzing blood and other data to see whether the degree of epigenetic variation is related to the inherited risk of developing the disorder. In another, researchers at Tufts are studying the genes of animals dependent on opiates to see how epigenetic alterations caused by drug exposure affect the opiate sensitivity of the animals’ offspring.

Other researchers are trying to determine whether areas of the genome that show large epigenetic changes can help uncover underlying genes that contribute to mental disorders.

Dr. Lehner notes that such studies are expensive, and that the findings may be as difficult to decipher as studies of the genes themselves. But experts agree that any effort to understand how genes affect behavior must take into account how experience affects genes.

As H.I.V. Babies Come of Age, Problems Linger

“They’ve been telling me since age 3 that I would die,” Tom Cosgrove said quietly. “Then age 6, age 8, age 10.”

Now 20, he is considered the longest-living person born with H.I.V. in his state, but every year has brought struggle.

As a toddler at a shelter for children infected with H.I.V. from birth, he watched others die. Then, AIDS killed his mother and newborn brother. At 8, his body rejected medication and he became temporarily unable to walk.

He raged with anger, once even striking a teacher with a chair. Classmates, paranoid about his disease, refused to shake his hand or sit at his lunch table. Friends’ parents forbade them to visit, and he could not join basketball teams or karate classes.

Even now, medications impair his short-term memory, making school, and job prospects, difficult.

“We call them his stupid drugs,” said Barbara Cosgrove, who adopted Tom at 3. “But, as I say to Tom, ‘You’re either stupid or you’re dead.’ ”

At a time when H.I.V. in the United States has become a manageable disease for many, Tom Cosgrove and others like him are proof of the epidemic’s troubling, lingering legacy. They are the survivors, born beginning in the 1990s to the first big wave of people with AIDS, babies practically destined to die. Improvements in drugs, along with some luck, allowed some 10,000 of them to live — and these days only about 200 children a year are born with H.I.V., thanks to vigilant drug treatment of infected pregnant women.

But life for those first H.I.V. babies now entering adolescence and adulthood has been a battle, and their experience is considered so significant — not only in this country but also for the millions of H.I.V.-positive babies worldwide — that federal health agencies have begun an extensive study to follow these young people as they grow up.

Some are weakened by years of yo-yoing symptoms that early drugs failed to treat. Some have developmental delays or other problems related to having H.I.V. at birth. And their medications often have harsher side effects than those taken by people infected more recently as teenagers or adults because complications from their illness, or previous drugs they took and became resistant to, have made their disease more stubborn to treat.

Emotionally, they grapple with hostility toward parents who infected them, grief that those parents suffered and usually died, and anxiety about trusting others with a secret that still provokes hazing and fear.

And a serious problem is emerging: some are rebelling or asserting independence by skipping or stopping medication, which can make H.I.V. spiral out of control and become impervious to previously effective therapies.

“It ain’t over yet,” Dr. Ellen Cooper, medical director of pediatric and adolescent H.I.V. at Boston Medical Center, said about keeping these young people alive and healthy. Although she has not lost a patient in five years, she said, “I’m expecting a second wave” of these young people “dying because they’re not adherent” to medication, or because of “complications from treatment.”

Dr. Lynne M. Mofenson, chief of pediatric, adolescent and maternal AIDS at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said that despite H.I.V. babies’ increased survival, their “mortality is still thirtyfold higher than similarly aged children,” and there is “a lot of research that’s needed, and interventions to improve their lives.”

Seven agencies of the National Institutes of Health are following 451 H.I.V. babies ages 7 to 16, monitoring their hearts, cholesterol, bones, brains, hearing, sexual development, school performance, language ability, behavior and mental health.

Preliminary findings show many of their current lifesaving drugs cause high cholesterol, raising fears of serious heart problems, said Dr. Russell Van Dyke, the study’s co-principal investigator. Their bone density appears poor. And many have mental health and behavioral problems, although it is unclear to what degree those problems are related to the disease or to the children’s often-difficult family circumstances.

“There is a lot of concern,” Dr. Van Dyke said, “about how the kids adapt to living and what sort of challenges they have. The lessons are going to be applicable to the rest of the world.”

‘I Was Born This Way’

Davi Morales is the kind of young person doctors worry about. He has H.I.V.-related cognitive disabilities, and spent months homeless after uncles who raised him in a Providence, R.I., housing project returned to Puerto Rico.

