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Some NYTimes articles.....
That Baron-Cohen editorial
The Male Condition
By SIMON BARON-COHEN
Cambridge, England
TWO big scientific debates have attracted a lot of attention over the past year. One concerns the causes of autism, while the other addresses differences in scientific aptitude between the sexes. At the risk of adding fuel to both fires, I submit that these two lines of inquiry have a great deal in common. By studying the differences between male and female brains, we can generate significant insights into the mystery of autism.
So was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, right when he remarked that women were innately less suited than men to be top-level scientists? Judging from current research, he was and he wasn't. It's true that scientists have documented psychological and physiological differences between male and female brains. But Mr. Summers was wrong to imply that these differences render any individual woman less capable than any individual man of becoming a top-level scientist.
In fact, the differences that show up in brain research reflect averages, meaning that they emerge only when you study groups of males and females and compare the two groups' averages on particular psychological tests or physiological measures. The evidence to date tells us nothing about individuals - which means that if you are a woman, there is no evidence to suggest that you could not become a Nobel laureate in your chosen area of scientific inquiry. A good scientist is a good scientist regardless of sex.
Nonetheless, with brain scanning, we can discern physiological differences between the average male and the average female brain. For example, the average man's cerebrum (the area in the front of the brain concerned with higher thinking) is 9 percent larger than the average woman's. Similar, though less distinct, overgrowth is found in all the lobes of the male brain. On average, men also have a larger amygdala (an almond shaped structure in the center of the brain involved in processing fear and emotion), and more nerve cells. Quite how these differences in size affect function, if at all, is not yet known.
In women, meanwhile, the connective tissue that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain tends to be thicker, perhaps facilitating interchange. This may explain why one study from Yale found that when performing language tasks, women are likely to activate both hemispheres, whereas males (on average) activate only the left hemisphere.
Psychological tests also reveal patterns of sex difference. On average, males finish faster and score higher than females on a test that requires the taker to visualize an object's appearance after it is rotated in three dimensions. The same is true for map-reading tests, and for embedded-figures tests, which ask subjects to find a component shape hidden within a larger design. Males are over-represented in the top percentiles on college-level math tests and tend to score higher on mechanics tests than females do. Females, on the other hand, average higher scores than males on tests of emotion recognition, social sensitivity and language ability.
Many of these sex differences are seen in adults, which might lead to the conclusion that all they reflect are differences in socialization and experience. But some differences are also seen extremely early in development, which may suggest that biology also plays a role. For example, girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate. One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.
In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one's own.
Our research team in Cambridge administered questionnaires on which men and women could report their level of interest in these two aspects of the world - one involving systems, the other involving other people's feelings. Three types of people were revealed through our study: one for whom empathy is stronger than systemizing (Type E brains); another for whom systemizing is stronger than empathy (Type S brains); and a third for whom empathy and systemizing are equally strong (Type B brains). As one might predict, more women (44 percent) have Type E brains than men (17 percent), while more men have Type S brains (54 percent) than women (17 percent).
What of Mr. Summers's other claim, that such sex differences are innate? We know that culture plays a role in the divergence of the sexes, but so does biology. For example, on the first day of life, male and female newborns pay attention to different things. On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, whereas more female infants will look at a human face.
It has also been found that the amount of prenatal testosterone, which is produced by the fetus and measurable in the amniotic fluid in which the baby is bathed in the womb, predicts how sociable a child will be. The higher the level of prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact the child will make as a toddler, and the slower the child will develop language. That is connected to the role of fetal testosterone in influencing brain development.
Males obviously produce far more prenatal testosterone than females do, but levels vary considerably even across members of the same sex. In fact, it may not be your sex per se that determines what kind of brain you have, but your prenatal hormone levels. From there it's a short leap to the intriguing idea that a male can have a typically female brain (if his testosterone levels are low), while a female can have a typically male brain (if her testosterone levels are high). That notion fits with the evidence that girls born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who for genetic reasons produce too much testosterone, are more likely to exhibit "tomboy" behavior than girls with more ordinary hormone levels.
What does all this have to do with autism? According to what I have called the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, people with autism simply match an extreme of the male profile, with a particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize. When adults with Asperger's syndrome (a subgroup on the autistic spectrum) took the same questionnaires we gave to non-autistic adults, they exhibited extreme Type S brains. Psychological tests reveal a similar pattern.
And this analysis makes sense. It helps explain the social disability in autism, because empathy difficulties make it harder to make and maintain relationships with others. It also explains the "islets of ability" that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing - all skills that benefit from systemizing.
People with autism often develop obsessions, which may be nothing other than very intense systemizing at work. The child might become obsessed with electrical switches (an electrical system), or train timetables (a temporal system), or spinning objects (a physical system), or the names of deep-sea fish (a natural, taxonomic system). The child with severe autism, who may have additional learning difficulties and little language ability, might express his obsessions by bouncing constantly on a trampoline or spinning around and around, because motion is highly lawful and predictable. Some children with severe autism line objects up for hours on end. What used to be dismissed by clinicians as "purposeless, repetitive behavior" may actually be a sign of a mind that is highly tuned to systemize.
One needs to be extremely careful in advancing a cause for autism, because this field is rife with theories that have collapsed under empirical scrutiny. Nonetheless, my hypothesis is that autism is the genetic result of "assortative mating" between parents who are both strong systemizers. Assortative mating is the term we use when like is attracted to like, and there are four significant reasons to believe it is happening here.
FIRST, both mothers and fathers of children with autism complete the embedded figures test faster than men and women in the general population.
Second, both mothers and fathers of children with autism are more likely to have fathers who are talented systemizers (engineers, for example).
Third, when we look at brain activity with magnetic resonance imaging, males and females on average show different patterns while performing empathizing or systemizing tasks. But both mothers and fathers of children with autism show strong male patterns of brain activity.
Fourth, both mothers and fathers of children with autism score above average on a questionnaire that measures how many autistic traits an individual has. These results suggest a genetic cause of autism, with both parents contributing genes that ultimately relate to a similar kind of mind: one with an affinity for thinking systematically.
In order to fully test this theory, we still need to do a lot of work. The specific genes involved must be identified. It is a theory that may be controversial and perhaps unpopular among those who believe that the cause of autism is largely or totally environmental. But controversy is not a reason not to test it - systematically, as we might say.
On games in Gaza
Coping With Adult Conflict in Gaza Can Be Child's Play
By DINA KRAFT
NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip - When children in the Israeli settlements of Gaza play their newest game, "Cops and Jews," nobody volunteers to be the police officer.
Not far away, across barbed-wire fences and high walls, children in Palestinian towns and refugee camps take turns playing roles in a game called "Martyrs and Soldiers."
Rivka Kirshenzaft, 11, said the rules for "Cops and Jews" are simple.
"Everyone goes to his spot, which is considered his home, and then the police come in and yell 'Get out!' and take the Jews to jail," she said, tossing her bobbed, strawberry-blond hair. "The Jews say, 'What? Are we criminals?' Then it all ends and it's time to go back to school."
Suzan Qouta, 9, plays "Martyrs and Soldiers" with her friends in Gaza City.
"I explode myself and then I became a martyr," she said. "Then I come to life again and throw blocks, which I shoot as bullets toward the soldiers and Sharon," referring to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister.
Ahead of Israel's planned mid-August withdrawal of the nearly 9,000 settlers in Gaza, children caught in the cross-fire of warring adults are trying to make sense of the confusion and trauma with games.
For the Israeli children, the violence of drive-by shootings and mortar attacks has been joined by a new threat - that of a government-ordered eviction from their homes. Among their Palestinian counterparts, for whom tanks and attack helicopters are part of the landscape of childhood, there is a new enthusiasm for the departure of the settlers and the soldiers who protect them.
Ibrahim Nassar, 11, who lives with his mother and four younger siblings in the Deir el Balah refugee camp, has covered the walls of the living room in their two-room apartment with crayon drawings of rocket launchers and automatic rifles.
"This is what they fire at the Israelis in the settlements," he said matter-of-factly. Because of these attacks, he said, "The Israelis will leave."
