More NYTimes articles...
Aug. 23rd, 2005 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyA Good Report on AIDS
A Good Report on AIDS, and Some Credit the Web
By DEAN E. MURPHY
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17 - The conversation over tossed salad, dinner rolls and iced tea was about dating. Mostly predictable stuff, like where to meet guys and the hottest men-seeking-men Web sites.
But the gathering last week at a coffee shop in the largely gay Castro district here was not a casual pickup session. The dozen or so men were infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and the talk was of "responsible sex," not through condoms, necessarily, but through choosing sex partners who are already infected.
"I don't think I could sleep at night if I knew I had infected another human being," said one of the men, Don Stewart, who tested positive for the virus, H.I.V., five years ago.
The monthly social event, called Positive Space and organized by an AIDS prevention group, is among the scores of educational meetings, workshops, seminars and parties that health officials here say may be contributing to a significant decline in the incidence of H.I.V. among gay men in San Francisco.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in a report in June that new infections in San Francisco among men who have sex with men were occurring at about half the rate previously calculated by city health officials - 1.2 percent a year instead of 2.2 percent. That is the lowest rate reported in San Francisco since 1997 and the lowest among five cities with significant gay populations studied by the disease control agency.
Since the report's release, health officials here, known for their cautious approach to shifts in AIDS trends, have been scrambling to confirm the results and offer an explanation. Some officials have said that the decline has been fueled by conventional efforts like stepped-up H.I.V. treatment programs, easier and more regular tests, and so-called harm-reduction strategies like discouraging the use of crystal methamphetamine, a drug blamed for helping to spread the disease by lowering inhibitions.
But other signs, like the proliferation of matchmaking Web sites for men infected with H.I.V. and the relatively high number of men here who know their H.I.V. status, point to a growth in the number of men looking for partners with the same status. The practice is known as sero-sorting, which involves men choosing sex partners based on their common serostatus, a term that refers to the presence of antibodies to a particular infectious agent in the blood.
"Studies have shown when people have knowledge of their sero-status, they take that knowledge and use it to protect their partners," said Dr. Patrick S. Sullivan, chief of the behavioral and clinical surveillance branch at the disease control centers. "Sero-sorting is one piece of that whole benefit that arises from people learning their status through H.I.V. testing."
Since the AIDS epidemic began nearly 25 years ago, San Francisco has often been a laboratory of sorts, with many behavioral changes, both good and bad, occurring here before spreading to other cities.
Though the disease control centers' report is just one in a sea of statistical analyses and studies about H.I.V., containing the usual caveats about possible reporting errors and potentially skewed sampling, the emerging consensus in San Francisco is that the new numbers signal a reversal in a sharp rise in infections that began about seven years ago.
The highest incidence of new infection among men who have sex with men, 8 percent, was found in Baltimore, followed by Miami with 2.6 percent, New York with 2.3 percent and Los Angeles with 1.4 percent, according to the report's preliminary estimates, which were based on H.I.V. tests conducted among 1,767 men from June 2004 to April 2005.
"When I first saw the data, I was skeptical and had to be convinced," said Jeff Sheehy, an adviser on AIDS issues to Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco. "There's a lot of fortunate events coming together to drive this. It's incredibly important to start people really looking at the factors driving the downward trend and reinforce and encourage those factors."
The federal report did not delve into possible causes, and there is no specific evidence to support any definitive conclusion. Dr. Sullivan said that the report was a "snapshot in time," and that there would not be directly comparable data available until another survey was conducted in 2007.
He said there was a variety of possible contributors to the lower incidence of infection in San Francisco. But some of the men gathered at the coffee shop in the Castro, the H-Cafe, suggested that sero-sorting - while imperfect because it relies on men being truthful about their H.I.V. status and gives some an excuse to avoid using condoms - was among the most important reasons for the decline.
"I very rarely date a negative person," said Stan Pugh, a massage therapist who said he had been H.I.V. positive since the early 1980's. "If I do, it is only safe sex. But when you have two positives together, we tend to have sex any way we want to."
