And some more articles....
Jul. 13th, 2005 01:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on glassy sponges
The Glass Menagerie (It's a Sponge)
In deep ocean waters, the prohibition against glass houses seems to be spectacularly ineffective. The glass sponge, Euplectella, or Venus flower basket, uses glass (silica), calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate to build a tubelike skeleton up to a foot long.
In an article in the current issue of Science, John D. Currey, a biologist at the University of York, in England, analyzed the glass house and found "a skeleton of extraordinary structural and mechanical refinement."
It is built in structural levels. Silica particles become filaments, which are formed into spicules, then gathered into larger spicules, which are arranged in a grid with struts and formed into a cylinder, with stiffening surface ridges.
No structure this beautiful should be vacant, and indeed each glass sponge houses a mating pair of bioluminescent shrimp. Many larvae enter the glass house, and as they grow they consume one another until only two remain, secure in their lifelong domicile.
One on this year's graduating class of cops
In Police Class, Blue Comes in Many Colors
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
When 1,600 recruits become police officers next week, they will make up the first graduating class in the history of the New York City Police Department that is majority minority; less than half the men and women are white. The difference - the class is 45.2 percent non-Hispanic white - is seen by many as a significant marker in the department's slow racial evolution.
But the racial breakdown is only one facet of the class. Looking closely at it provides a real-time snapshot of the force and its relationship to the city, with the newest immigrant police officers representing the city's newest immigrants, though belatedly. Many of the white recruits are themselves immigrants. And a very high percentage of new recruits live in the city, in contrast to many older officers, who work in the five boroughs but live in the suburbs.
At the very least, those in the department and those who watch it agree, the shift to such a class presents a moment to take stock of a department that has not always reflected the racial makeup of the city it polices - whose population has been less than 50 percent non-Hispanic white since sometime before the 1990 census. - and has at various times had a deeply troubled relationship with different groups.
Police officials say the change comes at a time of unusually strong community relationships with the police. Critics say that while the new class may be mostly minority, whites still occupy a disproportionately high percentage of the highest-paying jobs. Officials say changes will eventually come at those levels, too.
"There is less tension in the streets among the police and the people that we police than we have seen in my career," said Raymond Kelly, the police commissioner.
The Police Department hired Sam Battle as its first black police officer in 1911. Today, the 37,000-member force is 53.2 percent white, a level that decreases each year with retirements. In the last four years, more than 10,000 officers have graduated from the academy - just under half of them non-Hispanic white.
The rest of the department is 17.4 percent black, 25.5 percent Hispanic and about 3.8 percent Asian. It is one of the more representative agencies in a city that, as of the 2000 census, was 35 percent non-Hispanic white, 26.6 black, 9.8 percent Asian-American, and 27 percent Hispanic. The Fire Department, in contrast, is 92 percent white.
"On the street, where the rubber meets the road, is where you see the diversity displayed most clearly," Commissioner Kelly said.
In 1999, when the department came under sharp criticism after four white officers shot a West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, whites made up 67.4 percent of the force. Twenty years earlier, the force was 86.6 percent white. (The merger of the transit and housing police, which traditionally had higher percentages of minorities, into the main Police Department in 1995 helped increase the number of blacks and Hispanics.)
The class that will graduate on Wednesday is 45.2 percent white, 18.3 percent black, 28.2 percent Hispanic and 8 percent Asian-American. Many of the white recruits today are themselves immigrants, often from Eastern Europe; 63.3 percent of the incoming class lives in the city and 15.6 percent are women.
"When I came on in 1970, there were only 300 Hispanics on the job," said Rafael Pineiro, the chief of personnel, who is one of the highest-ranking Hispanics in the history of the department. Today, he said, there are about 8,000 Hispanics. "We've come a long way."
There are 68 minority officers at the rank of captain or above - or 10 percent. Critics say this is partially due to subtle, systemic discrimination against the promotion of minority officers. However, the department claims the disparity is largely a function of time lag for newer recruits to move up and of the civil service promotion exam, which controls promotions up to the rank of captain. For reasons that are subject to debate, some minority groups take and pass those tests at a lower rate.
Promotions above the rank of captain, from deputy inspector up to chief, are discretionary. Commissioner Kelly said the minority percentage of those ranks exceeds that in the eligible pool of captains.
Some critics also say that minority officers often do not get the same opportunities in prestigious specialized units like counterterrorism. "On the internal scale of the Police Department, minorities are playing roles which are least significant," said Anthony Miranda, executive director of the National Latino Officers Association of America, who is a 21-year department veteran.
The association filed a class-action lawsuit in 1999, claiming that the department had created a hostile environment for minority officers, who it said were disciplined in a discriminatory fashion and suffered reprisals when they complained. The suit was settled for $26.8 million in 2004 and included an agreement for the department to analyze whether minority employees are being discriminated or retaliated against.
The city's shifting immigrant population, along with the department's recruiting campaign through the mainstream and ethnic media, have been key reasons that the academy classes have grown more diverse.
The Police Department has long been a steppingstone to the middle class for the city's immigrants: it offers a promise of steady pay, good benefits and a sense of belonging to an American institution. For generations that promise drew Irish, Italian and German immigrants and their children. Today, the immigrant mix is just as likely to include Dominicans, Chinese, Bangladeshis, Haitians and Russians.
"The Irish and the Italians are getting outpaced by the newer immigrant arrivals," said Michael Cronin, the executive director of the New York Police Museum.
Word of mouth is also a powerful recruitment tool within immigrant communities. "Officers are our best recruiters," said Martin Morales, a deputy inspector, who heads the recruiting efforts. "They go out and tell their families and friends."
Syed Maksud Shah, a 31-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant, joined in large part because his twin brother, Syed Mokbul Shah, was a police officer.
In turn, he has spread the word to his Bangladeshi friends. "They work in hotels, in candy stories, driving taxis," said Mr. Shah. "I encourage them, tell them this is the best job nowadays, with lots of benefits," said Mr. Shah, who will return to Bangladesh for an arranged marriage after his graduation.
Woo Ham, a 24-year-old Korean-American police recruit, said his parents brag about his job to their friends, many of whom own nail salons and delis. "The first thing they say when they meet old friends is 'Hey, how are you doing? My son's in the N.Y.P.D.,' " said Mr. Ham, who himself has polished nails done by his mother, a manicurist.
For those whose families have been in the country for generations, the reasons for joining the force vary.
"The pay is not the best, and you have a chance of dying, but you have a direct impact on people's lives," said Joseph Muller, 27, a fourth-generation police officer whose great-grandfather was an officer in Brooklyn before it merged with the rest of the city.
Mr. Muller's reasons for joining the force are different from those of his grandfather. "It was the height of the Great Depression," said Mr. Muller. "It was a good job, solid benefits, pension."
The historic influence of the European immigrant groups is still felt around the department - reflected in the bagpipes and drums that are used in ceremonies, for example - but gone are the days where officers automatically asked one another which Catholic high school they went to or on which football team they played.
Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing group in the department, having made up only 2 to 3 percent of a graduating class just five years ago. Historically, Asian-Americans have been reluctant to allow their children to join the police force, in part because doing so was seen as putting strangers ahead of the family.
Ever since the Police Department established an Italian Legion in 1905 to investigate the Mafia, the department has put the diverse backgrounds and language skills of its officers to work in undercover, intelligence and other assignments.
Shaimaa Peterson, a 25-year-old Egyptian-American, hopes her linguistic skills and religious background will be assets to the department, especially in domestic security. "I know the religion, what phrases are out there," said Ms. Peterson, who lived in Egypt until she was 18.
An article on racing pigeons
Pigeons and Coupes
By COREY KILGANNON
Amjad Ali released six of his champion pigeons and watched proudly as they circled higher and higher into the morning sky and gradually became mere specks. When they had all but disappeared, a beefy man walked up and asked, "Hey, you got a radiator for a '97 Pathfinder?"
Mr. Ali runs an auto repair shop in Corona, Queens, where, perched above the junked cars, scrap metal and twisted auto wreckage, he keeps about 150 exquisite white pigeons with gray heads and outstanding pedigrees. They roost in outdoor cages attached to the side of the repair garage, above a smashed-up Lincoln.
Mr. Ali, 50, considers himself a first-rate mechanic, but he really fancies himself an athletic trainer, treating his pigeons as a team of finely tuned athletes. He breeds, trains and flies Pakistani tipplers, which are known among pigeon aficionados for their ability to fly very high for long periods - all day sometimes - before descending to the coop.
Mr. Ali said he grew up keeping tipplers in Karachi, Pakistan, where the highfliers are immensely popular. Enthusiasts hold high-stakes competitions to see whose birds can fly high the longest, the best ones flying up out of sight in the morning and coming back down by dusk.
Although many of the rooftop pigeon coops that were a staple of New York City decades ago are long gone, enthusiasts who keep birds are still out there. Most of these pigeons either circle near their coops, do aerial acrobatics or are "racing homers" trained to fly home from hundreds of miles away at impressive speeds. Mr. Ali's birds are more vertically minded.
He immigrated to New York about 17 years ago, set up a successful auto body business and settled his wife and three children into a nice home in Flushing. Then, four years ago, homesick for the passion of his youth, he persuaded a friend in Pakistan to give him 20 quality tipplers. Mr. Ali said he paid $7,000 to meet various United States government requirements so that he could ship them to America.
Since then he has carefully selected his top-performing fliers and mated them to breed better ones. Each morning, after opening his auto body shop, he feeds the birds and releases a half-dozen of them into the sky. Then he goes to work on customers' cars, stepping out intermittently to watch them go higher, up past the jet lanes leading to La Guardia Airport. They disappear for several hours, and in late afternoon they begin reappearing out of the sky, flying slowly down and usually roosting on the coop by dinnertime.
Mr. Ali said that many of his birds were world-class fliers that could easily fetch thousands of dollars from tippler handlers. He protects his flock with razor-wire fences, coopside surveillance cameras and a territorial German shepherd in the yard. He asked that the name and location of his business not be printed.
"I already get a lot of people stopping in and asking me about them," he said apologetically. "I'll never get any work done."
He said that the birds often caught the eye of Pakistani and Indian immigrants.
"A lot of Pakistani cabdrivers come in and ask, 'From where did you bring them?' " he said.
Michael J. Beat, a pigeon enthusiast from Brooklyn Heights who runs an online discussion group called Tippler Talk, said that he had heard increasingly from Indian and Pakistani immigrants keeping high-flying tipplers in New York, although he does not know Mr. Ali. "Twenty years ago, we never heard of Pakistani tipplers, but you hear more about Indians and Pakistanis coming to New York and the first thing they say is, 'I got to have my pigeons, I have to import a pair,' " he said. "It's familiar and it's country pride. It's what they know."
Mr. Ali has converted part of his shop into an indoor aviary. Inside it one recent morning, he fed his flock and checked on the 10 nesting pairs that sat on eggs or protected their newborn chicks.
Mr. Ali fed the birds food formulas he mixed himself, along with vitamin mixtures he makes from garlic oil, enzymes, vitamins, creatine, protein powder and a blend of spices his wife helps him mix, to aid the pigeons' digestion.
"Everything stems from the stomach," he explained. "If things are good there, the bird is healthy."
Mr. Ali says he has developed an expertise on pigeon nutrition from extensive reading about sports nutrition, biology and pigeon physiology. His pigeon handbooks and nutrition manuals are tucked among the automotive manuals in the shop office.
Nestled between two books about transmissions, for example, was "Feeding the Athlete Pigeon," and interspersed with manuals on engine parts are handbooks on sports nutrition and the physiology of pigeons and humans.
He reads Pakistani newspapers to keep up with the competitive circuit back home. From his research and experimentation, he said, he has found diets that have impressed the tippler aficionados he keeps in contact with in Pakistan, who have begun using his mixtures. He gestured proudly to a promotional poster from Pakistan hanging in his office advertising a coming race featuring some birds nurtured on Mr. Ali's diet formulas. The poster bore a photo of one of Mr. Ali's tipplers and listed the bird's name, American Express, in the caption, he said.
Asked about the name, he explained that he plans to pass his business on to his college-age son. Then, like a well-trained pigeon, he will fly home to Pakistan, possibly for good, and revive his old coops.
"I'd like to go back with my best birds and race them," he said. "They will all have American names - American Dream, American Fly, like that - so the people in Pakistan will see how well you can breed their birds in America."
And one on really cool crochet
Professor Lets Her Fingers Do the Talking
By MICHELLE YORK
Correction Appended
ITHACA, N.Y. - Some people looking at the crocheted objects on Daina Taimina's kitchen table would see funky modern art. Others would see advanced geometry.