Davi, 20, lost Social Security disability assistance because the government now considers most H.I.V.-infected people able to work, said Scott Mitchel, a counselor with AIDS Care Ocean State, who got him into an apartment that his agency owns. But Davi has trouble staying employed, following rules, working with managers.

“I don’t think right now he can go out there and support himself,” Mr. Mitchel said. For one thing, his medication, five pills twice daily, causes severe insomnia and diarrhea.

Nowadays, people contracting H.I.V. through sex or drugs may take one easily tolerated pill, but the H.I.V.-baby generation often needs complex multipill doses with irritating side effects, making pill-skipping more likely.

In desperation, doctors sometimes allow them to stop medication altogether rather than take their “last rescue regimen poorly,” Dr. Cooper said.

Davi sometimes skips several days, and “when I feel down, like I just want to give up, I don’t want to take my medicine at all,” he said. “If I didn’t have that kid, I probably never would take them.”

That kid is the son born three years ago after Davi, who was 16, told his girlfriend at the time, who was 14, “I want to have a kid” and “she was cool with it,” he said. “I didn’t really know what I was really doing.”

She took medication during pregnancy, and their son is uninfected. Her family, fearful of Davi’s disease, blocked access to the boy for a while, and the couple broke up. He is facing assault charges for striking her during an argument, but now sees his son regularly.

He said he wants to stay alive, but “maybe my lifespan is not as long as a normal lifespan. I was born this way and that’s what it is.”

Medication is not the problem for Elizabeth. Eighteen, white, from a wealthy Massachusetts suburb, she has been ostracized and tormented, “ ‘H.I.V. slut’ being yelled across the hallway, anything you can think of,” she said.

Elizabeth did not know she had H.I.V. until the age of 14, when her parents and physician appeared at her therapist’s appointment and told her.

“I couldn’t speak or really breathe,” said Elizabeth, whose mother was infected through a blood transfusion before she was born.

Elizabeth, who asked that her last name be withheld, said her mother “wants me to be completely closed about it,” and even Elizabeth’s little sister, who is uninfected, does not know. Keeping it inside feels “like holding your breath underwater for too long.”

But close friends she confided in betrayed her. Her best friend gossiped about it, and a boyfriend she broke up with “told everyone to get back at me,” she said. Schoolwork suffered as she constantly feared hazing and “focused on having to deal with this.”

At 16, she told a new boyfriend, who “promised that he’d never judge me upon it, that he’d never break up with me, that he’d never tell anyone,” she said. “The next day he broke up with me because of it.” They reunited, but his parents scorned her and he sometimes hid their relationship from friends, said Elizabeth, who recently stopped seeing him.

She said people in her well-educated community, who should know that H.I.V. can be well controlled with medication and protected against with condoms, have been surprisingly intolerant.

“There’s no need to think I’m dirty,” she said. “I’ve basically had my trust for people completely taken away.”

Sharing and Trusting

Things get harder as H.I.V. babies grow up and leave the “very nurturing network” of pediatric AIDS clinics and programs, said Rena Greifinger, who formed the One Love Project to help such young people. “At 18, all that support melts away,” plus some of them “have been completely rejected by their families, the leper child.”

At a weeklong retreat at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., One Love provided music therapy, role-playing about disclosing H.I.V. status, and explicit discussions about sex and having children.

“When I was pregnant, I was crying all the time, worried she would be positive,” said Imani Walters, 19, who contracted H.I.V. as a teenager. Her daughter turned out healthy. “Then you get scared you might not see them grow up.”

The young people were told that having infected children was unlikely with medication through pregnancy, avoiding breastfeeding and giving the babies medication for six weeks.

“We wanted to give them so much information that we get that buy-in to stay on their meds, and they learn how to live with H.I.V.,” said Bill Kubicek, executive director of Next Step, which sponsors One Love and was co-founded by Paul Newman.

Elizabeth met other H.I.V. babies for the first time at the conference, and “here I trust everyone,” she said.

The gathering was eye-opening for Sandy Perez, 18, from Canaan, N.H., too. Her mother, infected through drug use, died when Sandy was 7. Some foster families mistreated her, she said; at one home, underfed, she slept in the laundry room, locked in, and would climb out the window and re-enter the house through the garage to grab food.