His younger brothers, Ahmed, 5 and Ismail, 7, tend to stutter and do not like leaving the house. Their mother, Taghreed Nassar, said the two boys often wet their beds at night and cry out in the dark. Children are known for their resilience, even in the face of trauma, but when the threat of violence is continuing, as it often is in Gaza, it can be difficult for them to bounce back, say both Israeli and Palestinian child psychologists.
"The child in his first years sees the world as safe or not safe," said Samir Qouta, a psychologist with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program and Suzan's father. "If he believes he is not safe," he said, "it affects his development."
Such children, he said, are prone to developing phobias and anxieties and may have difficulties adapting and achieving later in life.
On a recent day in Kfar Darom, the Jewish settlement adjacent to Deir el Balah, Cheli Hadad, 13, sat on the edge of her bunk bed under dangling mobiles of rainbows and bumblebees. She tried to ignore her younger sister's barbs about the mottled, dark pink scar on her leg, the only visible remnant of shrapnel from a roadside bomb that exploded near her armored school bus.
Cheli, her chestnut ponytail spilling down her back, recalled that November morning, nearly five years ago. "I saw the windows shatter," she said. "I lay on the floor. I understood it was an attack."
The five children on the bus were injured; the two adults were killed.
Three of the children were from a single family, and each lost a limb or part of one.
Cheli has no contact with her Arab neighbors. "I don't normally see Palestinians," she said. "They're far from here."
But they are not. Just a few miles away, in the town of Khan Yunis, Houda Darweesh, 14, was led down the stairs by her younger sister. Houda's brown eyes darted from corner to corner, but saw nothing. She was blinded two years ago, her family said, when an Israeli Army bullet flew through her classroom window during a math lesson and lodged in her brain.
"My life has changed," said Houda, who has auburn hair and a sprinkling of freckles. "I used to love going to wedding parties, to visit my friends. But now I feel I can't. Where will I go now? I cannot see."
She said she looked forward to the Israelis leaving Gaza. "It will be much better," she said, her voice raspy. "People will be able to move freely. There will be no fear."
Meanwhile, children in Jewish settlements, who were told by their families that their struggle to remain in Gaza had purpose and meaning, face being forcibly evacuated from their homes.
"They are losing their homes and their foundations of personal safety," said Naomi Baum, of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma. "I'm concerned how it will impact on them." Dr. Baum said she advised parents, teachers and school counselors in Gush Katif, the main cluster of 15 Gaza settlements, to listen to their children's fears about the evacuation.
Dr. Qouta, the Gaza psychologist, said children who have witnessed traumatic events exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder like aggressive and antisocial behavior. Many find it difficult to concentrate in school, suffer from flashbacks and have difficulty sleeping, he said. In Gaza City, Ibrahim Bagdadi, 17, struggles with memories of a hot night in July 2002, when a woman's head and other body parts rolled into his bedroom.
An Israeli missile apparently aimed at Sheik Salah Shehade, a founder of Hamas's military wing, had hit a nearby apartment building. Sheik Shehade, his wife and 13 others were killed, nine of them children. "I can't forget anything from that night," Ibrahim said. "It changed my whole life. I'm more nervous. I'm afraid."
In Neve Dekalim, the largest of the Jewish settlements in Gaza, Rivka Kirshenzaft's brother, Nechamia, 9, is wearing the same green-and-white striped shirt he wore last December, when a Palestinian rocket exploded in the family's garden. He suffered internal injuries from shrapnel that flew through the window.
"I never lost consciousness, even though my condition was listed as serious," he said proudly. "It's normal. It happens every day. I'm used to hearing them so I didn't get scared."
On somebody helping people in Iraq
On a Break, at 78, From Aiding the Desperate in Iraq
By IAN URBINA
In a place where everything seems broken, she has been a fixer. At a time when most other American civilians were leaving the country, she was just arriving.
Sister Anne Montgomery, a 78-year-old nun, avoided the United States-patrolled Green Zone when she moved to Baghdad, opting instead to live in Karada, a mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood across the Tigris River from the American Embassy.
"You can't possibly do the type of work we sought to do with Iraqi civilians unless you live with them," she said in a recent interview from her home in East Harlem. She rotated into and out of Iraq regularly, from soon after the war started until April, when she returned home to take a break and get treatment for skin cancer.
As a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical antiwar group based in Chicago and Toronto, Sister Montgomery was among the handful of American civilians still based in Baghdad last year and early this year.
She worked with Iraqi civilians seeking answers to basic and often desperate questions: When will my son be released from detention? Where is he being held? Can we visit him?
They are questions that have become more difficult to answer, Sister Montgomery said, as the violence has grown. The group's goal has been to serve as a neutral intermediary between the United States military and the families of the detained, she said, while not taking a position on the guilt or innocence of the detainees.
"We walk a very fine line," she said. "And to this day we still have good relations with all sides."
When a teenage girl, who suffered burns in an explosion, needed medical treatment that was not available in Iraq, Sister Montgomery spent several days ushering her around to get the needed paperwork done so she could leave the country.
When an elderly man sought help finding property that he said had been taken by United States soldiers from his house during a raid, Sister Montgomery, who uses a translator, spent a day calling around to figure out who had conducted the raid. Later she escorted the man to the right office to file a claim.
But most of her time has been spent aiding families of the detained.
Iraqis often do not know where to turn for answers or how to fill out paperwork, she said. Others are afraid to navigate the process alone. Often the search for information becomes a race against the clock, especially when sick people are held without their medication.
Sister Montgomery is no stranger to conflict. As a veteran antinuclear activist, she has been arrested more times than she can remember. But it was the nearly two decades that she worked with high school dropouts in Albany and New York City that best equipped her to handle some of the rage that she has encountered in Iraq, she said.
"The kids had a lot of pent up feelings," she said. "But it taught me a sense of timing which has been useful in dealing with angry people because it helps me know how long to wait before responding to this kind of emotion."
The child of a military family, Sister Montgomery was born in San Diego and spent her childhood changing cities and schools every couple of years. She remembers her father, a Navy officer, growing increasingly disenchanted during his deployment in World War II.
For high school, she went to a boarding school in Pennsylvania run by nuns of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, where she was drawn to the order for its balance of contemplation and direct involvement in society, she said.
After college, she trained as a nun and became increasingly involved with tutoring children in urban areas. Her involvement with the antinuclear movement through the 1980's introduced her to other antiwar groups, and eventually she joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which sent her on several trips to the West Bank. There, she said, she worked with Palestinian families whose homes had been destroyed by Israeli soldiers.
"That confronted me with a lot of tense situations," she said. "But things in Iraq have gotten as bad as anything I've seen before."
While most major international aid organizations have pulled out of Iraq over the last year because of the kidnappings and bombings, the Christian Peacemaker Teams have maintained a steady presence in the country.
But the group has taken increased precautions, Sister Montgomery said. Members no longer give their Baghdad addresses to strangers, and rather than take cabs directly to their apartments, they are dropped off nearby and walk home.
"People in the neighborhood look out for us," she said. "But you still have to be careful."
The worst part is the confusion, Sister Montgomery said.
For Iraqis trying to locate detainees, the transition from the American coalition authority to Iraqi control has been a mixed blessing, she said. There are now more offices throughout Baghdad where people can go to inquire about the status of detainees, but there is even less uniformity in the way they handle the inquiries, she said.
This frustration seems to be shared on all sides.
When American soldiers confided in her that one of the toughest parts of serving was not knowing how long they would be deployed or where they would be dispatched next, Sister Montgomery said, she took the complaint on their behalf to their commanding officers.
"I think there are a lot of people working in the dark over there," she said. "It's not a pretty situation."
On Tombstone
Wyatt Earp Fought Here, but the Corral Isn't O.K.
By ANDREW POLLACK
TOMBSTONE, Ariz., Aug. 3 - George Spangenberg sold weapons to both Wyatt Earp and the gang he faced at the O.K. Corral. Today visitors can see the G. F. Spangenberg gun shop - "Est. 1880," according to its sign - standing on Fourth Street.
Well, actually, the shop was established only 16 years ago to cater to tourists and has no connection to the gunsmith whose name it borrowed.
"We don't say it's the same shop," said Jim Newbauer, a manager of the store, which is across the street from where the original stood. Nor does the shop go out of its way to say it isn't.