The curvy creations, made of yarn, are actually both. And they are helping two very different groups - artists and mathematicians - learn more about each other. Increasingly, they are also making a quirky celebrity out of the woman who created them.
"The forms are amazing," said Binnie B. Fry, the gallery director of the Eleven Eleven Sculpture Space, an art gallery in Washington, where Dr. Taimina's creations are part of a summer exhibition called "Not the Knitting You Know."
Dr. Taimina, a math researcher at Cornell University, started crocheting the objects so her students could visualize something called hyperbolic space, which is an advanced geometric shape with constant negative curvature. Say what?
Well, balls and oranges, for example, have constant positive curvature. A flat table has zero curvature. And some things, like ruffled lettuce leaves, sea slugs and cancer cells, have negative curvatures.
This is not some abstract - or frightening - math lesson. Hyperbolic space is useful to many professionals - engineers, architects and landscapers, among others. So Dr. Taimina expected some attention for her yarn work, especially from math students destined for those professions. But her work has recently drawn interest from crocheting enthusiasts.
Math professors have been teaching about hyperbolic space for decades, but did not think it was possible to create an exact physical model. In the 1970's, some educators, including Dr. Taimina's husband, David Henderson, a math professor at Cornell, created hyperbolic models, but the first ones, made from paper and cellophane tape, were too fragile to be of much use.
Though she did not realize it at the time, Dr. Taimina was a good candidate to create a better model. As a precocious child in her native Latvia, she tried her elementary school teacher's patience. When her fellow second graders did not understand a math lesson, she recalled, she would jump up and yell, "I can't stand these idiots," prompting her teacher to send notes home.
By high school she had settled down, and was most impressed by a teacher who was known to keep his advanced students laughing and engaged. When she became an educator, she decided that no student, regardless of aptitude level, would feel out of place in her classroom. One way she assured that was by using everyday objects to explain theories. (She was known for peering so intently at the oranges at her local grocery to see if she could find perfectly round ones to use in her geometry class that she scared the clerks.)
But it was her crocheting hobby that would prove really useful and make her something of a star - at least to knitters and math lovers.
In 1997, while on a camping trip with her husband, she started crocheting a simple chain, believing that it might yield a hyperbolic model that could be handled without losing its original shape. She added stitches in a precise formula, keeping the yarn tight and the stitches small. After many flicks of her crocheting needle, out came a model.
One professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years saw one and said, "Oh, so that's how they look," Dr. Taimina recalled in an interview at her home here, not far from the Cornell campus. A year after she created the models, she and her husband gave a talk about them to mathematicians at a workshop at Cornell. "The second day, everyone had gone to Jo-Ann fabrics, and had yarn and crochet hooks," said Dr. Taimina. "And these are math professors."
The crossover to the art world began last year. An official of the Institute for Figuring, an educational organization based in Los Angeles, spotted an article about Dr. Taimina's models in New Scientist magazine and invited her and her husband to California to speak about them. An audience that included artists and movie producers was there. "They told us this helps with their imagination," Dr. Henderson said.
In February, the two spoke in New York City. To their surprise, the talk, at the Kitchen, a performance space in Chelsea, sold out. Some enthusiasts asked if they were going on tour.
Gwen Blakley Kinsler, the director of the Crochet Guild of America, believes Dr. Taimina's objects will be of interest to free-form crocheters. "It's always nice to be validated," she said. "People think only grannies do this and it's just doilies."
She plans to publish an article about Dr. Taimina and her hyperbolic creations in Crochet Fantasy magazine later this year.
That would be interesting notoriety for someone who, as a child, was told by her teachers not to waste time in art classes. As an adult, when terrified artists started showing up in her math classes to fulfill their degree requirements, she signed up for a watercolor class, thinking, "Then I will know how they feel."
Now when students tell her they simply cannot understand math, she pulls out one of her paintings and says, "I learned that in three months." Then she might pull out one of her crochet models.
One on meth-orphans
A Drug Scourge Creates Its Own Form of Orphan
By KATE ZERNIKE
TULSA, Okla., July 8 - The Laura Dester Shelter here is licensed for 38 children, but at times in the past months it has housed 90, forcing siblings to double up in cots. It is supposed to be a 24-hour stopping point between troubled homes and foster care, but with foster homes backed up, children are staying weeks and sometimes months, making it more orphanage than shelter, a cacophony of need.
In a rocking chair, a volunteer uses one arm to feed a 5-day-old boy taken from his mother at birth, the other to placate a toddler who is wandering from adult to adult begging, "Bottle?" A 3-year-old who arrived at dawn shrieks as salve is rubbed on her to kill the lice.
This is a problem methamphetamine has made, a scene increasingly familiar across the country as the number of foster children rises rapidly in states hit hard by the drug, the overwhelming number of them, officials say, taken from parents who were using or making methamphetamine.
Oklahoma last year became the first state to ban over-the-counter sales of cold medicines that contain the crucial ingredient needed to make methamphetamine. Even so, the number of foster children in the state is up 16 percent from a year ago. In Kentucky, the numbers are up 12 percent, or 753 children, with only seven new homes.
In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the system in 2004, up from 4,946 the year before, and officials there say the caseload would be half what it is now if the methamphetamine problem suddenly went away. In Tennessee, state officials recently began tracking the number of children brought in because of methamphetamine, and it rose to 700 in 2004 from 400 in 2003.
While foster populations in cities rose because of so-called crack babies in the 1990's, methamphetamine is mostly a rural phenomenon, and it has created virtual orphans in areas without social service networks to support them. in Muskogee, an hour's drive south of here, a group is raising money to convert an old church into a shelter because there are none.
Officials say methamphetamine's particularly potent and destructive nature and the way it is often made in the home conspire against child welfare unlike any other drug.
It has become harder to attract and keep foster parents because the children of methamphetamine arrive with so many behavioral problems; they may not get into their beds at night because they are so used to sleeping on the floor, and they may resist toilet training because they are used to wearing dirty diapers.
"We used to think, you give these kids a good home and lots of love and they'll be O.K.," said Esther Rider-Salem, the manager of Child Protective Services programs for the State of Oklahoma. "This goes above and beyond anything we've seen."
Although the methamphetamine problem has existed for years, state officials here and elsewhere say the number of foster children created by it has spiked in the last year or two as growing awareness of the drug problem has prompted more lab raids, and more citizens reporting suspected methamphetamine use.
Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that over the last five years 15,000 children were found at laboratories where methamphetamine was made. But that number vastly understates the problem, federal officials say, because it does not include children whose parents use methamphetamine but do not make it and because it relies on state reporting, which can be spotty.
On July 5, the National Association of Counties reported that 40 percent of child welfare officials surveyed nationwide said that methamphetamine had caused a rise in the number of children removed from homes.
The percentage was far higher on the West Coast and in rural areas, where the drug has hit the hardest. Seventy-one percent of counties in California, 70 percent in Colorado and 69 percent in Minnesota reported an increase in the number of children removed from homes because of methamphetamine.
In North Dakota, 54 percent of counties reported a methamphetamine-related increase. At what was billed as a "community meeting on meth" in Fargo this year, the state attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem, exhorted the hundreds of people packed into an auditorium: "People always ask, what can they do about meth? The most important thing you can do is become a foster parent, because we're just seeing so many kids being taken from these homes."
Officials also say methamphetamine has made it harder to reunite families once the child is taken; 59 percent of those surveyed in the national counties study agreed.
The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, enacted as babies born to crack users were crowding foster care, requires states to begin terminating parental rights if a child has spent 15 out of 22 months in foster care. It was intended to keep children from languishing in foster homes. But rehabilitation for methamphetamine often takes longer than other drugs, and parents fall behind the clock.
"Termination of parental rights almost becomes the regular piece," said Jerry Foxhoven, the administrator of the Child Advocacy Board in Iowa. "We know pretty early that these families are not going to get back together."
The drug - smoked, ingested or injected - is synthetic, cheap and easy to make in home labs using pseudoephedrine, the ingredient in many cold medicines, and common fertilizers, solvents or battery acid. The materials are dangerous, and highly explosive.
"Meth adds this element of parents who think they are rocket scientists and want to cook these chemicals in the kitchen," said Yvonne Glick, a lawyer at the Department of Human Services in Oklahoma who works with the state's alliance for drug endangered children. "They're on the couch watching their stuff cook, and the kids are on the floor watching them."
The drug also produces a tremendous and long-lasting rush, with intense sexual desire. As a result of the sexual binges, some child welfare officials say, methamphetamine users are having more children. More young children are entering the foster system, often as newborns suffering from the effects of their mother's use of the drug.
Oklahoma was recently chosen to participate in a federally financed study of the effects of methamphetamine on babies born to addicted mothers. Doctors who work with them have already found that the babies are born with trouble suckling or bonding with their parents, who often abuse the children out of frustration.
But the biggest problem, doctors who work with children say, is not with those born under the effects of the drug but with the children who grow up surrounded by methamphetamine and its attendant problems. Because users are so highly sexualized, the children are often exposed to pornography or sexual abuse, or watch their mothers prostitute themselves, the welfare workers say.
The drug binges tend to last for days or weeks, and the crash is tremendous, leaving children unwashed and unfed for days as parents fall into a deep sleep.
"The oldest kid becomes the parent, and the oldest kid may be 4 or 5 years old," said Dr. Mike Stratton, a pediatrician in Muskogee, Okla., who is involved with a state program for children exposed to drugs that is run in conjunction with the Justice Department. "The parents are basically worthless, when they're not stoned they're sleeping it off, when they're not sleeping they don't eat, and it's not in their regimen to feed the kids."
Ms. Glick recalls a group of siblings found eating plaster at a home filled with methamphetamine. The oldest, age 6, was given a hamburger when they arrived at the Laura Dester Shelter; he broke it apart and handed out bits to his siblings before taking a bite himself.
Jay Wurscher, director of alcohol and drug services for the children and families division of the Oregon Department of Human Services, said, "In every way, shape and form, this is the worst drug ever for child welfare."
Child welfare workers say they used to remove children as a last resort, first trying to help with services in the home.
But everywhere there are reminders of the dangers of leaving children in homes with methamphetamine. In one recent case here, an 18-month-old child fell onto a heating unit on the floor and died while the parents slept; a 3-year-old sibling had tried to rouse them.
The police who raid methamphetamine labs say they try to leave the children with relatives, particularly in rural areas, where there are few other options.
But it has become increasingly clear, they say, that often the relatives, too, are cooking or using methamphetamine. And because the problem has hit areas where there are so few shelters, children are often placed far from their parents. Caseworkers have to drive children long distances to where parents are living or imprisoned for visits; Leslie Beyer, a caseworker at Laura Dester, logged 3,600 miles on her car one month.
The drain of the cases is forcing foster families to leave the system, or caseworkers to quit. In some counties in Oklahoma, Ms. Rider-Salem said, half the caseworkers now leave within two years.
After the ban on over-the-counter pseudoephedrine was enacted - a law other states are trying to emulate - the number of children taken out of methamphetamine labs and into the foster care system in Oklahoma declined by about 15 percent, Ms. Glick said. But she said the number of children found not in the labs but with parents who were using the drug had more than compensated for any decline.
The state's only other children's shelter, in Oklahoma City, was so crowded recently that the fire marshal threatened to shut it down, forcing the state to send children to foster families in far-flung counties.
At Laura Dester, three new children arrived on one recent morning, the 3-year-old being treated for lice and two siblings, found playing in an abandoned house while their mother was passed out at home. The girl now wanders with a plastic bag over her hair to keep the lice salve from leaking. She hugs her little brother, then grabs a plastic toy phone out of his hand, leaving him wailing.
"Who's on the phone?" asks Kay Saunders, the assistant director at the shelter, gently trying to intervene.
"My mom," the girl says, then turns to her little brother. "It's ringing!"
One on "looping"
Goodbye, Class. See You in the Fall.
By ALAN FINDER
ARDSLEY, N.Y. - Even though it was his last day of kindergarten, Zachary Gold, a bright, enthusiastic 6-year-old, said he wasn't scared about moving up to the rigors of first grade. Unlike most kindergartners at the Concord Road Elementary School in this Westchester County village, he already knew who his first-grade teacher would be.
In September, Zachary will come right back to room P8, his 18 classmates from kindergarten and his teacher, Leslie Cohen.
"I feel, like, not scared, because it's going to be the same," Zachary said. "Well, different work, but the same teacher. She's a nice teacher. I love Ms. Cohen."
Having a teacher stay with a class for more than a year - or looping, as it is known - is on the rise, according to many experts. As educational innovations go, it is remarkably simple. So are its benefits, proponents say. Teachers get to know their students, and the students' parents, extremely well. They know each child's strengths and weaknesses, and the children know the teachers' expectations and methods. This familiarity can save a lot of time at the beginning of the school year.