Although she now has a loving family and takes medication regularly, she has experienced serious symptoms: sunken cheeks, gaunt face, bony arms. Medication has caused diabetes, and liver and kidney problems.

Sandy rarely disclosed her H.I.V., not even to boyfriends, although she always used condoms. But she said the conference “inspired me” to feel “comfortable with myself and with having this H.I.V., so I can now share it with people that I feel I trust.”

Like her boyfriend of two years, with whom she had not had intercourse. Unable to reach him by phone from the conference, she texted him: “I have H.I.V.” He texted back: “Are you serious?” She replied: “Yes.”

Sandy felt relieved. If he did not know and “became infected, then there would be a part of me that felt responsible and guilty and just icky inside,” she said.

Soon after, the relationship ended, on good terms, she said. “He kind of didn’t really know how to handle it,” she said. But “he calmed down and we eventually talked” and “he was happy I had told him before we did anything.”

A Family’s Acceptance

When the Cosgroves adopted Tom, he was unruly and angry, and at 5 was further traumatized by seeing his mother “turning different colors, losing her hair,” dying of AIDS, he said. He pasted her obituary on his First Communion banner, and had “nightmares, night sweats,” he said, “very mad at her because I thought she purposefully gave me this disease.”

Since “people were petrified to take any of these children,” Ms. Cosgrove said, she adopted four other “throwaway babies,” saying she was abused as a child and “kind of a throwaway baby myself.”

All four, who arrived untested for H.I.V., turned out negative. “I really felt alone,” Tom said, and at 9, after an H.I.V.-camp friend died, he begged them to adopt someone like him.

They adopted Tyree, who had two H.I.V. strains, one from each parent, and developmental delays. For years, he took medication through a stomach tube because he would vomit it otherwise. Now 11, he often needs leg braces, and his viral load — the amount of virus in the blood — is too high.

Tyree’s adoption did not improve everything for Tom, and Tom was “very out of control” for years, he said. To tame his behavior, Ms. Cosgrove said, she had to “push him down and say, ‘You are not going to talk like that, you are not going to act like that.’ One day I dragged him across the carpet, and his teacher called and I told her this is what I did and why.”

By 12, Tom had calmed down, but he chafed at people’s reactions. Ms. Cosgrove informed his school about his H.I.V. and held a meeting for parents, but while school officials were supportive, some parents and classmates shunned him. Tyree attends another school, whose principal advised against disclosure because parents would react badly. And a soccer coach Ms. Cosgrove told said, “Oh, we’re not taking kids like that.”

Tyree said he feels “lonely” because “none of my friends come over.” He already knows how to protect others, saying, “Don’t have sex with me.”

Tom, now mature and thoughtful, finds things more complicated. With his infection well suppressed with medication, he has started Job Corps, a federal job-training program, but his medications’ side effects affecting his memory concern him, and he said that girlfriends have not lasted long because “people have a lot of worries about going out with someone with this disease.”

Still, since his adoptive family “can accept me for who I am,” he said, “I look at it as if there’s other people out there who can probably do the same.”

While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales

Domino’s Pizza was hurting early last year. Domestic sales had fallen, and a survey of big pizza chain customers left the company tied for the worst tasting pies.

Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.

Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits. “This partnership is clearly working,” Brandon Solano, the Domino’s vice president for brand innovation, said in a statement to The New York Times.

But as healthy as this pizza has been for Domino’s, one slice contains as much as two-thirds of a day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease and is high in calories.

And Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.

Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.

Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat; an ounce of many cheeses contains as much saturated fat as a glass of whole milk.

When Michelle Obama implored restaurateurs in September to help fight obesity, she cited the proliferation of cheeseburgers and macaroni and cheese. “I want to challenge every restaurant to offer healthy menu options,” she told the National Restaurant Association’s annual meeting.

But in a series of confidential agreements approved by agriculture secretaries in both the Bush and Obama administrations, Dairy Management has worked with restaurants to expand their menus with cheese-laden products.

Consider the Taco Bell steak quesadilla, with cheddar, pepper jack, mozzarella and a creamy sauce. “The item used an average of eight times more cheese than other items on their menu,” the Agriculture Department said in a report, extolling Dairy Management’s work — without mentioning that the quesadilla has more than three-quarters of the daily recommended level of saturated fat and sodium.

Dairy Management, whose annual budget approaches $140 million, is largely financed by a government-mandated fee on the dairy industry. But it also receives several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department, which appoints some of its board members, approves its marketing campaigns and major contracts and periodically reports to Congress on its work.