The surge in recent years in men turning to the Internet to find casual sex partners has made sero-sorting easier. Web dating often eliminates the awkward and too often skipped face-to-face discussion just before sexual relations about who is infected with what.
"Everything is going well and you dread finding the right moment to come out with that," said Matt Kennedy, who tested positive for H.I.V. a year ago and who works for the Stop AIDS Project, the nonprofit group that organizes the meetings at the H-Cafe.
Matchmaking Web sites for men who are H.I.V. positive have flourished, and many personal ads on more general sites, like Craigslist.com, also include details and demands from prospective sex partners about H.I.V. status.
In the shorthand of the sexually explicit personals, "POZ UB2" indicates a man who is H.I.V positive seeking the same. In a recent Craigslist item under the headline "Long Party Sessions Wanted," one San Francisco man asked to meet "sometime today" and posted his age, height, hair and eye colors, and the message "neg (u2 plz)."
Though San Francisco has a high percentage of men who are H.I.V. positive - about a quarter of the roughly 60,000 gay men here, according to city estimates - health officials said sero-sorting was easier here than in many other cities because the men were relatively well informed about their status. The disease control centers estimated in June that 77 percent of the city's infected men knew they were infected, compared with estimates of 48 percent in New York and 38 percent in Baltimore.
J. Jeff McConnell, who directs a study of about 300 people who are H.I.V. positive at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco, said recent data showed that sero-sorting patterns were "becoming stronger" among the study's gay participants.
Data from three recent months showed that the 176 gay participants engaged in 5,500 acts of sexual intercourse with other men, with about 80 percent of the acts occurring with men known to be H.I.V. positive.
Despite concerns that the Internet facilitates high-risk sex, Mr. McConnell said, "Ultimately, sex that occurs from the Internet is no more risky than sex from any other venues because of sero-sorting."
Yet there are drawbacks. Herb Topping, another of the H-cafe patrons, said that many men who are H.I.V. positive worried about the possibility of becoming infected with a new strain of the virus. Mr. Topping said he insisted on safe-sex practices, like use of condoms, even when having sex with a positive partner, but that other worried positive men seek out willing negative partners.
"I think that is a struggle in the community right now," said Mr. Topping, who tested positive for H.I.V. five years ago.
Health officials recommend safe-sex practices regardless of the partner. But Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, who oversees sexually transmitted disease prevention at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said worries about acquiring a second strain were mostly unfounded.
Dr. Klausner said research had shown that the risk was low, particularly after the first year or two of infection, and paled in comparison with the risks associated with men who are H.I.V. positive having sex with men who are not.
"From a public health perspective," he said, "it is much more important that people have sexual contacts of the same status."
Though it will take months for health officials to come up with firm numbers of their own, preliminary reviews of some data collected at city health clinics and in surveys by the Stop AIDS Project indicate a trend similar to that reported by the disease control centers.
Moreover, statistics released last week on syphilis, which researchers say often tracks closely with H.I.V., show that the number of new infections in San Francisco dropped 27 percent in the first six months of this year, the first decline since 1998.
"We interpret this C.D.C. report as good news, and there are some other encouraging trends and results of other studies," Dr. Willi McFarland, director of the H.I.V. seroepidemiology unit at the San Francisco health department, said in an e-mail message. "But we definitely do need to corroborate and independently confirm any decrease in H.I.V. incidence by carefully examining other data. We also need to figure out if this is true, then why."
On giving greenhouses to Palestinians... that's a bad summation
How Old Friends of Israel Gave $14 Million to Help the Palestinians
By ANDY NEWMAN
It was perhaps an odd request to make of a man noted for his commitment to Israeli causes and his fierce criticism of the Palestinian Authority.
Please raise $14 million to help buy the Jewish settlers' lucrative greenhouses in the Gaza Strip so that the Palestinians can take them over when the settlers are gone. Oh, and can you get it done by the weekend, before the pullout starts? If not, the settlers will destroy the greenhouses on their way out of Gaza to keep them out of Arab hands.