There is little hard data on the frequency or effectiveness of looping, but classes in hundreds, if not thousands of schools across the United States have adopted it.
"As schools try to improve their standardized test scores, this appears to be catching on," Arthur E. Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said.
It is most common in elementary schools, though some middle schools do it, too. Schools in Colorado Springs have tried looping, as have those in Attleboro, Mass., and Antioch, Ill. In New York City, hundreds of classes stay together for more than a year, most of them in the lower grades.
"In New York, it's a lot more prevalent than we think," said Carmen Fariña, the city's deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. "It's becoming more popular."
The decision on whether a teacher will loop with a class is left to principals, teachers and parents, said Ms. Fariña, who herself stayed with a class through third and fourth grades four times in her teaching career. "In the city, there are hundreds of classes doing it," she said. "In a lot of schools there are four or five classes looping."
The big payoff from looping appears to be in the fall, when teachers typically take time to assess each child, trying to figure out their skill levels and how each student learns. But when Ms. Cohen and her class return in September, she said, "we can basically pick up where we left off."
"I've always felt the first six to eight weeks of the school year are extremely chaotic for kids," Ms. Cohen said, "and not a whole lot of learning takes place."
Spending two years together as a class also reassures young children, she said. "Both at the end of the year and at the beginning of the year, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety in kids," she said. "And I think the anxiety makes it more difficult for them to learn."
The potential disadvantages of looping are also clear-cut. If parents think a teacher is inadequate, they would surely oppose having their child spend an additional year in his or her class.
Advocates of looping say options need to be built into any program, so that parents and teachers can decide to place a child in a different class if remaining with a teacher would be detrimental.
Research into looping suggests that it can pay substantial dividends. The school district in East Cleveland, Ohio, experimented with looping from 1993 to 1997. A class in each of four elementary schools stayed with their teachers for three years, generally from kindergarten through second grade. The teachers worked extensively with parents to reinforce lessons in school, and the classes also met for five weeks each summer.
After three years, students in the looped classes scored an average of 25 percentage points higher on standardized tests in reading, language arts and math than other students in the school district, said Frederick M. Hampton, an associate professor of education at Cleveland State University who oversaw the research project.
"Everything about the children's lives is pretty much in constant motion," said Professor Hampton, who described East Cleveland as poor and predominantly African-American.
"It had occurred to me over a number of years that children, particularly from inner-city areas, need a different model of school, a more family-oriented model, in order to be successful," he said, "something that would allow them to see familiar faces, familiar teachers."
Many educators think middle-class children also benefit from a more prolonged relationship with teachers. Daniel L. Burke, the superintendent of the Big Foot Union High School District in Walworth, Wis., became an advocate of looping after experiencing it during his first years as a teacher. Dr. Burke taught seventh-grade English in Alsip, Ill., in 1970; at the end of the school year, he and two other young teachers were told they would have the same classes the following year, because of scheduling problems caused by construction.
"Those kids came in the door the first day and they knew me and I knew them," he said. "I knew their parents and they knew me. They knew what my expectations were. It was just wonderful."
Twenty years later, when he was a district superintendent in Antioch, Ill., Dr. Burke convinced a first-grade teacher to try looping. She liked it and word spread. By the time he left the district in 1999, he said, 85 percent of the elementary school teachers were staying with classes for at least two years.
Given the enthusiasm for looping in pockets of the country, many educators said they were surprised that it is not more popular and that it has not been studied more rigorously. The roots of looping trace back to the one-room rural schoolhouse and to educational innovations in Europe in the early 20th century.
The East Cleveland school district stopped looping once Professor Hampton's experiment ended in 1997, in part, he said, because the district was reorganized, with new schools opening and some old ones shutting down.
Professor Hampton said he thought the primary reason more schools have not adopted looping "is because most administrators have this one concept, this one paradigm of the word 'school.' And anything that does not fit into that, they don't bother with."
Some other educators said many teachers might be unwilling to stay with a class for a second year because it would involve learning the curriculum of a new grade.
That was not a problem for Ms. Cohen at the Concord Road School, because she had previously taught first and second grade, as well as kindergarten. Ms. Cohen said she liked the variety. She first suggested looping to her principal after an outside expert mentioned it in a talk given to Concord Road teachers two years ago, and the principal agreed to allow her to try it with her kindergarten class last year.
Would she loop with a class again? "I'll let you know," she said with a laugh. "Right now I love it. I love the connection I feel with the class. I think both for myself and for the parents, there's been a palpable sense of commitment. I'm really, really excited to start the school year again with them."
So are Zachary and many of his classmates. But not all of the children completely understand the arrangement. "I heard one of them say to another, 'We're going to have her again next time,'" Ms. Cohen said. "And the other child said, 'What about high school?'"
One on the media and war
Almost four years ago, the American right launched a great moral crusade. Sept. 11 had changed everything forever, the war party and its supporters repeated. The apostles of the New Righteousness used the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center to anathematize anyone who failed to embrace the cause. To dissent, even to analyze, was to dishonor the dead, virtually to commit high treason. Those few who tried to stop King George's Crusade from marching to Jerusalem (or Baghdad, in this millennium-later iteration) were swept away like the black protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, hosed off the streets not with water but with the saintly blood of the 9/11 victims. Pundits railed against an elitist "Fifth Column" and compared dissenters to Neville Chamberlain-like "appeasers." In one of the great failures of the opposition in American history, the Democrats and the mainstream media joined the angry mob. A few mumbled some pathetic caveats as they waved their pitchforks, but their bleats were drowned out as the patriotic horde swept on to Infinite Justice.
Beyond the calls to war and vengeance, Americans were told that this was a transforming moment, an epiphany. It was a Great Awakening, not just a political but a spiritual watershed. Pious writers insisted that after 9/11, irony was dead. Analysts from across the political spectrum argued that the terror attacks, like a vast memento mori, were a manifestation of death and evil that would forever change our superficial, sensation-addled culture. The astute New York Times columnist Frank Rich criticized the media for its petty pre-9/11 obsessions with such ephemera as shark attacks and tawdry murder cases. In the dark months after the attacks, the left and right agreed that the new era should, must, be one of dignity and gravitas. For conservatives, those qualities were in the service of anger; for liberals, of analysis -- but there was no disagreement about the need for transformation.
Today, the issue of how to comport ourselves in the wake of 9/11 is moot: It has been almost four years since the attacks, and most Americans -- without forgetting the tragedy or disrespecting the dead -- have gotten over it. But our current situation raises almost identical issues, of morality, personal conscience and the responsibility of the media.
For those opposed to the Iraq war and appalled by the moralistic blackmail practiced by the right, it has never been easy to separate legitimate mourning and reflection on the significance of 9/11 from hysteria and unreflective anger. (Indeed, one of the sadder consequences of George W. Bush's divisive war has been the way it has scattered what could have been a shared American grief.) The "9/11 changed everything" line became a tool used by the right; it overstated the significance of what was not, historically speaking, an epochal event, and implicitly laid the groundwork for the Iraq war.
In fact, soon after the trauma of 9/11 faded it became clear that the demands for a permanent change in American manners and mores were naive at best and overbearing at worst. Moralistic pronouncements about what we should think or watch are tiresome, would result in terrible sitcoms and in any case are doomed to be defeated by what Daniel Bell called "the cultural contradictions of capitalism." No one would really expect, or want, American culture to suddenly abandon irony, or even its obsession with shark attacks, weird real people conniving against each other on prime time and addictive murder cases. What's the use of defeating a global enemy if as a result you can't watch "America's Next Top Model"?
Still, one need not be a Victorian, or Marxist, moralist to find some of those cultural contradictions pretty appalling -- and getting worse all the time.
We are at war. Dozens of Americans are dying every month, and hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis, and there is no end in sight. It is a situation that calls for seriousness, analysis and reflection -- in a word, for respect.
So one might expect that the mass media -- and in particular, those media outlets that were the most aggressive in calling for war -- would treat the war with at least a modicum of respect, and cover it seriously.
But if one expected that, one would be colossally wrong. Welcome to Fox's America, land of dissociation, where war isn't real but must be supported at all costs.
Fox News is rapidly becoming an essential if faintly horrific guide to the American soul, a kind of cross between an organ and a tumor. Fox is certainly not the only offender -- its cable competitors CNN and MSNBC are chasing the same ratings, and are guilty of similar sins -- but it's the most egregious. Those who have watched Fox News recently must feel as if they had fallen into a bizarre time and logic warp out of Philip K. Dick, where 9/11 never happened (except when necessary to drum up support for the war on Iraq, which also doesn't exist except when it has to be defended) and we've returned to those happy summer days when lurid, sexually charged murder cases and shark attacks were not just the most important stories, they were the only stories.
On Fox these days, it's all Natalee Holloway, all the time, with breaks for "news alerts" about shark attacks. Probably the only thing that could have knocked the young woman who went missing in Aruba off the Fox air was a speech by Bush, and it did. Fox dragged itself away from Holloway long enough on Tuesday to preview the president's prime-time speech, trotting out the usual "expert" ostriches who intoned through mouthfuls of sand that only a "steadfast message" would calm the markets and the country, as well as a long-haired right-winger in the Ted Nugent mold who informed us that the Allies had to fight Nazi terrorists after the end of World War II for 10 years. With its usual reverence, Fox also covered Bush's speech itself, an utterly insignificant offering that seemed to have been spliced together from earlier "inspiring" Bush sound bites. Bush sought to rally support for the increasingly disastrous war by saying we had to fight the terrorists "where they are making their stand" -- leaving out the inconvenient fact that they were not there before he invaded. His halftime locker-room address may have been intended to recall the steely resolve of Winston Churchill's famous "We shall never surrender" speech, but for students of military history it may instead have summoned the words of Adolf Hitler, who proclaimed to the commander of his doomed troops in Stalingrad, "Where the soldier of Germany sets foot, there he remains."
But Fox's all-consuming interest is in the Holloway case, upon whose resolution the fate of the republic apparently rests. Tuesday, a short news segment opened with a live report from that epicenter of world news, Aruba, with a grim-looking reporter standing on the beach, intoning something ominous about Holloway. On Monday, its news programming was even more dominated by Holloway (a highlight was when Geraldo Rivera suggested putting military pressure on the Dutch marines to help find her body) and lovingly detailed accounts of the gory Florida shark attacks. John Gibson opened his "The Big Story" show by intoning, "This is a Fox News alert" -- then proceeded to inform his viewers of the urgent news that a boy who was attacked by a shark had his leg amputated, before going on to interview a shark expert. The contrast between Fox's resolute avoidance of showing bloody images from the war in Iraq and its nearly pornographic immersion in shark bites and unsolved murders, was glaring. Only death or bloodshed with high entertainment value gets on Fox.
In this context, it was remarkable that Fox host Neil Cavuto was able to maintain a straight face when he asked oilman T. Boone Pickens, "Does it trouble you the way the war is presented in the media?" -- a question so embarrassingly Jeff Gannon-esque that even Pickens retorted, "That's a loaded question." There's no problem with such "liberal media" bias at Fox: If it doesn't like the way the war is going, it just doesn't cover it. (Bush and Fox always sing from the same hymnal. In a not-so-subtle passage in his speech, Bush implicitly chastised news outlets for running images of bombings in Iraq, saying the insurgents carry them out "for the cameras.")
If Fox had not been such an ardent supporter of the war, its tabloid wallowing might be merely irritating. As it is, it's disgusting -- the contrast between Fox's earlier moralizing and its current pandering feels debased, almost depraved. Fox has not lived up to the war it demanded, and it's hard to believe that even supporters of the war aren't offended by this. But for today's right wing, including those blowhards who make careers out of decrying "the death of outrage" and the loss of Victorian virtues and other sins for which liberal "relativism" and "moral cowardice" are responsible, the idea that war should be covered with dignity and seriousness is as quaint as the Geneva Conventions: What matters is propaganda, effectiveness. If you want to win a war, and it's going badly, and its continued prosecution (or the political effectiveness of the president) depends upon the opinion of the American people, then you don't cover it, or you whitewash it. Hence the violent anger, in some conservative quarters, at the "Nightline" programs that showed the U.S. dead in Iraq. That the ultimate act of disrespect for the dead is to ignore them apparently does not matter.