The organization’s activities, revealed through interviews and records, provide a stark example of inherent conflicts in the Agriculture Department’s historical roles as both marketer of agriculture products and America’s nutrition police.

In one instance, Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products, records and interviews show. The campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers — one paid by Dairy Management itself — found no such weight-loss benefits.

When the campaign was challenged as false, government lawyers defended it, saying the Agriculture Department “reviewed, approved and continually oversaw” the effort.

Dr. Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health and a former member of the federal government’s nutrition advisory committee, said: “The U.S.D.A. should not be involved in these programs that are promoting foods that we are consuming too much of already. A small amount of good-flavored cheese can be compatible with a healthy diet, but consumption in the U.S. is enormous and way beyond what is optimally healthy.”

The Agriculture Department declined to make top officials available for interviews for this article, and Dairy Management would not comment. In answering written questions, the department said that dairy promotion was intended to bolster farmers and rural economies, and that its oversight left Dairy Management’s board with “significant independence” in deciding how best to support those interests.

The department acknowledged that cheese is high in saturated fat, but said that lower milk consumption had made cheese an important source of calcium.

“When eaten in moderation and with attention to portion size, cheese can fit into a low-fat, healthy diet,” the department said.

In its reports to Congress, however, the Agriculture Department tallies Dairy Management’s successes in millions of pounds of cheese served.

In 2007, the department highlighted Pizza Hut’s Cheesy Bites pizza, Wendy’s “dual Double Melt sandwich concept,” and Burger King’s Cheesy Angus Bacon cheeseburger and TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. “Both featured two slices of American cheese, a slice of pepper jack and a cheesy sauce,” the department said.

These efforts, the department reported, helped generate a “cheese sales growth of nearly 30 million pounds.”

Relentless Marketing

Every day, the nation’s cows produce an average of about 60 million gallons of raw milk, yet less than a third goes toward making milk that people drink. And the majority of that milk has fat removed to make the low-fat or nonfat milk that Americans prefer. A vast amount of leftover whole milk and extracted milk fat results.

For years, the federal government bought the industry’s excess cheese and butter, an outgrowth of a Depression-era commitment to use price supports and other tools to maintain the dairy industry as a vital national resource. This stockpile, packed away in cool caves in Missouri, grew to a value of more than $4 billion by 1983, when Washington switched gears.

The government started buying only what it needed for food assistance programs. It also began paying farmers to slaughter some dairy cows. But at the time, the industry was moving toward larger, more sophisticated operations that increased productivity through artificial insemination, hormones and lighting that kept cows more active.

In 1995, the government created Dairy Management Inc., a nonprofit corporation that has defined its mission as increasing dairy consumption by “offering the products consumers want, where and when they want them.”

Dairy Management, through the “Got Milk?” campaign, has been successful at slowing the decline in milk consumption, particularly focusing on schoolchildren. It has also relentlessly marketed cheese and pushed back against the Agriculture Department’s suggestion that people eat only low-fat or fat-free varieties.

In a July letter to the department’s nutrition committee, Dairy Management wrote that efforts to make fat-free cheese have largely foundered because fat is what makes cheese appealing. “Consumer acceptance of low-fat and fat-free cheeses has been limited,” it said.

Agriculture Department data show that cheese is a major reason the average American diet contains too much saturated fat.

Research has found that the cardiovascular benefits in cutting saturated fat may depend on what replaces it. Refined starches and sugar might be just as bad or even worse, while switching to unsaturated fats has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease.

The department’s nutrition committee issued a new standard this summer calling for saturated fat not to exceed 7 percent of total calories, about 15.6 grams in a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet. Yet the average intake has remained about 11 percent to 12 percent of total calories for at least 15 years.

The department issued nutritional hints in a brochure titled “Steps To A Healthier You!” It instructs pizza lovers: “Ask for whole wheat crust and half the cheese” — even as Dairy Management has worked with pizza chains like Domino’s to increase cheese.

Dairy Management runs the largest of 18 Agriculture Department programs that market beef, pork, potatoes and other commodities. Their budgets are largely paid by levies imposed on farmers, but Dairy Management, which reported expenditures of $136 million last year, also received $5.3 million that year from the Agriculture Department to promote dairy sales overseas.