Just how true to history this famous Old West town should remain is the subject of a modern-day shootout. "The town too tough to die," as Tombstone bills itself, is at risk of losing its designation as a national historic landmark because some say it has been a little too kitschy in embellishing its heritage.
"It's becoming like a Hollywood set instead of an authentic historic Western town," said Sally Alves, a bed-and-breakfast owner.
Dates from the 19th century are painted on buildings erected in the last few decades. Some stores have simulated brick or adobe facades. Some are painted in colors like purple or turquoise that probably were not used in 1880's frontier towns.
The National Park Service, which administers the landmark program, last year listed Tombstone's status as "threatened" because of building alterations "that didn't have any basis in history," said Greg Kendrick, regional manager of the program. Only about 90 of the nation's 2,400 historic landmarks are considered "threatened," mostly because of deterioration, not decoration. Since 1980, 25 have lost their designation.
Now this town of 1,700 is at a crossroads. Starting Sept. 1, Tombstone will hold a three-day public meeting, with federal and state officials in attendance, to discuss whether and how to preserve its historic authenticity.
Anthony Veerkamp, a senior program manager for the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, said some other famous places, like Cannery Row in Monterey, Calif., have faced similar dilemmas. "There's often tension between protecting the historic resource and exploiting the historic resource, if you will," Mr. Veerkamp said.
In Tombstone, some people, like Ms. Alves, argue that unless the town is authentic, visitors would not come. Others say that if the town is too authentic, visitors will be bored.
"They don't particularly want dusty, dried-up history," said Donna Winn, manager of a tourist attraction called Ghosts and Legends. "They want to be entertained."
Actors and stuntmen stage several gunfights a day, including one at the O.K. Corral (which also features a re-enactment by mechanized statues). But Ghosts and Legends, which opened in January on historic Allen Street, is yet a step closer to Disneyland, a haunted house of sorts with skeletons, a computer-animated ghost of Doc Holliday narrating history and special effects like a sharp blast of air when a gun is fired.
Many business people say that authenticity is important and that the town generally achieves it. But exceptions must be made, they say, to cater to tourists who have certain expectations from movies like "Tombstone," the 1993 film starring Kurt Russell. Tourism is the town's only industry, bringing in about half a million visitors a year, according to its chamber of commerce.
Tombstone, about 70 miles southeast of Tucson, was founded by Ed Schieffelin, a prospector who was warned that if he went into the heart of Apache territory, he would find nothing but his own tombstone. When he discovered silver here in 1877, Tombstone became a boomtown.
The silver boom faded after a decade, and the town shrank. But it has survived for more than a century largely because of its 30 seconds of fame, which is all it took for Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, aided by Doc Holliday, to gun down Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury on Oct. 26, 1881.
Many of the oldest buildings burned down, though some remain, including the Bird Cage theater, City Hall and the courthouse, which is now a history museum.
Some people here say it is difficult to define what is authentic because the town has changed over time. At one point in the 1920's, an auto repair shop occupied the location of the O.K. Corral. (The corral has since been recreated at that spot.) Dusty Escapule, a former mayor and a fourth-generation resident, said that by the time the landmark designation was received in the early 1960's, there were neon signs and a bus depot in the historic district. Much of that is gone now, and the town more closely resembles 1880's Tombstone, even if some of it is re-creation, Mr. Escapule said.
The Crystal Palace saloon, whose first floor dates to the 1880's, has a faithfully reconstructed bar. But it also has a crude second-floor facade of offices, like one for Virgil E. Earp, marshal. (His middle name was Walter.)
Madam Mustache, a variety store named after an 1880's prostitute, has a simulated adobe facade and a sign on top saying "1881." The location was a vacant lot that year and the building came a century later. "At least it's based on a real person," said Vikki Bryant, who was working behind the counter on Tuesday.
Richard Wilson, the owner, said the building was like that when he bought it 15 years ago and he saw no need to change. "I can afford to do what I want with that building," he said, adding he did not care whether the town lost its historic designation, something rarely important to tourists.
Although the Interior Department confers landmark status based on broad guidelines, Tombstone itself is responsible for drawing up rules and enforcing them for the historic district.
Larry Noyes, appointed this year as chairman of the historic district commission, said that over the years there had been lax enforcement. "Building permits were issued without any inspection at all," he said.
Mr. Noyes said some businesspeople in town feared that publicity about the town's predicament, reported in The Arizona Republic last month, could hurt tourism. Still, he said, concern about authenticity is not new. In 1963, just after the landmark designation was made, an inspector from the National Park Service wrote that "rampant huckstering" was "rapidly ruining the integrity of this fine site."
Hollis Cook, who managed the history museum here for 20 years, said the town's Hollywood element was unavoidable. The importance of the 1881 shootout to American history was "vanishingly small," he said, and would barely be known were it not for television and movies.
Indeed, Mr. Cook said, the shootout actually took place behind the corral in a vacant lot and on Fremont Street, but Hollywood thought "O.K. Corral" was sexier. "It sold a hell of a lot more tickets than 'Gunfight on Fremont Street,' " he said.
Still, Mr. Cook said that over all, Tombstone was authentic. "If you brought Wyatt Earp back from the dead and put him on the street and said, 'Where are you?' " he said, "I think it would take him a minute or two, but he'd recognize it."
On wife-beatings in Africa
Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
LAGOS, Nigeria - It was a typical husband-wife argument. She wanted to visit her parents. He wanted her to stay home.
So they settled it in what some here say is an all-too-typical fashion, Rosalynn Isimeto-Osibuamhe recalled of the incident in December 2001. Her husband, Emmanuel, followed her out the door. Then he beat her unconscious, she says, and left her lying in the street near their apartment.
Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe, then 31 and in the fifth year of her marriage, had broken an unwritten rule in this part of the world: she had defied her husband. Surveys throughout sub-Saharan Africa show that many men - and women, too - consider such disobedience ample justification for a beating.
Not Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe. A university graduate and founder of a French school, she packed her clothes and walked out as soon as she got back from the hospital. So far, although her resolve sometimes wavers and she does not want a divorce, she has not gone back.
"He doesn't believe I have any rights of my own," she said in an interview outside her French classroom. "If I say no, he beats me. I said: 'Wow. That is not what I want in life.' "
Women suffer from violence in every society. In few places, however, is the abuse more entrenched, and accepted, than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three Nigerian women reported having been physically abused by a male partner, according to the latest study, conducted in 1993. The wife of the deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province told reporters last year that her husband beat her incessantly, in part because she watched television movies. One of President Olusegun Obasanjo's appointees to a national anticorruption commission was allegedly killed by her husband in 2000, two days after she asked the state police commissioner to protect her.
"It is like it is a normal thing for women to be treated by their husbands as punching bags," Obong Rita Akpan, until last month Nigeria's minister for women's affairs, said in an interview here. "The Nigerian man thinks that a woman is his inferior. Right from childhood, right from infancy, the boy is preferred to the girl. Even when they marry out of love, they still think the woman is below them and they do whatever they want."
In Zambia, nearly half of women surveyed said a male partner had beaten them, according to a 2004 study financed by the United States - the highest percentage of nine developing nations surveyed on three continents.
In South Africa, researchers for the Medical Research Council estimated last year that a male partner kills a girlfriend or spouse every six hours - the highest mortality rate from domestic violence ever reported, they say. In Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, domestic violence accounts for more than 6 in 10 murder cases in court, a United Nations report concluded last year.
Yet most women remain silent about the abuse, women's rights organizations say. A World Health Organization study has found that while more than a third of Namibian women reported enduring physical or sexual abuse by a male partner, often resulting in injury, six in seven victims had either kept it to themselves or confided only in a friend or relative.
Help is typically not easy to find. Nigeria, Africa's largest nation with nearly 130 million people, has only two shelters for battered women, both opened in the last four years. The United States, by contrast, has about 1,200 such havens. Moreover, many women say wifely transgression justify beatings. About half of women interviewed in Zambia in 2001 and 2002 said husbands had a right to beat wives who argue with them, burn the dinner, go out without the husband's permission, neglect the children or refuse sex.
To Kenny Adebayo, a 30-year-old driver in Lagos, the issue is clear-cut. "If you tell your wife she puts too much salt in the dinner, and every day, every day, every day there is too much salt, one day you will get emotional and hurt her," he said. "We men in Africa hate disrespect."