If only the war in Iraq had been the video-game cakewalk the Bush administration promised, Fox wouldn't have had to deal with this taste problem. After all, everyone knew at the time that the most pro-war cable channel was also the one that wallowed most luxuriantly in shark attacks, tawdry murder cases and cheesy sexual titillation. There seemed no reason at the time that this should trouble anyone: After all, we were going to swagger into Iraq, kick Saddam's evil ass, declare "Mission accomplished" and swagger back to a hero's greeting of wonderfully pneumatic blond babes in bikinis on some cool Pacific island where the beer flows 24/7. This wasn't going to be a war, it was going to be another hit reality show -- "Survivor" without casualties, where all the dudes score with the chicks! Plus, if gravitas was needed for some reason, like if somehow a GI actually got killed or something, all the news anchors were wearing U.S. flag pins in their lapels and were pumped to get deeply emotional and patriotic at a moment's notice.
Still, it is now slowly beginning to dawn on the American people -- perhaps even on Fox, although it is not going to do anything about it -- that there is a disconnect at the heart of the war party's rhetoric about the grand mission, a deeply mixed message, and that this is doing something bad to our national character. After 9/11 Bush told Americans that they were embarked on a great struggle, the "war on terror," and he periodically appealed to their fear and anger. But he has demanded no sacrifice -- unless slapping a $1 yellow "Support Our Troops" sticker on the back of your car counts as a sacrifice. In his speech Tuesday, Bush seemed aware that the war is a phantom, disconnected from American reality: He appealed to the country to make some gesture of support to the troops on July 4. It was a pathetic, token appeal that will do little or nothing to unify the country. Perhaps it will raise some troops' morale, but properly armored vehicles would do far more.
In the end, the larger question of how television should cover war today remains unexplored. In this era of a toothless and intimidated media, this is not surprising: It's an explosive issue, one that places the media in direct opposition to power. Governments never want their citizens to know the truth about war. Fox News or any other media organization could argue, legitimately enough from the traditional war-coverage perspective, that U.S. casualties in Iraq are so low that covering them in detail, in the modern age of instant mass transmission, of color film and close-ups, would be both unnecessary and a manifestation of antiwar bias, since the bloody images would harm national morale. This is, of course, a debate as old as the Vietnam War: Some conservatives insisted that the American people only rejected that war when body bags began appearing on the screen, and they demanded -- and demand now -- that the media serve as an instrument of the government.
In fact, this attitude patronizes the American people and imposes a kind of national repression about the actual realities of war that is deeply unhealthy. That unhealthiness, a kind of spiritual rot, rises up not just from Fox's coverage but from all war coverage that flinches, that glosses over, that pleads "taste," that pleads "we're a family newspaper," that does not actually depict what happens when you go to war.
I am not a pacifist: I accept that there may be times when it is necessary to go to war. But if we do make that ultimate decision, we should do it knowing -- and seeing -- what war does.
We now live in an age of near-total information. In our fear and uncertainty about this unprecedented state of affairs, magnified by our underlying confusion about how to deal with war, we have embraced near-total repression. As a result, this war has been absurdly sanitized. It's time to grow up, to make ourselves face the real boogeyman of war -- not fake ones like the BTK killer, now safely behind bars and telling his gruesome tales for our horrified titillation. As Chris Hedges, one of the most unflinching chroniclers of war, has noted, modern war is "industrialized slaughter." Or, as some GI somewhere put it, war is "about blowing motherfuckers up." It's about heads getting shot off, and faces torn apart, and babies cut in two, and everything else horrible that can happen to a human body when big pieces of metal hit it at incredible speed. That is what war is -- no more, no less. Goya knew this; he drew it in his "Disasters of War," and under one of his hideous etchings he wrote these simple words: "This always happens."
This always happens: Every combat veteran knows this about war, but the politicians who make war don't, or don't tell. Yes, compared with World War II, or even Vietnam, not many American troops are dying in Iraq. But every GI who dies in Iraq, and every dead Iraqi civilian we don't count, is a human being like you or me, and as worthy of memorializing as the people who died in the World Trade Center -- certainly as Natalee Holloway. It's time, long past time, for the media to get real about war. Until it does, the TV channels will just be filled with bread and circuses and lies. And the Great Awakening that was supposed to be ushered in will be revealed to be a restless sleep, haunted by shabby, mean-spirited dreams.
One ostensibly on women in the war
At 7:30 on a dusty evening June 13, a convoy of U.S. Marine vehicles headed east on Fallujah's main road and signaled for a vehicle in front of them to pull over. In Iraq, U.S. convoys always direct Iraqi traffic away from them as a security measure, and like thousands of other Iraqi drivers, this driver obeyed and pulled over to the side of the road. The driver waited for two Humvees to pass by, and then, as a lightly armored, seven-ton truck full of 20 Marines rolled past him, he accelerated and detonated his explosives, igniting the fuel tank and setting the truck ablaze. Five Marines and one sailor were killed, and 13 wounded, but the bombing made international headlines because three of the dead and 11 of the wounded were women. It was the deadliest attack on female U.S. soldiers in American history.
"I set up security around the truck. The truck was still burning," said a Marine who responded immediately at the scene, and who was only a few hundred feet to the east when it happened. The man requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the incident. "We went back to Entry Control Point 1 and grabbed 10 fire extinguishers. We attempted to put out the fire, but the fire burned until it wanted to stop. Twelve fire extinguishers couldn't put it out. We weren't able to get into the vehicle at all."
Members of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, had arrived at the scene within minutes of the attack, and encountered a scene of carnage and twisted metal. The ground was littered with scattered equipment and torn bodies. As the men of India Company rushed to put out the fire in the burning truck, squads fanned out through the area and cleared nearby buildings, following security rules for a convoy attack.
When the Marine who gave the account of the bombing was asked what went through his mind when he saw the aftermath of the bombing, he looked away, at a loss for words.
In the United States, the attack reignited the debate on the role of female soldiers, but here in Fallujah there is widespread American acceptance of the role played by female Marines. The women who were killed had been searching female Iraqis at crucial checkpoints; the truck had just made the rounds of all the Fallujah checkpoints and had picked up almost all the female searchers before it was bombed.
Within India Company, which fought to secure the bomb site, many dismissed distinctions between men and women in the military. Many of the young men here are on their third tour of duty in Iraq, belonging to the same unit that helped pull down Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square. The 3/4, one of the most famous units of the Iraq war, also took the city of Tikrit and fought the first siege of Fallujah in April 2004.
Lance Cpl. Alex Pak of Bellbrook, Ohio, is a fire team leader who was at the scene of the bombing. "I totally commend women. There's a lot of opposition for them to join the military, and it takes a lot of balls for a woman to come out here. Guys have it easy -- they are expected to be in combat, fight for their country and die -- but women have opposition from the get-go. It takes a hard person to join an elite force like this one." Pak is only 20 years old, but he has experienced more combat than many members of the military have in two decades. Pak gives the impression of being at least 10 years older than he is. Like many other members of India Company, he is also on his third tour of duty in Iraq.
Cpl. Courtney Waddell of Angola, N.Y., was waiting to begin her shift as a female searcher at Entry Control Point 1 two days after the suicide bombing. Normally, she works as a combat engineer, fortifying positions and building bridges. "I think especially because of the nature of my job, the military needs to keep us in forward positions, especially for things like this, because otherwise we would have to use doctors or use their husbands to search the Iraqi women, and we can't trust their husbands. Females are essential in the city to perform these actions. The military is supposed to be a uniform unit. How can it be uniform if females aren't supposed to be doing what the males are doing? My job is the closest thing to infantry we can get. That's why I believe I should stay in a forward position." Like Pak, Waddell is 20 years old.
The attack underscored the difficult security situation of American forces as they try to assist the return of normal life in Fallujah. For months, the city had been quiet as U.S. and Iraqi forces patrolled the streets, but the latest suicide attack is part of a sharp spike in violence in the area. As more residents have returned to a place still largely in ruins, there are visible signs of a civic life returning to what had been a ghost town.
All residents of Fallujah are now retina-scanned and fingerprinted and must carry a special I.D. card that allows them entry to the city through one of the checkpoints, a kind of technological replacement for an old city wall. But it seems likely that insurgents, too, have managed to pass through the checkpoints, or found other routes into the city. Recently, the new Iraqi government has been issuing its own I.D. cards, which allow ministry officials to cross the checkpoints, and Marines have been finding dozens of forgeries.
Months earlier, a resident had to carry an I.D. issued by the first Marine division to enter the city. "Now they're coming through with teacher badges and Ministry of Oil badges, and all these [other] crazy badges. We've been here long enough to filter through them, but about half the badges we get are fake," said one Marine on condition of anonymity. "The last couple of months, these new badges have been showing up, and they've been letting the Iraqis use them."
In Fallujah, the Marines have won when insurgents came out into the open. A few days before the suicide attack, in a southern neighborhood of Fallujah, a small unit of U.S. forces called a combined antiarmor team arrived as dozens of insurgents were setting up an ambush. In the firefight that followed, the Marines battled their way through a carefully designed maze of roadside bombs, car bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire. The Marines in the small convoy managed to overtake the insurgents' positions and killed many of the attackers without taking a single casualty. There were no reporters present when the incident took place, but five members of the unit later described the progress of the battle, drew diagrams and established timelines for events. Marines in Lima Company were able to corroborate many of the events in the timeline.
The bomber struck the convoy June 13 inside the secured part of the city, on Route 10. Because vehicle traffic into the city is tightly controlled, there is a strong possibility that insurgents assembled the bomb inside Fallujah. Another striking aspect of the account is the description of the way the bomber waited for the first two armored Humvees to pass and then chose the crowded seven-ton truck as his target. U.S. Marines often travel in the seven-ton trucks, many of which have steel armor that will stop a bullet from an automatic rifle. But the thin steel plate turns into shrapnel when hit by more powerful weapons. Many of the Marine seven-ton transports are lightly armored, however, and because they can carry as many as 18 people they're a prime target of suicide attacks and large roadside bombs. It is also true that the bomber could not have easily approached the truck from the back of the convoy, since he likely would have been killed by turret gunners on the rearmost Humvees. It seemed that he had carefully picked his approach to coincide with the seven-ton.
U.S. commanders are trying to walk a delicate line between allowing Iraqi citizens back into the city and giving Iraqi officials more say in the city's affairs, but as the security situation gets worse, they are likely to err on the side of caution and limit Iraqis' autonomy in deciding who gets back in.
One on native Hawaiians
In Hawaii, a Chance to Heal, Long Delayed
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Less than a month after 9/11, with terrorism fears threatening to put jet travel and thus the Hawaiian economy into a death spiral, tourism officials there announced an emergency marketing campaign to promote the state as a place of rest, solace and healing. Anyone who has ever stepped off a plane in Honolulu, trading the brittle staleness of the aircraft cabin for the liquid Hawaiian breeze, warm and heavy with the scent of flowers, knows exactly what they meant.
The selling of Hawaii as a land of gracious welcome works so well because it happens to be true. But for the members of one group, that has always evoked a bitter taste: native Hawaiians, the descendants of Polynesian voyagers who settled the islands in antiquity and lived there in isolation until the late 1700's. Ever since Captain Cook, the native Hawaiian story has been a litany of loss: loss of land and of a way of life, of population through sickness and disease, and of self-determination when United States marines toppled the monarchy in 1893.
Over decades, the islands emerged as a vibrant multiracial society and the proud 50th state. Hawaiian culture - language and art, religion and music - has undergone a profound rebirth since the 1970's. But underneath this modern history remains a deep sense of dispossession among native Hawaiians, who make up about 20 percent of the population.
Into the void has stepped Senator Daniel Akaka, the first native Hawaiian in Congress, who is the lead sponsor of a bill to extend federal recognition to native Hawaiians, giving them the rights of self-government as indigenous people that only American Indians and native Alaskans now enjoy. The Akaka bill has the support of Hawaii's Congressional delegation, the State Legislature and even its Republican governor, Linda Lingle. It will go before the Senate for a vote as soon as next week.
The bill would allow native Hawaiians - defined, in part, as anyone with indigenous ancestors living in the islands before the kingdom fell - to elect a governing body that would negotiate with the federal government over land and other natural resources and assets. There is a lot of money and property at stake, including nearly two million acres of "ceded lands," once owned by the monarchy; hundreds of thousands of acres set aside long ago for Hawaiian homesteaders; and hundreds of millions of dollars in entitlement programs.
Much of what is now the responsibility of two state agencies, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, would become the purview of the new government.
There are many jurisdictional and procedural details to work out, but Mr. Akaka and others insist that the bill precludes radical outcomes.
There would be no cash reparations, no new entitlements, no land grabs and especially no Indian-style casinos, which are a hot topic in Hawaii, one of only two states that outlaw all gambling.
The bill's critics include those who see it as a race-ba
The Glass Menagerie (It's a Sponge)
In deep ocean waters, the prohibition against glass houses seems to be spectacularly ineffective. The glass sponge, Euplectella, or Venus flower basket, uses glass (silica), calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate to build a tubelike skeleton up to a foot long.