By comparison, the department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, which promotes healthy diets, has a total budget of $6.5 million.

Although by law the secretary of agriculture approves Dairy Management’s contracts and advertising campaigns, the organization has become a full-blown company with 162 employees skilled in product development and marketing. It also includes the National Dairy Council, a 95-year-old group that acts as its research and communications arm.

Dairy Management’s longtime chief executive, Thomas P. Gallagher, received $633,475 in compensation in 2008, with first-class travel privileges, according to federal tax filings. Annual compensation for two other officials top $300,000 each.

Mr. Gallagher, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was described by board members, employees and food industry officials as an astute executive and effective champion of the sprawling dairy industry.

“He’s a big thinker,” said David Brandon, former chief executive of Domino’s. “A very creative guy who thinks big and is willing to make bets in helping to drive the business on behalf of his dairy farmers.”

Disputed Research

“Great news for dieters,” Dairy Management said in an advertisement in People magazine in 2005. “Clinical studies show that people on a reduced-calorie diet who consume three servings of milk, cheese or yogurt each day can lose significantly more weight and more body fat than those who just cut calories.”

With milk consumption in decline, Dairy Management had hit on a fresh marketing strategy with its weight-loss campaign.

When the campaign began in 2003, a Dairy Management official said it was inspired by newly relaxed federal rules on health claims and the ensuing “rapid growth of ‘better for you’ products.”

It was based on research by Michael B. Zemel, a University of Tennessee nutritionist and author of “The Calcium Key: The Revolutionary Diet Discovery That Will Help You Lose Weight Faster.” Precisely how dairy facilitates weight loss is unclear, Dr. Zemel said in interviews and e-mails, but in part it involves counteracting a hormone that fosters fat deposits when the body is low on calcium.

Dairy Management licensed Dr. Zemel’s research, promoted his book and enlisted a team of scientific advisers who “identified further research to develop more aggressive claims in the future,” according to a campaign strategy presentation.

One such study was conducted by Jean Harvey-Berino, chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont. “I think they felt they had a lot riding on it,” she said of the weight loss claim, “and felt it was a cash cow if it worked out.”

“I’m a big promoter of dairy,” she added, noting that her research was also paid for by Dairy Management.

But by 2004, her study had found no evidence of weight loss. She said Dairy Management took the news poorly, threatening to audit her work. She said she was astonished when the organization pressed on with its ad campaign.

“I thought they were crazy, and that eventually somebody would catch up with them,” she said.

Her study was published in 2005, and at scientific meetings she heard from other researchers who also failed to confirm Dr. Zemel’s work, including Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, an obesity unit chief at the National Institutes of Health.

But in late 2006, Dairy Management was still citing the weight-loss claim in urging the Agriculture Department not to cut the amount of cheese in federal food assistance programs. “The available data provide strong support for a beneficial effect of increased dairy foods on body weight and body composition,” two organization officials wrote, making no mention of Dr. Harvey-Berino’s findings.

Having dismissed the weight-loss claim in 2005, the federal nutrition advisory committee this summer again found the underlying science “not convincing.”

The campaign lasted until 2007, when the Federal Trade Commission acted on a two-year-old petition by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that challenged the campaign’s claims. “If you want to look at why people are fat today, it’s pretty hard to identify a contributor more significant than this meteoric rise in cheese consumption,” Dr. Neal D. Barnard, president of the physicians’ group, said in an interview.

The trade commission notified the group that Agriculture Department and dairy officials had decided to halt the campaign pending additional research. Dr. Zemel said he remained hopeful that his findings would eventually be upheld.

Meanwhile, Dairy Management, which allotted $12.4 million for nutrition research in 2008, has moved on to finance studies on promising opportunities, including the promotion of chocolate milk as a sports recovery drink and the use of cheese to entice children into eating healthy foods like string beans.

An All-Out Campaign

On Oct. 13, Domino’s announced the latest in its Legends line of cheesier pizza, which Dairy Management is promoting with the $12 million marketing effort.

Called the Wisconsin, the new pie has six cheeses on top and two more in the crust. “This is one way that we can support dairy farms across the country: by selling a pizza featuring an abundance of their products,” a Domino’s spokesman said in a news release. “We think that’s a good thing.”