Nigeria's penal code, in force in the Muslim-dominated north, specifically allows husbands to discipline their wives - just as it allows parents and teachers to discipline children - as long as they do not inflict grievous harm. Assault laws could apply, but the police typically see wife-beating as an exception. Domestic violence bills have been proposed in six of Nigeria's three dozen provinces but adopted in just two.
Women's rights activists say that the prevalence of abuse is emblematic of the low status of women in sub-Saharan Africa. Typically less educated, they work longer hours and transport three times as much weight as men, hauling firewood, water and sacks of corn on their heads.
Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe does not fit that standard profile. Articulate, with a fashionable haircut and a sociology book in her bag, she speaks in a confident, even assertive tone of voice. Her diary is full of plans for various projects she hopes to undertake. "I am an organizer," she said in a series of interviews. "I am a leader."
But that did not save her from a seemingly endless string of beatings during her eight-year marriage to her husband, Emmanuel.
By Nigerian standards, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said, her parents were progressive. Her father occasionally beat her mother, but he also encouraged his daughter, the oldest of seven children, to pursue her studies and, later, her careers as a marketing executive, French teacher and host of a French educational television show.
She was only about 16 when she met Emmanuel. Like her, he went on to graduate from a university, specializing in accounting. Slim and handsome, he slapped her only once during their long courtship, she said. She thought it was an aberration.
It wasn't. Now 35, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe says that Emmanuel beat her more than 60 times after she married him in 1997. He beat her, she says, while she was pregnant with their son, now 6. He threw a lantern at her. He held a knife to her head, she said, while a friend pleaded with him not to kill her.
Emmanuel Osibuamhe, 36, now says he was wrong to beat his wife. But in a two-hour interview in his office, which doubles as barber shop, he insisted that she drove him to it by deliberately provoking him. Pacing the floor in freshly pressed pants, polished shoes and yellow shirt, he grew increasingly agitated as he recalled how she challenged his authority.
"You can't imagine yourself beating your wife?" he said. "You can't imagine yourself being pushed to that level? But some people just push you over the edge, and you do things that you are not supposed to do."
"For God's sake," he added. "You are the head of the home as the man. You must have a home that is submissive to you."
To him, that means accepting that he is the head of the household and makes the final decisions. It also means that all property be in his name and that his wife ask his permission before she visits her family, he said.
When Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe eventually sought help, others only seemed to support her husband's view. She went to the police. "They told me I am not a small girl," she recalled. "If I don't want to be married, I should get divorced."
She told her father-in-law. He advised her that "beating is normal."
She told her local pastor, who counseled her that "I shouldn't make him so angry," telling her "whatever my husband says, I should submit."
She found support, finally, at Project Alert on Violence Against Women, a nonprofit organization that runs one of Nigeria's two shelters. She lived at the shelter for weeks. She titled her statement detailing the violence "A Cry for Help."
Briget Osekwe, the senior program officer, said the group's files contained 200 cases like Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe's. Even some women who are economically independent like Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe, she said, are loath to divorce their husbands for fear of social disgrace.
"In this society, a woman must do everything she can to make her marriage work," said Josephine Effah-Chukwuma, who set up Project Alert in 1999. "If it fails, the woman gets the blame."
Since she moved out, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said, her husband has hit her a dozen times, once knocking her to the floor of their church. She is torn over whether it is possible for him to change. She worries about how she will raise her son, now living with his grandparents, should she divorce. "Should I stay because of the baby and then get killed?" she asked. But at another point she asked a reporter to make sure that in any account of her story, her last name would be hyphenated to include his.
Her diary is filled with notes on how his views are wrong. "Marriage to you: A slavery relationship!" she wrote this January.
She has now found a new outlet as the creator and host of a local television show on domestic violence. After the first program was broadcast, she said, she was deluged with calls from women like herself. She hopes to pursue their cause through a little foundation she has formed called "Happy Family."
"An African man believes his wife is like a piece of property, is like a car, is like a shoe, is like something for him to trample on," Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said. "Our men need education."
So do "our mothers, our fathers, our sons," she added. "The whole society needs to be overhauled."
On those opposing the pullout from Gaza
Gaza Settlers Make Room for Opponents of the Pullout
By DINA KRAFT
MORAG, Gaza, Aug. 10 - Up to 2,000 Jewish opponents of the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip scheduled to begin next week have infiltrated the area, the Israeli police say. On Wednesday, the newcomers vowed to continue their opposition to the evacuation of the settlements.
Many are teenagers and young families from West Bank settlements who hope to make it more difficult for Israeli security forces to carry out the withdrawal. The activists opposed to the pullout have largely been welcomed by the Jewish settlers here even though many of the settlers have begun to acknowledge that the end is near and have begun packing up their homes.
Some newcomers are living in the attics of settler homes. Others are living in tent camps by the sea and in shacks cobbled together from tarpaulin and poles.
The government has called them infiltrators for illegally making their way into Gush Katif, the main cluster of 15 settlements. Some have smuggled themselves in inside the trunks of cars; others say they have come in on foot, walking around checkpoints. Some had permits to visit and never left.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview broadcast on Israeli television on Wednesday that the residents of Gush Katif were peaceful people and that the threat of violence during the withdrawal period came from outsiders who had recently arrived.
While the police say as many as 2,000 activists opposed to the withdrawal are now living in the Gaza Strip settlements, the army sets the figure at closer to 1,500. The settlers say the number is as high as 4,000.
Michael Lev, a teacher of Jewish texts, is one of the newcomers.
On Wednesday, he hammered a shack together from wooden planks in the settlement of Morag. Mr. Lev, who lives in central Israel but has been in Morag for several weeks with his wife and three children, said he was doing sacred work by helping reinforce the settlement.
"We are doing our bit for God," he said, adding that he did not plan to physically confront soldiers and police officers on evacuation day. "I did not come to argue."
"But they want to destroy, and I want to build."
Next Wednesday, Israeli security forces are scheduled to begin evacuating the Jewish settlements of Gaza, where close to 9,000 people have been living until recently when some began moving out. Israel took control of Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war.
Across the street from where Mr. Lev was working in Morag, Assaf and Miriam Yafin, both 27, discussed the makeshift attic they recently built in their house. They said they had lost count of how many outside activists they were housing and jokingly referred to their new attic as "the penthouse."
Religious Jews, the Yafins see their efforts to settle Gaza as part of a divine mission to settle the land promised to the Jews in the Bible.
"Our struggle is for the name of God," said Mr. Yafin, a yeshiva student. "Our job is to settle the Land of Israel and set an example."
Among their guests are both sets of the couple's parents, who live in West Bank settlements.
Many of the West Bank settlers who have temporarily relocated to Gaza said that by fighting for the settlements they were waging a struggle for their own homes.
"We are here because after this it could be the whole of Yesha and we are here to stop it at the source," said Yehuda Matar, using an acronym that refers to all West Bank and Gaza settlements. He is the 16-year-old son of Nadia Matar, a longtime right-wing activist in Israel.
The members of the Matar family have moved into a house in the Shirat Hayam settlement along the beach to show their opposition to the Gaza withdrawal and are encouraging others to do so as well.
A few doors down, Udi Amar, 28, has moved in from a small West Bank settlement in the Jordan Valley.
"We came here to prevent the evacuation," he said. "The mood here is good because new families are arriving all the time."
Under black netting used to stave off the blazing sun, a communal dining area with wooden picnic benches, stoves and refrigerators has been set up next to the tent camp of newcomers at the far edge of Shirat Hayam.
Inside, young women in head scarves and flowing skirts roasted potatoes and chicken for dinner. The most recent arrivals discussed their adventures inside Gaza.
Some spoke of soldiers who did not carefully check their identity cards as they made their way by car through the series of checkpoints along the road to the crossing into the Jewish settlements of Gaza.
They point to this as proof that some soldiers are tacitly aiding them in their cause because Israeli security forces have been very successful in stopping Palestinian infiltrators from entering Israel from Gaza.
Ilana Bar-Kochav, 30, has come to the camp in Shirat Hayam with her four children, all under the age of 4.
Mrs. Bar-Kochav said she had come to fight for the future of Israel and the future of her children.
As for getting here, she would only say, "It was easy."