In an article in the current issue of Science, John D. Currey, a biologist at the University of York, in England, analyzed the glass house and found "a skeleton of extraordinary structural and mechanical refinement."
It is built in structural levels. Silica particles become filaments, which are formed into spicules, then gathered into larger spicules, which are arranged in a grid with struts and formed into a cylinder, with stiffening surface ridges.
No structure this beautiful should be vacant, and indeed each glass sponge houses a mating pair of bioluminescent shrimp. Many larvae enter the glass house, and as they grow they consume one another until only two remain, secure in their lifelong domicile.
One on this year's graduating class of cops
In Police Class, Blue Comes in Many Colors
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
When 1,600 recruits become police officers next week, they will make up the first graduating class in the history of the New York City Police Department that is majority minority; less than half the men and women are white. The difference - the class is 45.2 percent non-Hispanic white - is seen by many as a significant marker in the department's slow racial evolution.
But the racial breakdown is only one facet of the class. Looking closely at it provides a real-time snapshot of the force and its relationship to the city, with the newest immigrant police officers representing the city's newest immigrants, though belatedly. Many of the white recruits are themselves immigrants. And a very high percentage of new recruits live in the city, in contrast to many older officers, who work in the five boroughs but live in the suburbs.
At the very least, those in the department and those who watch it agree, the shift to such a class presents a moment to take stock of a department that has not always reflected the racial makeup of the city it polices - whose population has been less than 50 percent non-Hispanic white since sometime before the 1990 census. - and has at various times had a deeply troubled relationship with different groups.
Police officials say the change comes at a time of unusually strong community relationships with the police. Critics say that while the new class may be mostly minority, whites still occupy a disproportionately high percentage of the highest-paying jobs. Officials say changes will eventually come at those levels, too.
"There is less tension in the streets among the police and the people that we police than we have seen in my career," said Raymond Kelly, the police commissioner.
The Police Department hired Sam Battle as its first black police officer in 1911. Today, the 37,000-member force is 53.2 percent white, a level that decreases each year with retirements. In the last four years, more than 10,000 officers have graduated from the academy - just under half of them non-Hispanic white.
The rest of the department is 17.4 percent black, 25.5 percent Hispanic and about 3.8 percent Asian. It is one of the more representative agencies in a city that, as of the 2000 census, was 35 percent non-Hispanic white, 26.6 black, 9.8 percent Asian-American, and 27 percent Hispanic. The Fire Department, in contrast, is 92 percent white.
"On the street, where the rubber meets the road, is where you see the diversity displayed most clearly," Commissioner Kelly said.
In 1999, when the department came under sharp criticism after four white officers shot a West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, whites made up 67.4 percent of the force. Twenty years earlier, the force was 86.6 percent white. (The merger of the transit and housing police, which traditionally had higher percentages of minorities, into the main Police Department in 1995 helped increase the number of blacks and Hispanics.)
The class that will graduate on Wednesday is 45.2 percent white, 18.3 percent black, 28.2 percent Hispanic and 8 percent Asian-American. Many of the white recruits today are themselves immigrants, often from Eastern Europe; 63.3 percent of the incoming class lives in the city and 15.6 percent are women.
"When I came on in 1970, there were only 300 Hispanics on the job," said Rafael Pineiro, the chief of personnel, who is one of the highest-ranking Hispanics in the history of the department. Today, he said, there are about 8,000 Hispanics. "We've come a long way."
There are 68 minority officers at the rank of captain or above - or 10 percent. Critics say this is partially due to subtle, systemic discrimination against the promotion of minority officers. However, the department claims the disparity is largely a function of time lag for newer recruits to move up and of the civil service promotion exam, which controls promotions up to the rank of captain. For reasons that are subject to debate, some minority groups take and pass those tests at a lower rate.
Promotions above the rank of captain, from deputy inspector up to chief, are discretionary. Commissioner Kelly said the minority percentage of those ranks exceeds that in the eligible pool of captains.
Some critics also say that minority officers often do not get the same opportunities in prestigious specialized units like counterterrorism. "On the internal scale of the Police Department, minorities are playing roles which are least significant," said Anthony Miranda, executive director of the National Latino Officers Association of America, who is a 21-year department veteran.
The association filed a class-action lawsuit in 1999, claiming that the department had created a hostile environment for minority officers, who it said were disciplined in a discriminatory fashion and suffered reprisals when they complained. The suit was settled for $26.8 million in 2004 and included an agreement for the department to analyze whether minority employees are being discriminated or retaliated against.
The city's shifting immigrant population, along with the department's recruiting campaign through the mainstream and ethnic media, have been key reasons that the academy classes have grown more diverse.
The Police Department has long been a steppingstone to the middle class for the city's immigrants: it offers a promise of steady pay, good benefits and a sense of belonging to an American institution. For generations that promise drew Irish, Italian and German immigrants and their children. Today, the immigrant mix is just as likely to include Dominicans, Chinese, Bangladeshis, Haitians and Russians.
"The Irish and the Italians are getting outpaced by the newer immigrant arrivals," said Michael Cronin, the executive director of the New York Police Museum.
Word of mouth is also a powerful recruitment tool within immigrant communities. "Officers are our best recruiters," said Martin Morales, a deputy inspector, who heads the recruiting efforts. "They go out and tell their families and friends."
Syed Maksud Shah, a 31-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant, joined in large part because his twin brother, Syed Mokbul Shah, was a police officer.
In turn, he has spread the word to his Bangladeshi friends. "They work in hotels, in candy stories, driving taxis," said Mr. Shah. "I encourage them, tell them this is the best job nowadays, with lots of benefits," said Mr. Shah, who will return to Bangladesh for an arranged marriage after his graduation.
Woo Ham, a 24-year-old Korean-American police recruit, said his parents brag about his job to their friends, many of whom own nail salons and delis. "The first thing they say when they meet old friends is 'Hey, how are you doing? My son's in the N.Y.P.D.,' " said Mr. Ham, who himself has polished nails done by his mother, a manicurist.
For those whose families have been in the country for generations, the reasons for joining the force vary.
"The pay is not the best, and you have a chance of dying, but you have a direct impact on people's lives," said Joseph Muller, 27, a fourth-generation police officer whose great-grandfather was an officer in Brooklyn before it merged with the rest of the city.
Mr. Muller's reasons for joining the force are different from those of his grandfather. "It was the height of the Great Depression," said Mr. Muller. "It was a good job, solid benefits, pension."
The historic influence of the European immigrant groups is still felt around the department - reflected in the bagpipes and drums that are used in ceremonies, for example - but gone are the days where officers automatically asked one another which Catholic high school they went to or on which football team they played.
Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing group in the department, having made up only 2 to 3 percent of a graduating class just five years ago. Historically, Asian-Americans have been reluctant to allow their children to join the police force, in part because doing so was seen as putting strangers ahead of the family.
Ever since the Police Department established an Italian Legion in 1905 to investigate the Mafia, the department has put the diverse backgrounds and language skills of its officers to work in undercover, intelligence and other assignments.
Shaimaa Peterson, a 25-year-old Egyptian-American, hopes her linguistic skills and religious background will be assets to the department, especially in domestic security. "I know the religion, what phrases are out there," said Ms. Peterson, who lived in Egypt until she was 18.
An article on racing pigeons
Pigeons and Coupes
By COREY KILGANNON
Amjad Ali released six of his champion pigeons and watched proudly as they circled higher and higher into the morning sky and gradually became mere specks. When they had all but disappeared, a beefy man walked up and asked, "Hey, you got a radiator for a '97 Pathfinder?"
Mr. Ali runs an auto repair shop in Corona, Queens, where, perched above the junked cars, scrap metal and twisted auto wreckage, he keeps about 150 exquisite white pigeons with gray heads and outstanding pedigrees. They roost in outdoor cages attached to the side of the repair garage, above a smashed-up Lincoln.
Mr. Ali, 50, considers himself a first-rate mechanic, but he really fancies himself an athletic trainer, treating his pigeons as a team of finely tuned athletes. He breeds, trains and flies Pakistani tipplers, which are known among pigeon aficionados for their ability to fly very high for long periods - all day sometimes - before descending to the coop.
Mr. Ali said he grew up keeping tipplers in Karachi, Pakistan, where the highfliers are immensely popular. Enthusiasts hold high-stakes competitions to see whose birds can fly high the longest, the best ones flying up out of sight in the morning and coming back down by dusk.
Although many of the rooftop pigeon coops that were a staple of New York City decades ago are long gone, enthusiasts who keep birds are still out there. Most of these pigeons either circle near their coops, do aerial acrobatics or are "racing homers" trained to fly home from hundreds of miles away at impressive speeds. Mr. Ali's birds are more vertically minded.
He immigrated to New York about 17 years ago, set up a successful auto body business and settled his wife and three children into a nice home in Flushing. Then, four years ago, homesick for the passion of his youth, he persuaded a friend in Pakistan to give him 20 quality tipplers. Mr. Ali said he paid $7,000 to meet various United States government requirements so that he could ship them to America.
Since then he has carefully selected his top-performing fliers and mated them to breed better ones. Each morning, after opening his auto body shop, he feeds the birds and releases a half-dozen of them into the sky. Then he goes to work on customers' cars, stepping out intermittently to watch them go higher, up past the jet lanes leading to La Guardia Airport. They disappear for several hours, and in late afternoon they begin reappearing out of the sky, flying slowly down and usually roosting on the coop by dinnertime.
Mr. Ali said that many of his birds were world-class fliers that could easily fetch thousands of dollars from tippler handlers. He protects his flock with razor-wire fences, coopside surveillance cameras and a territorial German shepherd in the yard. He asked that the name and location of his business not be printed.
"I already get a lot of people stopping in and asking me about them," he said apologetically. "I'll never get any work done."
He said that the birds often caught the eye of Pakistani and Indian immigrants.
"A lot of Pakistani cabdrivers come in and ask, 'From where did you bring them?' " he said.
Michael J. Beat, a pigeon enthusiast from Brooklyn Heights who runs an online discussion group called Tippler Talk, said that he had heard increasingly from Indian and Pakistani immigrants keeping high-flying tipplers in New York, although he does not know Mr. Ali. "Twenty years ago, we never heard of Pakistani tipplers, but you hear more about Indians and Pakistanis coming to New York and the first thing they say is, 'I got to have my pigeons, I have to import a pair,' " he said. "It's familiar and it's country pride. It's what they know."
Mr. Ali has converted part of his shop into an indoor aviary. Inside it one recent morning, he fed his flock and checked on the 10 nesting pairs that sat on eggs or protected their newborn chicks.
Mr. Ali fed the birds food formulas he mixed himself, along with vitamin mixtures he makes from garlic oil, enzymes, vitamins, creatine, protein powder and a blend of spices his wife helps him mix, to aid the pigeons' digestion.
"Everything stems from the stomach," he explained. "If things are good there, the bird is healthy."
Mr. Ali says he has developed an expertise on pigeon nutrition from extensive reading about sports nutrition, biology and pigeon physiology. His pigeon handbooks and nutrition manuals are tucked among the automotive manuals in the shop office.
Nestled between two books about transmissions, for example, was "Feeding the Athlete Pigeon," and interspersed with manuals on engine parts are handbooks on sports nutrition and the physiology of pigeons and humans.
He reads Pakistani newspapers to keep up with the competitive circuit back home. From his research and experimentation, he said, he has found diets that have impressed the tippler aficionados he keeps in contact with in Pakistan, who have begun using his mixtures. He gestured proudly to a promotional poster from Pakistan hanging in his office advertising a coming race featuring some birds nurtured on Mr. Ali's diet formulas. The poster bore a photo of one of Mr. Ali's tipplers and listed the bird's name, American Express, in the caption, he said.
Asked about the name, he explained that he plans to pass his business on to his college-age son. Then, like a well-trained pigeon, he will fly home to Pakistan, possibly for good, and revive his old coops.
"I'd like to go back with my best birds and race them," he said. "They will all have American names - American Dream, American Fly, like that - so the people in Pakistan will see how well you can breed their birds in America."
And one on really cool crochet
Professor Lets Her Fingers Do the Talking
By MICHELLE YORK
Correction Appended
ITHACA, N.Y. - Some people looking at the crocheted objects on Daina Taimina's kitchen table would see funky modern art. Others would see advanced geometry.
The curvy creations, made of yarn, are actually both. And they are helping two very different groups - artists and mathematicians - learn more about each other. Increasingly, they are also making a quirky celebrity out of the woman who created them.