A laboratory test of the Wisconsin that was commissioned by The Times found that one-quarter of a medium thin-crust pie had 12 grams of saturated fat, more than three-quarters of the recommended daily maximum. It also has 430 calories, double the calories in pizza formulations that the chain bills as its “lighter options.”

According to contract records released through the Freedom of Information Act, Dairy Management’s role in helping to develop Domino’s pizzas included generating and testing new pizza concepts.

When Dairy Management began working with companies like Domino’s, it first had to convince them that cheese would make their products more desirable, records and interviews show. It provided banners and special lighting for the drive-up window menus at fast food restaurants, recalled Debra Olson Linday, who led Dairy Management’s early efforts in promoting cheese to restaurant chains before leaving in 1997.

By 1999, food retailers and manufacturers were coming to Dairy Management for help.

“Let’s sell more pizza and more cheese!” said two officials with Pizza Hut, which began putting cheese inside its crust after holding development meetings with Dairy Management, according to a memorandum released by the Agriculture Department.

Derek Correia, a former Pizza Hut product innovations chief, said Dairy Management also helped find suppliers for the extra cheese. “We were using four cheeses, if not six, and with a company like Pizza Hut, that is a lot of supply,” he said in an interview.

And unlike with its advertising campaigns, Dairy Management and the Agriculture Department could point to specific results with these projects. The “Summer of Cheese” promotion it developed with Pizza Hut in 2002 generated the use of 102 million additional pounds of cheese, the department reported to Congress.

“More cheese on pizza equals more cheese sales,” Mr. Gallagher, the Dairy Management chief executive, wrote in a guest column in a trade publication last year. “In fact, if every pizza included one more ounce of cheese, we would sell an additional 250 million pounds of cheese annually.”

Working with some of the largest food companies, Dairy Management has also pushed to expand the use of cheese in processed foods and home cooking. The Agriculture Department has reported a 5 percent to 16 percent increase in sales of cheese snacks in stores where Dairy Management has helped grocers reinvent their dairy aisles. Now on display is an array of sliced, grated and cubed products, along with handy recipes for home cooking that use more cheese.

The strategy is focusing on families whose cheese “habit” outpaces their concern about the health risks, Dairy Management documents show. One study gave them a name: “Cheese snacking fanatics.”

In Efforts to End Bullying, Some See Agenda

Alarmed by evidence that gay and lesbian students are common victims of schoolyard bullies, many school districts are bolstering their antiharassment rules with early lessons in tolerance, explaining that some children have “two moms” or will grow up to love members of the same sex.

But such efforts to teach acceptance of homosexuality, which have gained urgency after several well-publicized suicides by gay teenagers, are provoking new culture wars in some communities.

Many educators and rights advocates say that official prohibitions of slurs and taunts are most effective when combined with frank discussions, from kindergarten on, about diverse families and sexuality.

Angry parents and religious critics, while agreeing that schoolyard harassment should be stopped, charge that liberals and gay rights groups are using the antibullying banner to pursue a hidden “homosexual agenda,” implicitly endorsing, for example, same-sex marriage.

Last summer, school officials here in Montana’s capital unveiled new guidelines for teaching about sexuality and tolerance. They proposed teaching first graders that “human beings can love people of the same gender,” and fifth graders that sexual intercourse can involve “vaginal, oral or anal penetration.”

A local pastor, Rick DeMato, carried his shock straight to the pulpit.

“We do not want the minds of our children to be polluted with the things of a carnal-minded society,” Mr. DeMato, 69, told his flock at Liberty Baptist Church.

In tense community hearings, some parents made familiar arguments that innocent youngsters were not ready for explicit language. Other parents and pastors, along with leaders of the Big Sky Tea Party, saw a darker purpose.

“Anyone who reads this document can see that it promotes acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,” one mother said at a six-hour school board meeting in late September.

Barely heard was the plea of Harlan Reidmohr, 18, who graduated last spring and said he was relentlessly tormented and slammed against lockers after coming out during his freshman year. Through his years in the Helena schools, he said at another school board meeting, sexual orientation was never once discussed in the classroom, and “I believe this led to a lot of the sexual harassment I faced.”

Last month, the federal Department of Education told schools they were obligated, under civil rights laws, to try to prevent harassment, including that based on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the agency did not address the controversy over more explicit classroom materials in grade schools.

Some districts, especially in larger cities, have adopted tolerance lessons with minimal dissent. But in suburban districts in California, Illinois and Minnesota, as well as here in Helena, the programs have unleashed fierce opposition.