The Male Condition
By SIMON BARON-COHEN
Cambridge, England
TWO big scientific debates have attracted a lot of attention over the past year. One concerns the causes of autism, while the other addresses differences in scientific aptitude between the sexes. At the risk of adding fuel to both fires, I submit that these two lines of inquiry have a great deal in common. By studying the differences between male and female brains, we can generate significant insights into the mystery of autism.
So was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, right when he remarked that women were innately less suited than men to be top-level scientists? Judging from current research, he was and he wasn't. It's true that scientists have documented psychological and physiological differences between male and female brains. But Mr. Summers was wrong to imply that these differences render any individual woman less capable than any individual man of becoming a top-level scientist.
In fact, the differences that show up in brain research reflect averages, meaning that they emerge only when you study groups of males and females and compare the two groups' averages on particular psychological tests or physiological measures. The evidence to date tells us nothing about individuals - which means that if you are a woman, there is no evidence to suggest that you could not become a Nobel laureate in your chosen area of scientific inquiry. A good scientist is a good scientist regardless of sex.
Nonetheless, with brain scanning, we can discern physiological differences between the average male and the average female brain. For example, the average man's cerebrum (the area in the front of the brain concerned with higher thinking) is 9 percent larger than the average woman's. Similar, though less distinct, overgrowth is found in all the lobes of the male brain. On average, men also have a larger amygdala (an almond shaped structure in the center of the brain involved in processing fear and emotion), and more nerve cells. Quite how these differences in size affect function, if at all, is not yet known.
In women, meanwhile, the connective tissue that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain tends to be thicker, perhaps facilitating interchange. This may explain why one study from Yale found that when performing language tasks, women are likely to activate both hemispheres, whereas males (on average) activate only the left hemisphere.
Psychological tests also reveal patterns of sex difference. On average, males finish faster and score higher than females on a test that requires the taker to visualize an object's appearance after it is rotated in three dimensions. The same is true for map-reading tests, and for embedded-figures tests, which ask subjects to find a component shape hidden within a larger design. Males are over-represented in the top percentiles on college-level math tests and tend to score higher on mechanics tests than females do. Females, on the other hand, average higher scores than males on tests of emotion recognition, social sensitivity and language ability.
Many of these sex differences are seen in adults, which might lead to the conclusion that all they reflect are differences in socialization and experience. But some differences are also seen extremely early in development, which may suggest that biology also plays a role. For example, girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate. One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.
In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one's own.
Our research team in Cambridge administered questionnaires on which men and women could report their level of interest in these two aspects of the world - one involving systems, the other involving other people's feelings. Three types of people were revealed through our study: one for whom empathy is stronger than systemizing (Type E brains); another for whom systemizing is stronger than empathy (Type S brains); and a third for whom empathy and systemizing are equally strong (Type B brains). As one might predict, more women (44 percent) have Type E brains than men (17 percent), while more men have Type S brains (54 percent) than women (17 percent).
What of Mr. Summers's other claim, that such sex differences are innate? We know that culture plays a role in the divergence of the sexes, but so does biology. For example, on the first day of life, male and female newborns pay attention to different things. On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, whereas more female infants will look at a human face.
It has also been found that the amount of prenatal testosterone, which is produced by the fetus and measurable in the amniotic fluid in which the baby is bathed in the womb, predicts how sociable a child will be. The higher the level of prenatal testosterone, the less eye contact the child will make as a toddler, and the slower the child will develop language. That is connected to the role of fetal testosterone in influencing brain development.
Males obviously produce far more prenatal testosterone than females do, but levels vary considerably even across members of the same sex. In fact, it may not be your sex per se that determines what kind of brain you have, but your prenatal hormone levels. From there it's a short leap to the intriguing idea that a male can have a typically female brain (if his testosterone levels are low), while a female can have a typically male brain (if her testosterone levels are high). That notion fits with the evidence that girls born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who for genetic reasons produce too much testosterone, are more likely to exhibit "tomboy" behavior than girls with more ordinary hormone levels.
What does all this have to do with autism? According to what I have called the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, people with autism simply match an extreme of the male profile, with a particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize. When adults with Asperger's syndrome (a subgroup on the autistic spectrum) took the same questionnaires we gave to non-autistic adults, they exhibited extreme Type S brains. Psychological tests reveal a similar pattern.
And this analysis makes sense. It helps explain the social disability in autism, because empathy difficulties make it harder to make and maintain relationships with others. It also explains the "islets of ability" that people with autism display in subjects like math or music or drawing - all skills that benefit from systemizing.
People with autism often develop obsessions, which may be nothing other than very intense systemizing at work. The child might become obsessed with electrical switches (an electrical system), or train timetables (a temporal system), or spinning objects (a physical system), or the names of deep-sea fish (a natural, taxonomic system). The child with severe autism, who may have additional learning difficulties and little language ability, might express his obsessions by bouncing constantly on a trampoline or spinning around and around, because motion is highly lawful and predictable. Some children with severe autism line objects up for hours on end. What used to be dismissed by clinicians as "purposeless, repetitive behavior" may actually be a sign of a mind that is highly tuned to systemize.
One needs to be extremely careful in advancing a cause for autism, because this field is rife with theories that have collapsed under empirical scrutiny. Nonetheless, my hypothesis is that autism is the genetic result of "assortative mating" between parents who are both strong systemizers. Assortative mating is the term we use when like is attracted to like, and there are four significant reasons to believe it is happening here.
FIRST, both mothers and fathers of children with autism complete the embedded figures test faster than men and women in the general population.
Second, both mothers and fathers of children with autism are more likely to have fathers who are talented systemizers (engineers, for example).
Third, when we look at brain activity with magnetic resonance imaging, males and females on average show different patterns while performing empathizing or systemizing tasks. But both mothers and fathers of children with autism show strong male patterns of brain activity.
Fourth, both mothers and fathers of children with autism score above average on a questionnaire that measures how many autistic traits an individual has. These results suggest a genetic cause of autism, with both parents contributing genes that ultimately relate to a similar kind of mind: one with an affinity for thinking systematically.
In order to fully test this theory, we still need to do a lot of work. The specific genes involved must be identified. It is a theory that may be controversial and perhaps unpopular among those who believe that the cause of autism is largely or totally environmental. But controversy is not a reason not to test it - systematically, as we might say.
On games in Gaza
Coping With Adult Conflict in Gaza Can Be Child's Play
By DINA KRAFT
NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip - When children in the Israeli settlements of Gaza play their newest game, "Cops and Jews," nobody volunteers to be the police officer.
Not far away, across barbed-wire fences and high walls, children in Palestinian towns and refugee camps take turns playing roles in a game called "Martyrs and Soldiers."
Rivka Kirshenzaft, 11, said the rules for "Cops and Jews" are simple.
"Everyone goes to his spot, which is considered his home, and then the police come in and yell 'Get out!' and take the Jews to jail," she said, tossing her bobbed, strawberry-blond hair. "The Jews say, 'What? Are we criminals?' Then it all ends and it's time to go back to school."
Suzan Qouta, 9, plays "Martyrs and Soldiers" with her friends in Gaza City.
"I explode myself and then I became a martyr," she said. "Then I come to life again and throw blocks, which I shoot as bullets toward the soldiers and Sharon," referring to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister.
Ahead of Israel's planned mid-August withdrawal of the nearly 9,000 settlers in Gaza, children caught in the cross-fire of warring adults are trying to make sense of the confusion and trauma with games.
For the Israeli children, the violence of drive-by shootings and mortar attacks has been joined by a new threat - that of a government-ordered eviction from their homes. Among their Palestinian counterparts, for whom tanks and attack helicopters are part of the landscape of childhood, there is a new enthusiasm for the departure of the settlers and the soldiers who protect them.
Ibrahim Nassar, 11, who lives with his mother and four younger siblings in the Deir el Balah refugee camp, has covered the walls of the living room in their two-room apartment with crayon drawings of rocket launchers and automatic rifles.
"This is what they fire at the Israelis in the settlements," he said matter-of-factly. Because of these attacks, he said, "The Israelis will leave."