"The forms are amazing," said Binnie B. Fry, the gallery director of the Eleven Eleven Sculpture Space, an art gallery in Washington, where Dr. Taimina's creations are part of a summer exhibition called "Not the Knitting You Know."
Dr. Taimina, a math researcher at Cornell University, started crocheting the objects so her students could visualize something called hyperbolic space, which is an advanced geometric shape with constant negative curvature. Say what?
Well, balls and oranges, for example, have constant positive curvature. A flat table has zero curvature. And some things, like ruffled lettuce leaves, sea slugs and cancer cells, have negative curvatures.
This is not some abstract - or frightening - math lesson. Hyperbolic space is useful to many professionals - engineers, architects and landscapers, among others. So Dr. Taimina expected some attention for her yarn work, especially from math students destined for those professions. But her work has recently drawn interest from crocheting enthusiasts.
Math professors have been teaching about hyperbolic space for decades, but did not think it was possible to create an exact physical model. In the 1970's, some educators, including Dr. Taimina's husband, David Henderson, a math professor at Cornell, created hyperbolic models, but the first ones, made from paper and cellophane tape, were too fragile to be of much use.
Though she did not realize it at the time, Dr. Taimina was a good candidate to create a better model. As a precocious child in her native Latvia, she tried her elementary school teacher's patience. When her fellow second graders did not understand a math lesson, she recalled, she would jump up and yell, "I can't stand these idiots," prompting her teacher to send notes home.
By high school she had settled down, and was most impressed by a teacher who was known to keep his advanced students laughing and engaged. When she became an educator, she decided that no student, regardless of aptitude level, would feel out of place in her classroom. One way she assured that was by using everyday objects to explain theories. (She was known for peering so intently at the oranges at her local grocery to see if she could find perfectly round ones to use in her geometry class that she scared the clerks.)
But it was her crocheting hobby that would prove really useful and make her something of a star - at least to knitters and math lovers.
In 1997, while on a camping trip with her husband, she started crocheting a simple chain, believing that it might yield a hyperbolic model that could be handled without losing its original shape. She added stitches in a precise formula, keeping the yarn tight and the stitches small. After many flicks of her crocheting needle, out came a model.
One professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years saw one and said, "Oh, so that's how they look," Dr. Taimina recalled in an interview at her home here, not far from the Cornell campus. A year after she created the models, she and her husband gave a talk about them to mathematicians at a workshop at Cornell. "The second day, everyone had gone to Jo-Ann fabrics, and had yarn and crochet hooks," said Dr. Taimina. "And these are math professors."
The crossover to the art world began last year. An official of the Institute for Figuring, an educational organization based in Los Angeles, spotted an article about Dr. Taimina's models in New Scientist magazine and invited her and her husband to California to speak about them. An audience that included artists and movie producers was there. "They told us this helps with their imagination," Dr. Henderson said.
In February, the two spoke in New York City. To their surprise, the talk, at the Kitchen, a performance space in Chelsea, sold out. Some enthusiasts asked if they were going on tour.
Gwen Blakley Kinsler, the director of the Crochet Guild of America, believes Dr. Taimina's objects will be of interest to free-form crocheters. "It's always nice to be validated," she said. "People think only grannies do this and it's just doilies."
She plans to publish an article about Dr. Taimina and her hyperbolic creations in Crochet Fantasy magazine later this year.
That would be interesting notoriety for someone who, as a child, was told by her teachers not to waste time in art classes. As an adult, when terrified artists started showing up in her math classes to fulfill their degree requirements, she signed up for a watercolor class, thinking, "Then I will know how they feel."
Now when students tell her they simply cannot understand math, she pulls out one of her paintings and says, "I learned that in three months." Then she might pull out one of her crochet models.
One on meth-orphans
A Drug Scourge Creates Its Own Form of Orphan
By KATE ZERNIKE
TULSA, Okla., July 8 - The Laura Dester Shelter here is licensed for 38 children, but at times in the past months it has housed 90, forcing siblings to double up in cots. It is supposed to be a 24-hour stopping point between troubled homes and foster care, but with foster homes backed up, children are staying weeks and sometimes months, making it more orphanage than shelter, a cacophony of need.
In a rocking chair, a volunteer uses one arm to feed a 5-day-old boy taken from his mother at birth, the other to placate a toddler who is wandering from adult to adult begging, "Bottle?" A 3-year-old who arrived at dawn shrieks as salve is rubbed on her to kill the lice.
This is a problem methamphetamine has made, a scene increasingly familiar across the country as the number of foster children rises rapidly in states hit hard by the drug, the overwhelming number of them, officials say, taken from parents who were using or making methamphetamine.
Oklahoma last year became the first state to ban over-the-counter sales of cold medicines that contain the crucial ingredient needed to make methamphetamine. Even so, the number of foster children in the state is up 16 percent from a year ago. In Kentucky, the numbers are up 12 percent, or 753 children, with only seven new homes.
In Oregon, 5,515 children entered the system in 2004, up from 4,946 the year before, and officials there say the caseload would be half what it is now if the methamphetamine problem suddenly went away. In Tennessee, state officials recently began tracking the number of children brought in because of methamphetamine, and it rose to 700 in 2004 from 400 in 2003.
While foster populations in cities rose because of so-called crack babies in the 1990's, methamphetamine is mostly a rural phenomenon, and it has created virtual orphans in areas without social service networks to support them. in Muskogee, an hour's drive south of here, a group is raising money to convert an old church into a shelter because there are none.
Officials say methamphetamine's particularly potent and destructive nature and the way it is often made in the home conspire against child welfare unlike any other drug.
It has become harder to attract and keep foster parents because the children of methamphetamine arrive with so many behavioral problems; they may not get into their beds at night because they are so used to sleeping on the floor, and they may resist toilet training because they are used to wearing dirty diapers.
"We used to think, you give these kids a good home and lots of love and they'll be O.K.," said Esther Rider-Salem, the manager of Child Protective Services programs for the State of Oklahoma. "This goes above and beyond anything we've seen."
Although the methamphetamine problem has existed for years, state officials here and elsewhere say the number of foster children created by it has spiked in the last year or two as growing awareness of the drug problem has prompted more lab raids, and more citizens reporting suspected methamphetamine use.
Nationwide, the Drug Enforcement Administration says that over the last five years 15,000 children were found at laboratories where methamphetamine was made. But that number vastly understates the problem, federal officials say, because it does not include children whose parents use methamphetamine but do not make it and because it relies on state reporting, which can be spotty.
On July 5, the National Association of Counties reported that 40 percent of child welfare officials surveyed nationwide said that methamphetamine had caused a rise in the number of children removed from homes.
The percentage was far higher on the West Coast and in rural areas, where the drug has hit the hardest. Seventy-one percent of counties in California, 70 percent in Colorado and 69 percent in Minnesota reported an increase in the number of children removed from homes because of methamphetamine.
In North Dakota, 54 percent of counties reported a methamphetamine-related increase. At what was billed as a "community meeting on meth" in Fargo this year, the state attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem, exhorted the hundreds of people packed into an auditorium: "People always ask, what can they do about meth? The most important thing you can do is become a foster parent, because we're just seeing so many kids being taken from these homes."
Officials also say methamphetamine has made it harder to reunite families once the child is taken; 59 percent of those surveyed in the national counties study agreed.
The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, enacted as babies born to crack users were crowding foster care, requires states to begin terminating parental rights if a child has spent 15 out of 22 months in foster care. It was intended to keep children from languishing in foster homes. But rehabilitation for methamphetamine often takes longer than other drugs, and parents fall behind the clock.
"Termination of parental rights almost becomes the regular piece," said Jerry Foxhoven, the administrator of the Child Advocacy Board in Iowa. "We know pretty early that these families are not going to get back together."
The drug - smoked, ingested or injected - is synthetic, cheap and easy to make in home labs using pseudoephedrine, the ingredient in many cold medicines, and common fertilizers, solvents or battery acid. The materials are dangerous, and highly explosive.
"Meth adds this element of parents who think they are rocket scientists and want to cook these chemicals in the kitchen," said Yvonne Glick, a lawyer at the Department of Human Services in Oklahoma who works with the state's alliance for drug endangered children. "They're on the couch watching their stuff cook, and the kids are on the floor watching them."
The drug also produces a tremendous and long-lasting rush, with intense sexual desire. As a result of the sexual binges, some child welfare officials say, methamphetamine users are having more children. More young children are entering the foster system, often as newborns suffering from the effects of their mother's use of the drug.
Oklahoma was recently chosen to participate in a federally financed study of the effects of methamphetamine on babies born to addicted mothers. Doctors who work with them have already found that the babies are born with trouble suckling or bonding with their parents, who often abuse the children out of frustration.
But the biggest problem, doctors who work with children say, is not with those born under the effects of the drug but with the children who grow up surrounded by methamphetamine and its attendant problems. Because users are so highly sexualized, the children are often exposed to pornography or sexual abuse, or watch their mothers prostitute themselves, the welfare workers say.
The drug binges tend to last for days or weeks, and the crash is tremendous, leaving children unwashed and unfed for days as parents fall into a deep sleep.
"The oldest kid becomes the parent, and the oldest kid may be 4 or 5 years old," said Dr. Mike Stratton, a pediatrician in Muskogee, Okla., who is involved with a state program for children exposed to drugs that is run in conjunction with the Justice Department. "The parents are basically worthless, when they're not stoned they're sleeping it off, when they're not sleeping they don't eat, and it's not in their regimen to feed the kids."
Ms. Glick recalls a group of siblings found eating plaster at a home filled with methamphetamine. The oldest, age 6, was given a hamburger when they arrived at the Laura Dester Shelter; he broke it apart and handed out bits to his siblings before taking a bite himself.
Jay Wurscher, director of alcohol and drug services for the children and families division of the Oregon Department of Human Services, said, "In every way, shape and form, this is the worst drug ever for child welfare."
Child welfare workers say they used to remove children as a last resort, first trying to help with services in the home.
But everywhere there are reminders of the dangers of leaving children in homes with methamphetamine. In one recent case here, an 18-month-old child fell onto a heating unit on the floor and died while the parents slept; a 3-year-old sibling had tried to rouse them.
The police who raid methamphetamine labs say they try to leave the children with relatives, particularly in rural areas, where there are few other options.
But it has become increasingly clear, they say, that often the relatives, too, are cooking or using methamphetamine. And because the problem has hit areas where there are so few shelters, children are often placed far from their parents. Caseworkers have to drive children long distances to where parents are living or imprisoned for visits; Leslie Beyer, a caseworker at Laura Dester, logged 3,600 miles on her car one month.
The drain of the cases is forcing foster families to leave the system, or caseworkers to quit. In some counties in Oklahoma, Ms. Rider-Salem said, half the caseworkers now leave within two years.
After the ban on over-the-counter pseudoephedrine was enacted - a law other states are trying to emulate - the number of children taken out of methamphetamine labs and into the foster care system in Oklahoma declined by about 15 percent, Ms. Glick said. But she said the number of children found not in the labs but with parents who were using the drug had more than compensated for any decline.
The state's only other children's shelter, in Oklahoma City, was so crowded recently that the fire marshal threatened to shut it down, forcing the state to send children to foster families in far-flung counties.
At Laura Dester, three new children arrived on one recent morning, the 3-year-old being treated for lice and two siblings, found playing in an abandoned house while their mother was passed out at home. The girl now wanders with a plastic bag over her hair to keep the lice salve from leaking. She hugs her little brother, then grabs a plastic toy phone out of his hand, leaving him wailing.
"Who's on the phone?" asks Kay Saunders, the assistant director at the shelter, gently trying to intervene.
"My mom," the girl says, then turns to her little brother. "It's ringing!"
One on "looping"
Goodbye, Class. See You in the Fall.
By ALAN FINDER
ARDSLEY, N.Y. - Even though it was his last day of kindergarten, Zachary Gold, a bright, enthusiastic 6-year-old, said he wasn't scared about moving up to the rigors of first grade. Unlike most kindergartners at the Concord Road Elementary School in this Westchester County village, he already knew who his first-grade teacher would be.
In September, Zachary will come right back to room P8, his 18 classmates from kindergarten and his teacher, Leslie Cohen.
"I feel, like, not scared, because it's going to be the same," Zachary said. "Well, different work, but the same teacher. She's a nice teacher. I love Ms. Cohen."
Having a teacher stay with a class for more than a year - or looping, as it is known - is on the rise, according to many experts. As educational innovations go, it is remarkably simple. So are its benefits, proponents say. Teachers get to know their students, and the students' parents, extremely well. They know each child's strengths and weaknesses, and the children know the teachers' expectations and methods. This familiarity can save a lot of time at the beginning of the school year.