Last Wednesday, though, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, real estate magnate and publisher of The Daily News, received just such a pitch from his friend James D. Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank, current Middle East envoy for the White House and would-be broker of the deal.
Mr. Zuckerman, who is also former head of the American-Israel Friendship League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Soviet Jewish Zionist Forum, said he thought about the ironies. But not for too long.
"Despite my skepticism," Mr. Zuckerman said in an interview on Tuesday, "I thought to myself, 'This is perhaps the only illustration or symbol of what could be the benefits of a co-operational, rather than a confrontational attitude.' "
So he in turn picked up the phone and called a few of his friends and fellow billionaires, who also happened to be prominent Jewish philanthropists.
Not all of them shared his enthusiasm. "Some people said, 'Well, if these people are so anti-Semitic, why should we do anything to help them?' " Mr. Zuckerman said.
But Lester Crown of Chicago, whose family owns General Dynamics, said yes. Leonard Stern, the chairman of the Hartz Mountain real estate empire and former owner of The Village Voice, called Mr. Zuckerman back from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and said yes. A foundation that prefers to remain anonymous said yes.
Within 48 hours, Mr. Zuckerman said, he had his $14 million. And the Palestinians had a shot at inheriting relatively intact the greenhouses whose vegetables and flowers have been a major source of Israeli export income, and, not incidentally, about 3,500 desperately needed Palestinian jobs.
When the deal was announced Friday, the donors were anonymous, apart from Mr. Wolfensohn, who put up $500,000 of his own. But word about these things tends to leak out, and yesterday morning, Mr. Stern said he got a call at his beach house in the Hamptons from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
"She said that she wanted to let me know that myself and every member of the group that helped make this possible had made a very positive contribution to the peace," he said. Mr. Stern, 67, was asked the last time he received a call from Ms. Rice. "Before my bar mitzvah," he joked, before answering, "Never."
The purchase of the greenhouses had been months in the making. The Israeli government is giving the settlers $55 million for the greenhouses themselves, but Israeli law allows compensation only for buildings and land, not for movables like the greenhouses' computerized irrigation systems.
Without those, the Palestinians would not be able to make a go of running the greenhouses, Mr. Zuckerman said. It was those, the greenhouse guts, that carried the $14 million price tag.
The United States Agency for International Development was willing to put up the money, but could not give it directly to the Israelis because Israel does not qualify for the agency's help, Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Stern said.
The simple way around that obstacle would have been for the agency to give the money to the Palestinian Authority to hand over to the settlers. But there, Mr. Zuckerman said, "The attitude was, 'We are not going to put our fingerprints on anything that helps the Jews.' "
The donors arranged to funnel their money to the Aspen Institute, a private advocacy group that has been working on investments in the Palestinian areas, and a private Israeli group helped broker the deal with the settlers.
Mr. Stern said he was not used to writing a seven-figure check to a cause he had not had time to research himself.
"But when you know people and you know they're passionate, and you have a great respect for their judgment," he said of Mr. Zuckerman, "I listened to him, and I asked him one question. 'Are you contributing?' He said yes. I said 'Well, O.K., then I will.' "
Mr. Zuckerman is hardly naïve about the prospects for peace in the Middle East.
On Monday in U.S. News & World Report, which he also publishes, he wrote an editorial excoriating both the Palestinian Authority's leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and his more violent, increasingly powerful rivals in Hamas.
"The sad fact," Mr. Zuckerman wrote, "is that everything is going wrong."
But some hope, he said, is better than no hope.
"It's not an easy thing to be up against," Mr. Zuckerman yesterday, "when someone is swearing and yelling at you, and you're saying, 'O.K., well, I'm going to give you $14 million so that you can do better.' But this is the one thing that might be seen as a constructive effort."
On planets
10 Planets? Why Not 11?
By KENNETH CHANG
PASADENA, Calif. - Between feedings and diaper changes of his newborn daughter, Michael E. Brown may yet find an 11th planet.
Once conducted almost exclusively on cold, lonely nights, observational astronomy these days is often done under bright California sunshine.