His younger brothers, Ahmed, 5 and Ismail, 7, tend to stutter and do not like leaving the house. Their mother, Taghreed Nassar, said the two boys often wet their beds at night and cry out in the dark. Children are known for their resilience, even in the face of trauma, but when the threat of violence is continuing, as it often is in Gaza, it can be difficult for them to bounce back, say both Israeli and Palestinian child psychologists.
"The child in his first years sees the world as safe or not safe," said Samir Qouta, a psychologist with the Gaza Community Mental Health Program and Suzan's father. "If he believes he is not safe," he said, "it affects his development."
Such children, he said, are prone to developing phobias and anxieties and may have difficulties adapting and achieving later in life.
On a recent day in Kfar Darom, the Jewish settlement adjacent to Deir el Balah, Cheli Hadad, 13, sat on the edge of her bunk bed under dangling mobiles of rainbows and bumblebees. She tried to ignore her younger sister's barbs about the mottled, dark pink scar on her leg, the only visible remnant of shrapnel from a roadside bomb that exploded near her armored school bus.
Cheli, her chestnut ponytail spilling down her back, recalled that November morning, nearly five years ago. "I saw the windows shatter," she said. "I lay on the floor. I understood it was an attack."
The five children on the bus were injured; the two adults were killed.
Three of the children were from a single family, and each lost a limb or part of one.
Cheli has no contact with her Arab neighbors. "I don't normally see Palestinians," she said. "They're far from here."
But they are not. Just a few miles away, in the town of Khan Yunis, Houda Darweesh, 14, was led down the stairs by her younger sister. Houda's brown eyes darted from corner to corner, but saw nothing. She was blinded two years ago, her family said, when an Israeli Army bullet flew through her classroom window during a math lesson and lodged in her brain.
"My life has changed," said Houda, who has auburn hair and a sprinkling of freckles. "I used to love going to wedding parties, to visit my friends. But now I feel I can't. Where will I go now? I cannot see."
She said she looked forward to the Israelis leaving Gaza. "It will be much better," she said, her voice raspy. "People will be able to move freely. There will be no fear."
Meanwhile, children in Jewish settlements, who were told by their families that their struggle to remain in Gaza had purpose and meaning, face being forcibly evacuated from their homes.
"They are losing their homes and their foundations of personal safety," said Naomi Baum, of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma. "I'm concerned how it will impact on them." Dr. Baum said she advised parents, teachers and school counselors in Gush Katif, the main cluster of 15 Gaza settlements, to listen to their children's fears about the evacuation.
Dr. Qouta, the Gaza psychologist, said children who have witnessed traumatic events exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder like aggressive and antisocial behavior. Many find it difficult to concentrate in school, suffer from flashbacks and have difficulty sleeping, he said. In Gaza City, Ibrahim Bagdadi, 17, struggles with memories of a hot night in July 2002, when a woman's head and other body parts rolled into his bedroom.
An Israeli missile apparently aimed at Sheik Salah Shehade, a founder of Hamas's military wing, had hit a nearby apartment building. Sheik Shehade, his wife and 13 others were killed, nine of them children. "I can't forget anything from that night," Ibrahim said. "It changed my whole life. I'm more nervous. I'm afraid."
In Neve Dekalim, the largest of the Jewish settlements in Gaza, Rivka Kirshenzaft's brother, Nechamia, 9, is wearing the same green-and-white striped shirt he wore last December, when a Palestinian rocket exploded in the family's garden. He suffered internal injuries from shrapnel that flew through the window.
"I never lost consciousness, even though my condition was listed as serious," he said proudly. "It's normal. It happens every day. I'm used to hearing them so I didn't get scared."
On somebody helping people in Iraq
On a Break, at 78, From Aiding the Desperate in Iraq
By IAN URBINA
In a place where everything seems broken, she has been a fixer. At a time when most other American civilians were leaving the country, she was just arriving.
Sister Anne Montgomery, a 78-year-old nun, avoided the United States-patrolled Green Zone when she moved to Baghdad, opting instead to live in Karada, a mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood across the Tigris River from the American Embassy.
"You can't possibly do the type of work we sought to do with Iraqi civilians unless you live with them," she said in a recent interview from her home in East Harlem. She rotated into and out of Iraq regularly, from soon after the war started until April, when she returned home to take a break and get treatment for skin cancer.
As a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical antiwar group based in Chicago and Toronto, Sister Montgomery was among the handful of American civilians still based in Baghdad last year and early this year.
She worked with Iraqi civilians seeking answers to basic and often desperate questions: When will my son be released from detention? Where is he being held? Can we visit him?
They are questions that have become more difficult to answer, Sister Montgomery said, as the violence has grown. The group's goal has been to serve as a neutral intermediary between the United States military and the families of the detained, she said, while not taking a position on the guilt or innocence of the detainees.
"We walk a very fine line," she said. "And to this day we still have good relations with all sides."
When a teenage girl, who suffered burns in an explosion, needed medical treatment that was not available in Iraq, Sister Montgomery spent several days ushering her around to get the needed paperwork done so she could leave the country.
When an elderly man sought help finding property that he said had been taken by United States soldiers from his house during a raid, Sister Montgomery, who uses a translator, spent a day calling around to figure out who had conducted the raid. Later she escorted the man to the right office to file a claim.
But most of her time has been spent aiding families of the detained.
Iraqis often do not know where to turn for answers or how to fill out paperwork, she said. Others are afraid to navigate the process alone. Often the search for information becomes a race against the clock, especially when sick people are held without their medication.
Sister Montgomery is no stranger to conflict. As a veteran antinuclear activist, she has been arrested more times than she can remember. But it was the nearly two decades that she worked with high school dropouts in Albany and New York City that best equipped her to handle some of the rage that she has encountered in Iraq, she said.
"The kids had a lot of pent up feelings," she said. "But it taught me a sense of timing which has been useful in dealing with angry people because it helps me know how long to wait before responding to this kind of emotion."
The child of a military family, Sister Montgomery was born in San Diego and spent her childhood changing cities and schools every couple of years. She remembers her father, a Navy officer, growing increasingly disenchanted during his deployment in World War II.
For high school, she went to a boarding school in Pennsylvania run by nuns of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, where she was drawn to the order for its balance of contemplation and direct involvement in society, she said.
After college, she trained as a nun and became increasingly involved with tutoring children in urban areas. Her involvement with the antinuclear movement through the 1980's introduced her to other antiwar groups, and eventually she joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which sent her on several trips to the West Bank. There, she said, she worked with Palestinian families whose homes had been destroyed by Israeli soldiers.
"That confronted me with a lot of tense situations," she said. "But things in Iraq have gotten as bad as anything I've seen before."
While most major international aid organizations have pulled out of Iraq over the last year because of the kidnappings and bombings, the Christian Peacemaker Teams have maintained a steady presence in the country.
But the group has taken increased precautions, Sister Montgomery said. Members no longer give their Baghdad addresses to strangers, and rather than take cabs directly to their apartments, they are dropped off nearby and walk home.
"People in the neighborhood look out for us," she said. "But you still have to be careful."
The worst part is the confusion, Sister Montgomery said.
For Iraqis trying to locate detainees, the transition from the American coalition authority to Iraqi control has been a mixed blessing, she said. There are now more offices throughout Baghdad where people can go to inquire about the status of detainees, but there is even less uniformity in the way they handle the inquiries, she said.
This frustration seems to be shared on all sides.
When American soldiers confided in her that one of the toughest parts of serving was not knowing how long they would be deployed or where they would be dispatched next, Sister Montgomery said, she took the complaint on their behalf to their commanding officers.
"I think there are a lot of people working in the dark over there," she said. "It's not a pretty situation."
On Tombstone
Wyatt Earp Fought Here, but the Corral Isn't O.K.
By ANDREW POLLACK
TOMBSTONE, Ariz., Aug. 3 - George Spangenberg sold weapons to both Wyatt Earp and the gang he faced at the O.K. Corral. Today visitors can see the G. F. Spangenberg gun shop - "Est. 1880," according to its sign - standing on Fourth Street.
Well, actually, the shop was established only 16 years ago to cater to tourists and has no connection to the gunsmith whose name it borrowed.
"We don't say it's the same shop," said Jim Newbauer, a manager of the store, which is across the street from where the original stood. Nor does the shop go out of its way to say it isn't.