There is little hard data on the frequency or effectiveness of looping, but classes in hundreds, if not thousands of schools across the United States have adopted it.
"As schools try to improve their standardized test scores, this appears to be catching on," Arthur E. Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said.
It is most common in elementary schools, though some middle schools do it, too. Schools in Colorado Springs have tried looping, as have those in Attleboro, Mass., and Antioch, Ill. In New York City, hundreds of classes stay together for more than a year, most of them in the lower grades.
"In New York, it's a lot more prevalent than we think," said Carmen Fariña, the city's deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. "It's becoming more popular."
The decision on whether a teacher will loop with a class is left to principals, teachers and parents, said Ms. Fariña, who herself stayed with a class through third and fourth grades four times in her teaching career. "In the city, there are hundreds of classes doing it," she said. "In a lot of schools there are four or five classes looping."
The big payoff from looping appears to be in the fall, when teachers typically take time to assess each child, trying to figure out their skill levels and how each student learns. But when Ms. Cohen and her class return in September, she said, "we can basically pick up where we left off."
"I've always felt the first six to eight weeks of the school year are extremely chaotic for kids," Ms. Cohen said, "and not a whole lot of learning takes place."
Spending two years together as a class also reassures young children, she said. "Both at the end of the year and at the beginning of the year, there is a tremendous amount of anxiety in kids," she said. "And I think the anxiety makes it more difficult for them to learn."
The potential disadvantages of looping are also clear-cut. If parents think a teacher is inadequate, they would surely oppose having their child spend an additional year in his or her class.
Advocates of looping say options need to be built into any program, so that parents and teachers can decide to place a child in a different class if remaining with a teacher would be detrimental.
Research into looping suggests that it can pay substantial dividends. The school district in East Cleveland, Ohio, experimented with looping from 1993 to 1997. A class in each of four elementary schools stayed with their teachers for three years, generally from kindergarten through second grade. The teachers worked extensively with parents to reinforce lessons in school, and the classes also met for five weeks each summer.
After three years, students in the looped classes scored an average of 25 percentage points higher on standardized tests in reading, language arts and math than other students in the school district, said Frederick M. Hampton, an associate professor of education at Cleveland State University who oversaw the research project.
"Everything about the children's lives is pretty much in constant motion," said Professor Hampton, who described East Cleveland as poor and predominantly African-American.
"It had occurred to me over a number of years that children, particularly from inner-city areas, need a different model of school, a more family-oriented model, in order to be successful," he said, "something that would allow them to see familiar faces, familiar teachers."
Many educators think middle-class children also benefit from a more prolonged relationship with teachers. Daniel L. Burke, the superintendent of the Big Foot Union High School District in Walworth, Wis., became an advocate of looping after experiencing it during his first years as a teacher. Dr. Burke taught seventh-grade English in Alsip, Ill., in 1970; at the end of the school year, he and two other young teachers were told they would have the same classes the following year, because of scheduling problems caused by construction.
"Those kids came in the door the first day and they knew me and I knew them," he said. "I knew their parents and they knew me. They knew what my expectations were. It was just wonderful."
Twenty years later, when he was a district superintendent in Antioch, Ill., Dr. Burke convinced a first-grade teacher to try looping. She liked it and word spread. By the time he left the district in 1999, he said, 85 percent of the elementary school teachers were staying with classes for at least two years.
Given the enthusiasm for looping in pockets of the country, many educators said they were surprised that it is not more popular and that it has not been studied more rigorously. The roots of looping trace back to the one-room rural schoolhouse and to educational innovations in Europe in the early 20th century.
The East Cleveland school district stopped looping once Professor Hampton's experiment ended in 1997, in part, he said, because the district was reorganized, with new schools opening and some old ones shutting down.
Professor Hampton said he thought the primary reason more schools have not adopted looping "is because most administrators have this one concept, this one paradigm of the word 'school.' And anything that does not fit into that, they don't bother with."
Some other educators said many teachers might be unwilling to stay with a class for a second year because it would involve learning the curriculum of a new grade.
That was not a problem for Ms. Cohen at the Concord Road School, because she had previously taught first and second grade, as well as kindergarten. Ms. Cohen said she liked the variety. She first suggested looping to her principal after an outside expert mentioned it in a talk given to Concord Road teachers two years ago, and the principal agreed to allow her to try it with her kindergarten class last year.
Would she loop with a class again? "I'll let you know," she said with a laugh. "Right now I love it. I love the connection I feel with the class. I think both for myself and for the parents, there's been a palpable sense of commitment. I'm really, really excited to start the school year again with them."
So are Zachary and many of his classmates. But not all of the children completely understand the arrangement. "I heard one of them say to another, 'We're going to have her again next time,'" Ms. Cohen said. "And the other child said, 'What about high school?'"
One on the media and war
Almost four years ago, the American right launched a great moral crusade. Sept. 11 had changed everything forever, the war party and its supporters repeated. The apostles of the New Righteousness used the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center to anathematize anyone who failed to embrace the cause. To dissent, even to analyze, was to dishonor the dead, virtually to commit high treason. Those few who tried to stop King George's Crusade from marching to Jerusalem (or Baghdad, in this millennium-later iteration) were swept away like the black protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, hosed off the streets not with water but with the saintly blood of the 9/11 victims. Pundits railed against an elitist "Fifth Column" and compared dissenters to Neville Chamberlain-like "appeasers." In one of the great failures of the opposition in American history, the Democrats and the mainstream media joined the angry mob. A few mumbled some pathetic caveats as they waved their pitchforks, but their bleats were drowned out as the patriotic horde swept on to Infinite Justice.
Beyond the calls to war and vengeance, Americans were told that this was a transforming moment, an epiphany. It was a Great Awakening, not just a political but a spiritual watershed. Pious writers insisted that after 9/11, irony was dead. Analysts from across the political spectrum argued that the terror attacks, like a vast memento mori, were a manifestation of death and evil that would forever change our superficial, sensation-addled culture. The astute New York Times columnist Frank Rich criticized the media for its petty pre-9/11 obsessions with such ephemera as shark attacks and tawdry murder cases. In the dark months after the attacks, the left and right agreed that the new era should, must, be one of dignity and gravitas. For conservatives, those qualities were in the service of anger; for liberals, of analysis -- but there was no disagreement about the need for transformation.
Today, the issue of how to comport ourselves in the wake of 9/11 is moot: It has been almost four years since the attacks, and most Americans -- without forgetting the tragedy or disrespecting the dead -- have gotten over it. But our current situation raises almost identical issues, of morality, personal conscience and the responsibility of the media.
For those opposed to the Iraq war and appalled by the moralistic blackmail practiced by the right, it has never been easy to separate legitimate mourning and reflection on the significance of 9/11 from hysteria and unreflective anger. (Indeed, one of the sadder consequences of George W. Bush's divisive war has been the way it has scattered what could have been a shared American grief.) The "9/11 changed everything" line became a tool used by the right; it overstated the significance of what was not, historically speaking, an epochal event, and implicitly laid the groundwork for the Iraq war.
In fact, soon after the trauma of 9/11 faded it became clear that the demands for a permanent change in American manners and mores were naive at best and overbearing at worst. Moralistic pronouncements about what we should think or watch are tiresome, would result in terrible sitcoms and in any case are doomed to be defeated by what Daniel Bell called "the cultural contradictions of capitalism." No one would really expect, or want, American culture to suddenly abandon irony, or even its obsession with shark attacks, weird real people conniving against each other on prime time and addictive murder cases. What's the use of defeating a global enemy if as a result you can't watch "America's Next Top Model"?
Still, one need not be a Victorian, or Marxist, moralist to find some of those cultural contradictions pretty appalling -- and getting worse all the time.
We are at war. Dozens of Americans are dying every month, and hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis, and there is no end in sight. It is a situation that calls for seriousness, analysis and reflection -- in a word, for respect.
So one might expect that the mass media -- and in particular, those media outlets that were the most aggressive in calling for war -- would treat the war with at least a modicum of respect, and cover it seriously.
But if one expected that, one would be colossally wrong. Welcome to Fox's America, land of dissociation, where war isn't real but must be supported at all costs.
Fox News is rapidly becoming an essential if faintly horrific guide to the American soul, a kind of cross between an organ and a tumor. Fox is certainly not the only offender -- its cable competitors CNN and MSNBC are chasing the same ratings, and are guilty of similar sins -- but it's the most egregious. Those who have watched Fox News recently must feel as if they had fallen into a bizarre time and logic warp out of Philip K. Dick, where 9/11 never happened (except when necessary to drum up support for the war on Iraq, which also doesn't exist except when it has to be defended) and we've returned to those happy summer days when lurid, sexually charged murder cases and shark attacks were not just the most important stories, they were the only stories.
On Fox these days, it's all Natalee Holloway, all the time, with breaks for "news alerts" about shark attacks. Probably the only thing that could have knocked the young woman who went missing in Aruba off the Fox air was a speech by Bush, and it did. Fox dragged itself away from Holloway long enough on Tuesday to preview the president's prime-time speech, trotting out the usual "expert" ostriches who intoned through mouthfuls of sand that only a "steadfast message" would calm the markets and the country, as well as a long-haired right-winger in the Ted Nugent mold who informed us that the Allies had to fight Nazi terrorists after the end of World War II for 10 years. With its usual reverence, Fox also covered Bush's speech itself, an utterly insignificant offering that seemed to have been spliced together from earlier "inspiring" Bush sound bites. Bush sought to rally support for the increasingly disastrous war by saying we had to fight the terrorists "where they are making their stand" -- leaving out the inconvenient fact that they were not there before he invaded. His halftime locker-room address may have been intended to recall the steely resolve of Winston Churchill's famous "We shall never surrender" speech, but for students of military history it may instead have summoned the words of Adolf Hitler, who proclaimed to the commander of his doomed troops in Stalingrad, "Where the soldier of Germany sets foot, there he remains."
But Fox's all-consuming interest is in the Holloway case, upon whose resolution the fate of the republic apparently rests. Tuesday, a short news segment opened with a live report from that epicenter of world news, Aruba, with a grim-looking reporter standing on the beach, intoning something ominous about Holloway. On Monday, its news programming was even more dominated by Holloway (a highlight was when Geraldo Rivera suggested putting military pressure on the Dutch marines to help find her body) and lovingly detailed accounts of the gory Florida shark attacks. John Gibson opened his "The Big Story" show by intoning, "This is a Fox News alert" -- then proceeded to inform his viewers of the urgent news that a boy who was attacked by a shark had his leg amputated, before going on to interview a shark expert. The contrast between Fox's resolute avoidance of showing bloody images from the war in Iraq and its nearly pornographic immersion in shark bites and unsolved murders, was glaring. Only death or bloodshed with high entertainment value gets on Fox.
In this context, it was remarkable that Fox host Neil Cavuto was able to maintain a straight face when he asked oilman T. Boone Pickens, "Does it trouble you the way the war is presented in the media?" -- a question so embarrassingly Jeff Gannon-esque that even Pickens retorted, "That's a loaded question." There's no problem with such "liberal media" bias at Fox: If it doesn't like the way the war is going, it just doesn't cover it. (Bush and Fox always sing from the same hymnal. In a not-so-subtle passage in his speech, Bush implicitly chastised news outlets for running images of bombings in Iraq, saying the insurgents carry them out "for the cameras.")
If Fox had not been such an ardent supporter of the war, its tabloid wallowing might be merely irritating. As it is, it's disgusting -- the contrast between Fox's earlier moralizing and its current pandering feels debased, almost depraved. Fox has not lived up to the war it demanded, and it's hard to believe that even supporters of the war aren't offended by this. But for today's right wing, including those blowhards who make careers out of decrying "the death of outrage" and the loss of Victorian virtues and other sins for which liberal "relativism" and "moral cowardice" are responsible, the idea that war should be covered with dignity and seriousness is as quaint as the Geneva Conventions: What matters is propaganda, effectiveness. If you want to win a war, and it's going badly, and its continued prosecution (or the political effectiveness of the president) depends upon the opinion of the American people, then you don't cover it, or you whitewash it. Hence the violent anger, in some conservative quarters, at the "Nightline" programs that showed the U.S. dead in Iraq. That the ultimate act of disrespect for the dead is to ignore them apparently does not matter.