When he has a few spare minutes, Dr. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, downloads images taken during a previous night by a robotically driven telescope at Palomar Observatory 100 miles away. Each night, the telescope scans a different swath of sky, photographing each patch three times, spaced an hour and a half apart.
In any one of the photographs, a planet or some other icy body at the edge of the solar system looks just like a star. Unlike a star it moves between the exposures.
Dr. Brown's computer programs flag potential discovery candidates for him to inspect. He quickly dismisses almost all of them - double images caused by a bumping of the telescope, blurriness from whirls in the atmosphere or random noise.
Sometimes, like last Jan. 5, he spots a moving dot.
Dr. Brown had rewritten his software to look for slower-moving and more distant objects.
On that morning, he was sitting in his Caltech office - unremarkable university turf sparsely decorated with a not-full bottle of Jack Daniel's, a dragon mobile, a dinosaur toothbrush, a Mr. Potato Head and other toys and knickknacks that long predated parenthood - and re-examining images from nearly a year and a half earlier, Oct. 21, 2003.
The first several candidates offered by the computer were the usual garbled images.
Then he saw it: a bright, unmistakably round dot moving across the star field.
He did a quick calculation. Even if this new object reflected 100 percent of the sunlight that hit it - and nothing is perfectly reflective - it would still be almost as large as Pluto.
That meant, without any additional data, Dr. Brown knew he had discovered what could be the 10th planet.
He noted the time: 11:20 a.m. Dr. Brown knew that astrologers would ask because they had asked after earlier discoveries of smaller Kuiper Belt objects.
He thought about a bet he had made with a friend, for five bottles of Champagne, that he would discover something larger than Pluto by Jan. 1, 2005, five days earlier. He sent her an e-mail message asking for a five-day extension.
Dr. Brown seems destined for future astronomy textbooks, either as the discoverer of the first new planet in 75 years or as the man who pushed Pluto out of the planetary pantheon. Astronomers have long argued over whether Pluto should be a planet and speculated that ice balls larger than Pluto might be hiding in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of debris beyond the orbit of Neptune. Several objects approaching the size of Pluto have been discovered in recent years.
Dr. Brown and two colleagues, David Rabinowitz of Yale and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, are the first to point to something that is almost certainly larger than Pluto.
"If people want to get rid of Pluto, I'm more than happy to get rid of Pluto and say this one isn't a planet, either," Dr. Brown said.
"If culturally we would be willing to accept a scientific definition, that would be great," he continued. "The only thing that would make me unhappy is if Pluto remained a planet, and this one was not one."
So far, little is known about the new planet, which carries the temporary designation of 2003 UB313. It is currently nine billion miles from Sun, at the farthest point of its 560-year orbit.
A couple of centuries from now, its elliptical trajectory will take it within 3.3 billion miles of the Sun, closer than some of Pluto's orbit. And the orbit is surprisingly askew.
While most of the solar system circles the Sun in a flat disc, the new planet's orbit is tilted about 45 degrees from the disc.
Planet finding was not a career goal for Dr. Brown. Until recently, he was among those who argued that nothing in the Kuiper Belt deserved to be called a planet, not even Pluto.
Dr. Brown, 40, grew up in Alabama, a child of the 1970's, which left a mark in his speech patterns. For things he likes, he inevitably calls them "cool."
His father, an engineer at I.B.M., had moved to Huntsville to work on the giant Saturn rockets, which were being designed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to carry astronauts to the Moon.
When he was finishing up his undergraduate degree in physics at Princeton, he thought he would pursue theoretical work in cosmology, devising ideas about how the universe came together.
Then James Peebles, a physics professor at Princeton, mentioned to him how astronomy needed more observers actually looking at the sky.
"That was it," Dr. Brown recalled. "As soon as he said it, I was like, O.K."
In graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, he still planned to work on the far, far away - distant galaxies that blast out loud radio signals. His thesis adviser, Hyron Spinrad, made his graduate students also work on comets, because he was interested in them and could not get help otherwise. Dr. Brown was captivated as well. "I thought, This stuff is cool," he said.