Just how true to history this famous Old West town should remain is the subject of a modern-day shootout. "The town too tough to die," as Tombstone bills itself, is at risk of losing its designation as a national historic landmark because some say it has been a little too kitschy in embellishing its heritage.
"It's becoming like a Hollywood set instead of an authentic historic Western town," said Sally Alves, a bed-and-breakfast owner.
Dates from the 19th century are painted on buildings erected in the last few decades. Some stores have simulated brick or adobe facades. Some are painted in colors like purple or turquoise that probably were not used in 1880's frontier towns.
The National Park Service, which administers the landmark program, last year listed Tombstone's status as "threatened" because of building alterations "that didn't have any basis in history," said Greg Kendrick, regional manager of the program. Only about 90 of the nation's 2,400 historic landmarks are considered "threatened," mostly because of deterioration, not decoration. Since 1980, 25 have lost their designation.
Now this town of 1,700 is at a crossroads. Starting Sept. 1, Tombstone will hold a three-day public meeting, with federal and state officials in attendance, to discuss whether and how to preserve its historic authenticity.
Anthony Veerkamp, a senior program manager for the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, said some other famous places, like Cannery Row in Monterey, Calif., have faced similar dilemmas. "There's often tension between protecting the historic resource and exploiting the historic resource, if you will," Mr. Veerkamp said.
In Tombstone, some people, like Ms. Alves, argue that unless the town is authentic, visitors would not come. Others say that if the town is too authentic, visitors will be bored.
"They don't particularly want dusty, dried-up history," said Donna Winn, manager of a tourist attraction called Ghosts and Legends. "They want to be entertained."
Actors and stuntmen stage several gunfights a day, including one at the O.K. Corral (which also features a re-enactment by mechanized statues). But Ghosts and Legends, which opened in January on historic Allen Street, is yet a step closer to Disneyland, a haunted house of sorts with skeletons, a computer-animated ghost of Doc Holliday narrating history and special effects like a sharp blast of air when a gun is fired.
Many business people say that authenticity is important and that the town generally achieves it. But exceptions must be made, they say, to cater to tourists who have certain expectations from movies like "Tombstone," the 1993 film starring Kurt Russell. Tourism is the town's only industry, bringing in about half a million visitors a year, according to its chamber of commerce.
Tombstone, about 70 miles southeast of Tucson, was founded by Ed Schieffelin, a prospector who was warned that if he went into the heart of Apache territory, he would find nothing but his own tombstone. When he discovered silver here in 1877, Tombstone became a boomtown.
The silver boom faded after a decade, and the town shrank. But it has survived for more than a century largely because of its 30 seconds of fame, which is all it took for Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, aided by Doc Holliday, to gun down Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury on Oct. 26, 1881.
Many of the oldest buildings burned down, though some remain, including the Bird Cage theater, City Hall and the courthouse, which is now a history museum.
Some people here say it is difficult to define what is authentic because the town has changed over time. At one point in the 1920's, an auto repair shop occupied the location of the O.K. Corral. (The corral has since been recreated at that spot.) Dusty Escapule, a former mayor and a fourth-generation resident, said that by the time the landmark designation was received in the early 1960's, there were neon signs and a bus depot in the historic district. Much of that is gone now, and the town more closely resembles 1880's Tombstone, even if some of it is re-creation, Mr. Escapule said.
The Crystal Palace saloon, whose first floor dates to the 1880's, has a faithfully reconstructed bar. But it also has a crude second-floor facade of offices, like one for Virgil E. Earp, marshal. (His middle name was Walter.)
Madam Mustache, a variety store named after an 1880's prostitute, has a simulated adobe facade and a sign on top saying "1881." The location was a vacant lot that year and the building came a century later. "At least it's based on a real person," said Vikki Bryant, who was working behind the counter on Tuesday.
Richard Wilson, the owner, said the building was like that when he bought it 15 years ago and he saw no need to change. "I can afford to do what I want with that building," he said, adding he did not care whether the town lost its historic designation, something rarely important to tourists.
Although the Interior Department confers landmark status based on broad guidelines, Tombstone itself is responsible for drawing up rules and enforcing them for the historic district.
Larry Noyes, appointed this year as chairman of the historic district commission, said that over the years there had been lax enforcement. "Building permits were issued without any inspection at all," he said.
Mr. Noyes said some businesspeople in town feared that publicity about the town's predicament, reported in The Arizona Republic last month, could hurt tourism. Still, he said, concern about authenticity is not new. In 1963, just after the landmark designation was made, an inspector from the National Park Service wrote that "rampant huckstering" was "rapidly ruining the integrity of this fine site."
Hollis Cook, who managed the history museum here for 20 years, said the town's Hollywood element was unavoidable. The importance of the 1881 shootout to American history was "vanishingly small," he said, and would barely be known were it not for television and movies.
Indeed, Mr. Cook said, the shootout actually took place behind the corral in a vacant lot and on Fremont Street, but Hollywood thought "O.K. Corral" was sexier. "It sold a hell of a lot more tickets than 'Gunfight on Fremont Street,' " he said.
Still, Mr. Cook said that over all, Tombstone was authentic. "If you brought Wyatt Earp back from the dead and put him on the street and said, 'Where are you?' " he said, "I think it would take him a minute or two, but he'd recognize it."
On wife-beatings in Africa
Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
LAGOS, Nigeria - It was a typical husband-wife argument. She wanted to visit her parents. He wanted her to stay home.
So they settled it in what some here say is an all-too-typical fashion, Rosalynn Isimeto-Osibuamhe recalled of the incident in December 2001. Her husband, Emmanuel, followed her out the door. Then he beat her unconscious, she says, and left her lying in the street near their apartment.
Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe, then 31 and in the fifth year of her marriage, had broken an unwritten rule in this part of the world: she had defied her husband. Surveys throughout sub-Saharan Africa show that many men - and women, too - consider such disobedience ample justification for a beating.
Not Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe. A university graduate and founder of a French school, she packed her clothes and walked out as soon as she got back from the hospital. So far, although her resolve sometimes wavers and she does not want a divorce, she has not gone back.
"He doesn't believe I have any rights of my own," she said in an interview outside her French classroom. "If I say no, he beats me. I said: 'Wow. That is not what I want in life.' "
Women suffer from violence in every society. In few places, however, is the abuse more entrenched, and accepted, than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three Nigerian women reported having been physically abused by a male partner, according to the latest study, conducted in 1993. The wife of the deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province told reporters last year that her husband beat her incessantly, in part because she watched television movies. One of President Olusegun Obasanjo's appointees to a national anticorruption commission was allegedly killed by her husband in 2000, two days after she asked the state police commissioner to protect her.
"It is like it is a normal thing for women to be treated by their husbands as punching bags," Obong Rita Akpan, until last month Nigeria's minister for women's affairs, said in an interview here. "The Nigerian man thinks that a woman is his inferior. Right from childhood, right from infancy, the boy is preferred to the girl. Even when they marry out of love, they still think the woman is below them and they do whatever they want."
In Zambia, nearly half of women surveyed said a male partner had beaten them, according to a 2004 study financed by the United States - the highest percentage of nine developing nations surveyed on three continents.
In South Africa, researchers for the Medical Research Council estimated last year that a male partner kills a girlfriend or spouse every six hours - the highest mortality rate from domestic violence ever reported, they say. In Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, domestic violence accounts for more than 6 in 10 murder cases in court, a United Nations report concluded last year.
Yet most women remain silent about the abuse, women's rights organizations say. A World Health Organization study has found that while more than a third of Namibian women reported enduring physical or sexual abuse by a male partner, often resulting in injury, six in seven victims had either kept it to themselves or confided only in a friend or relative.
Help is typically not easy to find. Nigeria, Africa's largest nation with nearly 130 million people, has only two shelters for battered women, both opened in the last four years. The United States, by contrast, has about 1,200 such havens. Moreover, many women say wifely transgression justify beatings. About half of women interviewed in Zambia in 2001 and 2002 said husbands had a right to beat wives who argue with them, burn the dinner, go out without the husband's permission, neglect the children or refuse sex.
To Kenny Adebayo, a 30-year-old driver in Lagos, the issue is clear-cut. "If you tell your wife she puts too much salt in the dinner, and every day, every day, every day there is too much salt, one day you will get emotional and hurt her," he said. "We men in Africa hate disrespect."