“Of course we’re all against bullying,” Mr. DeMato, one of numerous pastors who opposed the plan, said in an interview. “But the Bible says very clearly that homosexuality is wrong, and Christians don’t want the schools to teach subjects that are repulsive to their values.”

The divided Helena school board, after four months of turmoil, recently adopted a revised plan for teaching about health, sex and diversity. Much of the explicit language about sexuality and gay families was removed or replaced with vague phrases, like a call for young children to “understand that family structures differ.” The superintendent who has ardently pushed the new curriculum, Bruce K. Messinger, agreed to let parents remove their children from lessons they find objectionable.

In Alameda, Calif., officials started to introduce new tolerance lessons after teachers noticed grade-schoolers using gay slurs and teasing children with gay or lesbian parents. A group of parents went to court seeking the right to remove their children from lessons that included reading “And Tango Makes Three,” a book in which two male penguins bond and raise a child.

The parents lost the suit, and the school superintendent, Kirsten Vital, said the district was not giving ground. “Everyone in our community needs to feel safe and visible and included,” Ms. Vital said.

Some of the Alameda parents have taken their children out of public schools, while others now hope to unseat members of the school board.

After at least two suicides by gay students last year, a Minnesota school district recently clarified its antibullying rules to explicitly protect gay and lesbian students along with other target groups. But to placate religious conservatives, the district, Anoka-Hennepin County, also stated that teachers must be absolutely neutral on questions of sexual orientation and refrain from endorsing gay parenting.

Rights advocates worry that teachers will avoid any discussion of gay-related topics, missing a chance to fight prejudice.

While nearly all states require schools to have rules against harassment, only 10 require them to explicitly outlaw bullying related to sexual orientation. Rights groups including the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, based in New York, are promoting a federal “safe schools” act to make this a universal requirement, although passage is not likely any time soon.

Candi Cushman, an educational analyst with Focus on the Family, a Christian group, said that early lessons about sexuality and gay parents reflected a political agenda, including legitimizing same-sex marriage. “We need to protect all children from bullying,” Ms. Cushman said. “But the advocacy groups are promoting homosexual lessons in the name of antibullying.”

Ellen Kahn of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, which offers a “welcoming schools” curriculum for grade schools, denied such motives.

“When you talk about two moms or two dads, the idea is to validate the families, not to push a debate about gay marriage,” Ms. Kahn said. The program involves what she described as age-appropriate materials on family and sexual diversity and is used in dozens of districts, though it has sometime stirred dissent.

The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, which runs teacher-training programs and recommends videos and books depicting gay parents in a positive light, has met opposition in several districts, including the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.

Julie Justicz, a 47-year-old lawyer, and her partner live in Oak Park with two sons ages 6 and 11. Ms. Justicz saw the need for early tolerance training, she said, when their older son was upset by pejorative terms about gays in the schoolyard.

Frank classroom discussions about diverse families and hurtful phrases had greatly reduced the problem, she said.

But one of the objecting parents, Tammi Shulz, who describes herself as a traditional Christian, said, “I just don’t think it’s great to talk about homosexuality with 5-year-olds.”

Tess Dufrechou, president of Helena High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance, a club that promotes tolerance, counters that, “By the time kids get to high school, it’s too late.”

Only a handful of students in Helena high schools are openly gay, with others keeping the secret because they fear the reactions of parents and peers, students said.

Michael Gengler, one of the few to have come out, said, “You learn from an early age that it’s not acceptable to be gay,” adding that he was disappointed that the teaching guidelines had been watered down.

But Mr. Messinger, the superintendent, said he still hoped to achieve the original goals without using the explicit language that offended many parents.

“This is not about advocating a lifestyle, but making sure our children understand it and, I hope, accept it,” he said.

From Brooklyn to Beijing, and Into a Caldron

China had captivated the imagination of Paul Cabo for as long as he could remember. Maybe it started with the documentaries he saw as a child about the Great Wall. Or his desire to understand his recently immigrated Chinese classmates at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island. Or maybe it was kung fu movies.

Whatever the cause, four years ago it finally propelled Mr. Cabo, now 35, from a job as a Starbucks manager to a position as an English teacher in Beijing.

“This is one of the most exciting places to be in the world right now,” Mr. Cabo recalled thinking.