If only the war in Iraq had been the video-game cakewalk the Bush administration promised, Fox wouldn't have had to deal with this taste problem. After all, everyone knew at the time that the most pro-war cable channel was also the one that wallowed most luxuriantly in shark attacks, tawdry murder cases and cheesy sexual titillation. There seemed no reason at the time that this should trouble anyone: After all, we were going to swagger into Iraq, kick Saddam's evil ass, declare "Mission accomplished" and swagger back to a hero's greeting of wonderfully pneumatic blond babes in bikinis on some cool Pacific island where the beer flows 24/7. This wasn't going to be a war, it was going to be another hit reality show -- "Survivor" without casualties, where all the dudes score with the chicks! Plus, if gravitas was needed for some reason, like if somehow a GI actually got killed or something, all the news anchors were wearing U.S. flag pins in their lapels and were pumped to get deeply emotional and patriotic at a moment's notice.
Still, it is now slowly beginning to dawn on the American people -- perhaps even on Fox, although it is not going to do anything about it -- that there is a disconnect at the heart of the war party's rhetoric about the grand mission, a deeply mixed message, and that this is doing something bad to our national character. After 9/11 Bush told Americans that they were embarked on a great struggle, the "war on terror," and he periodically appealed to their fear and anger. But he has demanded no sacrifice -- unless slapping a $1 yellow "Support Our Troops" sticker on the back of your car counts as a sacrifice. In his speech Tuesday, Bush seemed aware that the war is a phantom, disconnected from American reality: He appealed to the country to make some gesture of support to the troops on July 4. It was a pathetic, token appeal that will do little or nothing to unify the country. Perhaps it will raise some troops' morale, but properly armored vehicles would do far more.
In the end, the larger question of how television should cover war today remains unexplored. In this era of a toothless and intimidated media, this is not surprising: It's an explosive issue, one that places the media in direct opposition to power. Governments never want their citizens to know the truth about war. Fox News or any other media organization could argue, legitimately enough from the traditional war-coverage perspective, that U.S. casualties in Iraq are so low that covering them in detail, in the modern age of instant mass transmission, of color film and close-ups, would be both unnecessary and a manifestation of antiwar bias, since the bloody images would harm national morale. This is, of course, a debate as old as the Vietnam War: Some conservatives insisted that the American people only rejected that war when body bags began appearing on the screen, and they demanded -- and demand now -- that the media serve as an instrument of the government.
In fact, this attitude patronizes the American people and imposes a kind of national repression about the actual realities of war that is deeply unhealthy. That unhealthiness, a kind of spiritual rot, rises up not just from Fox's coverage but from all war coverage that flinches, that glosses over, that pleads "taste," that pleads "we're a family newspaper," that does not actually depict what happens when you go to war.
I am not a pacifist: I accept that there may be times when it is necessary to go to war. But if we do make that ultimate decision, we should do it knowing -- and seeing -- what war does.
We now live in an age of near-total information. In our fear and uncertainty about this unprecedented state of affairs, magnified by our underlying confusion about how to deal with war, we have embraced near-total repression. As a result, this war has been absurdly sanitized. It's time to grow up, to make ourselves face the real boogeyman of war -- not fake ones like the BTK killer, now safely behind bars and telling his gruesome tales for our horrified titillation. As Chris Hedges, one of the most unflinching chroniclers of war, has noted, modern war is "industrialized slaughter." Or, as some GI somewhere put it, war is "about blowing motherfuckers up." It's about heads getting shot off, and faces torn apart, and babies cut in two, and everything else horrible that can happen to a human body when big pieces of metal hit it at incredible speed. That is what war is -- no more, no less. Goya knew this; he drew it in his "Disasters of War," and under one of his hideous etchings he wrote these simple words: "This always happens."
This always happens: Every combat veteran knows this about war, but the politicians who make war don't, or don't tell. Yes, compared with World War II, or even Vietnam, not many American troops are dying in Iraq. But every GI who dies in Iraq, and every dead Iraqi civilian we don't count, is a human being like you or me, and as worthy of memorializing as the people who died in the World Trade Center -- certainly as Natalee Holloway. It's time, long past time, for the media to get real about war. Until it does, the TV channels will just be filled with bread and circuses and lies. And the Great Awakening that was supposed to be ushered in will be revealed to be a restless sleep, haunted by shabby, mean-spirited dreams.
One ostensibly on women in the war
At 7:30 on a dusty evening June 13, a convoy of U.S. Marine vehicles headed east on Fallujah's main road and signaled for a vehicle in front of them to pull over. In Iraq, U.S. convoys always direct Iraqi traffic away from them as a security measure, and like thousands of other Iraqi drivers, this driver obeyed and pulled over to the side of the road. The driver waited for two Humvees to pass by, and then, as a lightly armored, seven-ton truck full of 20 Marines rolled past him, he accelerated and detonated his explosives, igniting the fuel tank and setting the truck ablaze. Five Marines and one sailor were killed, and 13 wounded, but the bombing made international headlines because three of the dead and 11 of the wounded were women. It was the deadliest attack on female U.S. soldiers in American history.
"I set up security around the truck. The truck was still burning," said a Marine who responded immediately at the scene, and who was only a few hundred feet to the east when it happened. The man requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the incident. "We went back to Entry Control Point 1 and grabbed 10 fire extinguishers. We attempted to put out the fire, but the fire burned until it wanted to stop. Twelve fire extinguishers couldn't put it out. We weren't able to get into the vehicle at all."
Members of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, had arrived at the scene within minutes of the attack, and encountered a scene of carnage and twisted metal. The ground was littered with scattered equipment and torn bodies. As the men of India Company rushed to put out the fire in the burning truck, squads fanned out through the area and cleared nearby buildings, following security rules for a convoy attack.
When the Marine who gave the account of the bombing was asked what went through his mind when he saw the aftermath of the bombing, he looked away, at a loss for words.
In the United States, the attack reignited the debate on the role of female soldiers, but here in Fallujah there is widespread American acceptance of the role played by female Marines. The women who were killed had been searching female Iraqis at crucial checkpoints; the truck had just made the rounds of all the Fallujah checkpoints and had picked up almost all the female searchers before it was bombed.
Within India Company, which fought to secure the bomb site, many dismissed distinctions between men and women in the military. Many of the young men here are on their third tour of duty in Iraq, belonging to the same unit that helped pull down Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdos Square. The 3/4, one of the most famous units of the Iraq war, also took the city of Tikrit and fought the first siege of Fallujah in April 2004.
Lance Cpl. Alex Pak of Bellbrook, Ohio, is a fire team leader who was at the scene of the bombing. "I totally commend women. There's a lot of opposition for them to join the military, and it takes a lot of balls for a woman to come out here. Guys have it easy -- they are expected to be in combat, fight for their country and die -- but women have opposition from the get-go. It takes a hard person to join an elite force like this one." Pak is only 20 years old, but he has experienced more combat than many members of the military have in two decades. Pak gives the impression of being at least 10 years older than he is. Like many other members of India Company, he is also on his third tour of duty in Iraq.
Cpl. Courtney Waddell of Angola, N.Y., was waiting to begin her shift as a female searcher at Entry Control Point 1 two days after the suicide bombing. Normally, she works as a combat engineer, fortifying positions and building bridges. "I think especially because of the nature of my job, the military needs to keep us in forward positions, especially for things like this, because otherwise we would have to use doctors or use their husbands to search the Iraqi women, and we can't trust their husbands. Females are essential in the city to perform these actions. The military is supposed to be a uniform unit. How can it be uniform if females aren't supposed to be doing what the males are doing? My job is the closest thing to infantry we can get. That's why I believe I should stay in a forward position." Like Pak, Waddell is 20 years old.
The attack underscored the difficult security situation of American forces as they try to assist the return of normal life in Fallujah. For months, the city had been quiet as U.S. and Iraqi forces patrolled the streets, but the latest suicide attack is part of a sharp spike in violence in the area. As more residents have returned to a place still largely in ruins, there are visible signs of a civic life returning to what had been a ghost town.
All residents of Fallujah are now retina-scanned and fingerprinted and must carry a special I.D. card that allows them entry to the city through one of the checkpoints, a kind of technological replacement for an old city wall. But it seems likely that insurgents, too, have managed to pass through the checkpoints, or found other routes into the city. Recently, the new Iraqi government has been issuing its own I.D. cards, which allow ministry officials to cross the checkpoints, and Marines have been finding dozens of forgeries.
Months earlier, a resident had to carry an I.D. issued by the first Marine division to enter the city. "Now they're coming through with teacher badges and Ministry of Oil badges, and all these [other] crazy badges. We've been here long enough to filter through them, but about half the badges we get are fake," said one Marine on condition of anonymity. "The last couple of months, these new badges have been showing up, and they've been letting the Iraqis use them."
In Fallujah, the Marines have won when insurgents came out into the open. A few days before the suicide attack, in a southern neighborhood of Fallujah, a small unit of U.S. forces called a combined antiarmor team arrived as dozens of insurgents were setting up an ambush. In the firefight that followed, the Marines battled their way through a carefully designed maze of roadside bombs, car bombs, rockets and machine-gun fire. The Marines in the small convoy managed to overtake the insurgents' positions and killed many of the attackers without taking a single casualty. There were no reporters present when the incident took place, but five members of the unit later described the progress of the battle, drew diagrams and established timelines for events. Marines in Lima Company were able to corroborate many of the events in the timeline.
The bomber struck the convoy June 13 inside the secured part of the city, on Route 10. Because vehicle traffic into the city is tightly controlled, there is a strong possibility that insurgents assembled the bomb inside Fallujah. Another striking aspect of the account is the description of the way the bomber waited for the first two armored Humvees to pass and then chose the crowded seven-ton truck as his target. U.S. Marines often travel in the seven-ton trucks, many of which have steel armor that will stop a bullet from an automatic rifle. But the thin steel plate turns into shrapnel when hit by more powerful weapons. Many of the Marine seven-ton transports are lightly armored, however, and because they can carry as many as 18 people they're a prime target of suicide attacks and large roadside bombs. It is also true that the bomber could not have easily approached the truck from the back of the convoy, since he likely would have been killed by turret gunners on the rearmost Humvees. It seemed that he had carefully picked his approach to coincide with the seven-ton.
U.S. commanders are trying to walk a delicate line between allowing Iraqi citizens back into the city and giving Iraqi officials more say in the city's affairs, but as the security situation gets worse, they are likely to err on the side of caution and limit Iraqis' autonomy in deciding who gets back in.
One on native Hawaiians
In Hawaii, a Chance to Heal, Long Delayed
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Less than a month after 9/11, with terrorism fears threatening to put jet travel and thus the Hawaiian economy into a death spiral, tourism officials there announced an emergency marketing campaign to promote the state as a place of rest, solace and healing. Anyone who has ever stepped off a plane in Honolulu, trading the brittle staleness of the aircraft cabin for the liquid Hawaiian breeze, warm and heavy with the scent of flowers, knows exactly what they meant.
The selling of Hawaii as a land of gracious welcome works so well because it happens to be true. But for the members of one group, that has always evoked a bitter taste: native Hawaiians, the descendants of Polynesian voyagers who settled the islands in antiquity and lived there in isolation until the late 1700's. Ever since Captain Cook, the native Hawaiian story has been a litany of loss: loss of land and of a way of life, of population through sickness and disease, and of self-determination when United States marines toppled the monarchy in 1893.
Over decades, the islands emerged as a vibrant multiracial society and the proud 50th state. Hawaiian culture - language and art, religion and music - has undergone a profound rebirth since the 1970's. But underneath this modern history remains a deep sense of dispossession among native Hawaiians, who make up about 20 percent of the population.
Into the void has stepped Senator Daniel Akaka, the first native Hawaiian in Congress, who is the lead sponsor of a bill to extend federal recognition to native Hawaiians, giving them the rights of self-government as indigenous people that only American Indians and native Alaskans now enjoy. The Akaka bill has the support of Hawaii's Congressional delegation, the State Legislature and even its Republican governor, Linda Lingle. It will go before the Senate for a vote as soon as next week.
The bill would allow native Hawaiians - defined, in part, as anyone with indigenous ancestors living in the islands before the kingdom fell - to elect a governing body that would negotiate with the federal government over land and other natural resources and assets. There is a lot of money and property at stake, including nearly two million acres of "ceded lands," once owned by the monarchy; hundreds of thousands of acres set aside long ago for Hawaiian homesteaders; and hundreds of millions of dollars in entitlement programs.
Much of what is now the responsibility of two state agencies, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, would become the purview of the new government.
There are many jurisdictional and procedural details to work out, but Mr. Akaka and others insist that the bill precludes radical outcomes.
There would be no cash reparations, no new entitlements, no land grabs and especially no Indian-style casinos, which are a hot topic in Hawaii, one of only two states that outlaw all gambling.
The bill's critics include those who see it as a race-ba
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Off topic!
Date: 2005-07-13 01:57 am (UTC)I just found an article you might find interesting. Maybe you already know it...
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/nyt062093.htm
So long!