Nigeria's penal code, in force in the Muslim-dominated north, specifically allows husbands to discipline their wives - just as it allows parents and teachers to discipline children - as long as they do not inflict grievous harm. Assault laws could apply, but the police typically see wife-beating as an exception. Domestic violence bills have been proposed in six of Nigeria's three dozen provinces but adopted in just two.
Women's rights activists say that the prevalence of abuse is emblematic of the low status of women in sub-Saharan Africa. Typically less educated, they work longer hours and transport three times as much weight as men, hauling firewood, water and sacks of corn on their heads.
Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe does not fit that standard profile. Articulate, with a fashionable haircut and a sociology book in her bag, she speaks in a confident, even assertive tone of voice. Her diary is full of plans for various projects she hopes to undertake. "I am an organizer," she said in a series of interviews. "I am a leader."
But that did not save her from a seemingly endless string of beatings during her eight-year marriage to her husband, Emmanuel.
By Nigerian standards, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said, her parents were progressive. Her father occasionally beat her mother, but he also encouraged his daughter, the oldest of seven children, to pursue her studies and, later, her careers as a marketing executive, French teacher and host of a French educational television show.
She was only about 16 when she met Emmanuel. Like her, he went on to graduate from a university, specializing in accounting. Slim and handsome, he slapped her only once during their long courtship, she said. She thought it was an aberration.
It wasn't. Now 35, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe says that Emmanuel beat her more than 60 times after she married him in 1997. He beat her, she says, while she was pregnant with their son, now 6. He threw a lantern at her. He held a knife to her head, she said, while a friend pleaded with him not to kill her.
Emmanuel Osibuamhe, 36, now says he was wrong to beat his wife. But in a two-hour interview in his office, which doubles as barber shop, he insisted that she drove him to it by deliberately provoking him. Pacing the floor in freshly pressed pants, polished shoes and yellow shirt, he grew increasingly agitated as he recalled how she challenged his authority.
"You can't imagine yourself beating your wife?" he said. "You can't imagine yourself being pushed to that level? But some people just push you over the edge, and you do things that you are not supposed to do."
"For God's sake," he added. "You are the head of the home as the man. You must have a home that is submissive to you."
To him, that means accepting that he is the head of the household and makes the final decisions. It also means that all property be in his name and that his wife ask his permission before she visits her family, he said.
When Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe eventually sought help, others only seemed to support her husband's view. She went to the police. "They told me I am not a small girl," she recalled. "If I don't want to be married, I should get divorced."
She told her father-in-law. He advised her that "beating is normal."
She told her local pastor, who counseled her that "I shouldn't make him so angry," telling her "whatever my husband says, I should submit."
She found support, finally, at Project Alert on Violence Against Women, a nonprofit organization that runs one of Nigeria's two shelters. She lived at the shelter for weeks. She titled her statement detailing the violence "A Cry for Help."
Briget Osekwe, the senior program officer, said the group's files contained 200 cases like Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe's. Even some women who are economically independent like Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe, she said, are loath to divorce their husbands for fear of social disgrace.
"In this society, a woman must do everything she can to make her marriage work," said Josephine Effah-Chukwuma, who set up Project Alert in 1999. "If it fails, the woman gets the blame."
Since she moved out, Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said, her husband has hit her a dozen times, once knocking her to the floor of their church. She is torn over whether it is possible for him to change. She worries about how she will raise her son, now living with his grandparents, should she divorce. "Should I stay because of the baby and then get killed?" she asked. But at another point she asked a reporter to make sure that in any account of her story, her last name would be hyphenated to include his.
Her diary is filled with notes on how his views are wrong. "Marriage to you: A slavery relationship!" she wrote this January.
She has now found a new outlet as the creator and host of a local television show on domestic violence. After the first program was broadcast, she said, she was deluged with calls from women like herself. She hopes to pursue their cause through a little foundation she has formed called "Happy Family."
"An African man believes his wife is like a piece of property, is like a car, is like a shoe, is like something for him to trample on," Ms. Isimeto-Osibuamhe said. "Our men need education."
So do "our mothers, our fathers, our sons," she added. "The whole society needs to be overhauled."
On those opposing the pullout from Gaza
Gaza Settlers Make Room for Opponents of the Pullout
By DINA KRAFT
MORAG, Gaza, Aug. 10 - Up to 2,000 Jewish opponents of the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip scheduled to begin next week have infiltrated the area, the Israeli police say. On Wednesday, the newcomers vowed to continue their opposition to the evacuation of the settlements.
Many are teenagers and young families from West Bank settlements who hope to make it more difficult for Israeli security forces to carry out the withdrawal. The activists opposed to the pullout have largely been welcomed by the Jewish settlers here even though many of the settlers have begun to acknowledge that the end is near and have begun packing up their homes.
Some newcomers are living in the attics of settler homes. Others are living in tent camps by the sea and in shacks cobbled together from tarpaulin and poles.
The government has called them infiltrators for illegally making their way into Gush Katif, the main cluster of 15 settlements. Some have smuggled themselves in inside the trunks of cars; others say they have come in on foot, walking around checkpoints. Some had permits to visit and never left.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview broadcast on Israeli television on Wednesday that the residents of Gush Katif were peaceful people and that the threat of violence during the withdrawal period came from outsiders who had recently arrived.
While the police say as many as 2,000 activists opposed to the withdrawal are now living in the Gaza Strip settlements, the army sets the figure at closer to 1,500. The settlers say the number is as high as 4,000.
Michael Lev, a teacher of Jewish texts, is one of the newcomers.
On Wednesday, he hammered a shack together from wooden planks in the settlement of Morag. Mr. Lev, who lives in central Israel but has been in Morag for several weeks with his wife and three children, said he was doing sacred work by helping reinforce the settlement.
"We are doing our bit for God," he said, adding that he did not plan to physically confront soldiers and police officers on evacuation day. "I did not come to argue."
"But they want to destroy, and I want to build."
Next Wednesday, Israeli security forces are scheduled to begin evacuating the Jewish settlements of Gaza, where close to 9,000 people have been living until recently when some began moving out. Israel took control of Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East war.
Across the street from where Mr. Lev was working in Morag, Assaf and Miriam Yafin, both 27, discussed the makeshift attic they recently built in their house. They said they had lost count of how many outside activists they were housing and jokingly referred to their new attic as "the penthouse."
Religious Jews, the Yafins see their efforts to settle Gaza as part of a divine mission to settle the land promised to the Jews in the Bible.
"Our struggle is for the name of God," said Mr. Yafin, a yeshiva student. "Our job is to settle the Land of Israel and set an example."
Among their guests are both sets of the couple's parents, who live in West Bank settlements.
Many of the West Bank settlers who have temporarily relocated to Gaza said that by fighting for the settlements they were waging a struggle for their own homes.
"We are here because after this it could be the whole of Yesha and we are here to stop it at the source," said Yehuda Matar, using an acronym that refers to all West Bank and Gaza settlements. He is the 16-year-old son of Nadia Matar, a longtime right-wing activist in Israel.
The members of the Matar family have moved into a house in the Shirat Hayam settlement along the beach to show their opposition to the Gaza withdrawal and are encouraging others to do so as well.
A few doors down, Udi Amar, 28, has moved in from a small West Bank settlement in the Jordan Valley.
"We came here to prevent the evacuation," he said. "The mood here is good because new families are arriving all the time."
Under black netting used to stave off the blazing sun, a communal dining area with wooden picnic benches, stoves and refrigerators has been set up next to the tent camp of newcomers at the far edge of Shirat Hayam.
Inside, young women in head scarves and flowing skirts roasted potatoes and chicken for dinner. The most recent arrivals discussed their adventures inside Gaza.
Some spoke of soldiers who did not carefully check their identity cards as they made their way by car through the series of checkpoints along the road to the crossing into the Jewish settlements of Gaza.
They point to this as proof that some soldiers are tacitly aiding them in their cause because Israeli security forces have been very successful in stopping Palestinian infiltrators from entering Israel from Gaza.
Ilana Bar-Kochav, 30, has come to the camp in Shirat Hayam with her four children, all under the age of 4.
Mrs. Bar-Kochav said she had come to fight for the future of Israel and the future of her children.
As for getting here, she would only say, "It was easy."