The small-business landscape in China is littered with stories of customers who have felt swindled by investors who have fled the scene. When Mr. Cabo started teaching at the Shangxuele Children’s Activity Center in suburban Beijing a few months ago, he certainly did not expect to be embroiled in one of them. Nor did he expect to use his personal savings to reopen the center.

In mid-July, its owners hung up a sign saying the center was undergoing plumbing repairs. Then they disappeared, leaving about 100 students and about 20 staff members in the lurch. It was only after Mr. Cabo called Yao Gang, one of the three owners, that he learned the center had been closed permanently.

“You read about this in the newspapers, but you never think it’s going to happen to you,” Mr. Cabo said. “I just felt so bad for these children.”

Mr. Cabo also sensed a business opportunity. China’s ultracompetitive education system and the government’s population control policies, which generally limit urban families to one child, have created a vibrant market for extracurricular education. Almost every middle-class couple is willing to spend extra money to give their child a leg up when applying to top-ranked universities.

So Mr. Cabo emptied his bank account of about 60,000 renminbi, or about $9,000, and began paying the bills. Now he is struggling to keep the center open, dealing not only with parents but also with corrupt police officers, physical violence toward his staff and bewilderment on the part of many Beijing residents at his very existence.

Mr. Cabo favors the kind of dress inspired by turn-of-the century Chinese aristocrats: a long, black silk tunic with a mandarin collar that opens to the side and a black trilby over a black do-rag bearing Chinese characters for “dragon” and “trust.” On his feet he wears black Dr. Martens boots.

One early Sunday morning, while commuting to work by subway, he explained his look. His attire communicates his respect for Chinese culture, he said, but it also has a more practical function. Because angry Chinese parents do not knock before barging into his office, when they see him behind his desk in the fashions of yesteryear they are momentarily flabbergasted.

“It gives me time to think,” Mr. Cabo said as he walked through the crowd. At 6-foot-3, he appeared nearly a head taller than almost everyone around him. “Plus, they’re going to stare at me anyway,” he said.

Recently, a 4-year-old started crying in fright at the sight of him. “I’m a little afraid to talk to you, because you’re black,” a parent said to Mr. Cabo, who speaks fluent Mandarin.

Though Chinese generally welcome Westerners, Mr. Cabo finds that his nationality can sometimes be as big a hurdle as his skin color.

“You are all the running dogs for this American!” an angry grandparent once screamed at Mr. Cabo’s employees, accusing them of betraying their country.

Difficult parents are hardly Mr. Cabo’s only concern. There is also a running dispute over bills. Mr. Yao, one of the previous owners, claims that Mr. Cabo agreed to assume the bulk of the center’s debts when he took over the business. The previous owners owed money not only to parents, but also to teachers, all but three of whom quit.

Mr. Cabo’s investment is stretched thin. He recently abandoned a purchase of new toys in a dispute over a difference of about seven dollars.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Yao and another former owner showed up at the center with 20 people and laid claim to furniture and two pianos. Han Lu, a woman whom Mr. Cabo had hired as the center’s general manager, videotaped the episode. One of the workers punched her in the face and head, kicked her in the side and left her with a bloody nose, said Ms. Han, who is 26 and pregnant.

As a result of the pressure, Mr. Cabo moved his center to another building across the street.

Despite the hardships, he and his staff have been overhauling the operation. He changed its name to X-change International Activity Center and hired new teachers. Mr. Cabo said he planned to eventually hire a mix of foreign and domestic instructors, to give the center’s students an international outlook.

He has also won some battles. After a local newspaper ran an article about the center, the previous owners returned about $3,000 in tuition to parents. Mr. Yao said they had meant to do so all along.

“For a Chinese person like me, I’ve never seen someone with this much guts and determination,” said Ms. Han, who said she quit a lucrative job in event planning to work at the center for nothing. “I’m here for the challenge and the chance to build something from the ground up.”

When Mr. Cabo runs out of money, she said, she is ready to step in with her modest savings and perhaps sell her car.

“I think they have good ideas, and I hope they do well,” said Ding Shaowei, whose daughter studies ballet at the center and who has acted as a liaison between other parents and Mr. Cabo’s team.

Mr. Cabo has maintained his resolve. Along with a crane-feather fan, he carries with him a copy of China’s most famous military strategy text, Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.”

“I’m from Brooklyn,” he said. “I’m not going to roll over so easily.”