That brought his interests inside the solar system. Later Dr. Brown came across a tiny, little-used 24-inch telescope at the Lick Observatory outside San Jose. "You find the telescope first and then find your thesis program," he said.
His thesis topic turned out to be the volcanoes on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, and how the gases from the volcanoes are swept up into Jupiter's magnetic fields, accelerated into orbit around Jupiter and then slammed back into Io at 125,000 miles per hour.
He entered the planet-searching business through a chance opportunity. When he arrived at Caltech a decade ago, the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar was just finishing up a large sky survey. While many astronomers clamor for use of Palomar's main 200-inch telescope, Dr. Brown realized he could easily get ample time on the smaller one.
So, just as he did at Lick, he looked for a project to fit the telescope.
The first Kuiper Belt object had been discovered a few years earlier, and Dr. Brown thought it would be useful to do a systematic sweep of the sky to look for them. In past centuries, the trick to discovering a planet was knowing exactly where to look. Now, computers and automated telescopes have allowed a new strategy: look everywhere.
Dr. Brown has a love of code names, so he and his colleagues decided if they ever found something larger than Pluto, they would give it the code name Xena, after the television series starring Lucy Lawless as an ancient Greek warrior.
It was also partly a nod to Planet X, a long-hypothesized massive planet in the outer solar system.
In 2002, Dr. Brown and Dr. Trujillo turned up their first big find: a Kuiper Belt object about 775 miles wide, or about as large as Pluto's moon, Charon. They named it Quaoar, after a god in Native American mythology, and learned their first lesson in astronomical discovery: find a pronounceable name. (Quaoar is pronounced KWAH-o-wahr.)
A year later, Dr. Brown, Dr. Trujillo and Dr. Rabinowitz of Yale found something stranger, an object larger than Quaoar and much father out, eight billion miles. And stranger yet, its 11,000-year orbit carries it out as far as 84 billion miles, far beyond anything else known in the solar system.
Initially, they excitedly thought it might be larger than Pluto and called it Xena for a few days. But further measurements and calculations indicated it was probably, at most, three-quarters the diameter of Pluto. When they announced the discovery last year, they gave it the name of Sedna, after an Inuit goddess.
The name was easily pronounceable, but it peeved some astronomers, especially amateur asteroid searchers, who felt Dr. Brown had again flouted the International Astronomical Union's naming rules. The rules prohibit discoverers from publicly announcing any name, even a tentative one, before the union approves it, a process that takes months to years. The critics wanted the union to rebuke Dr. Brown and reject the name.
One amateur astronomer, Reiner M. Stoss, even proposed Sedna as a name for a small, earlier discovered asteroid, to thwart Dr. Brown.
Dr. Brown admitted, "I consciously broke the rules," but he felt that the preliminary designation, 2003 VB12, was too obscure and confusing for a noteworthy addition to the solar system. "I thought, This is stupid," he said. "This object needs to have a name before it goes public."
After Sedna, the astronomers also realized that there could be more discoveries lurking in their photographs.
Dr. Brown finds that betting is an effective way to spur scientific progress. He would have found the planet sooner or later, but late last year he realized that his best hope for winning the Champagne bet was to sift through thousands of candidates in the old images.
On Dec. 20, going through the images from the previous May, he discovered a new bright Kuiper Belt object.
It was big, but not big enough. He gave that one the code name of Santa.
When he later discovered a moon around Santa, he gave the moon the code name Rudolph. (When he discovered yet another Kuiper Belt object in April, he continued in the holiday vein and code named that one Easter Bunny. He even had a code name for his daughter before she was born and he and his wife had not yet settled on a name. The whiteboard in his office had a list of tasks labeled "TDBP" - To Do Before Petunia.)
He spent Christmas through New Year's examining old images.
Nothing turned up.
Then on Jan. 5 - not Jan. 8 as he had said at his news conference - he finally found one he could call Xena. "What if it's the size of Mercury?" he mused in his notes.
This time, Dr. Brown decided to play by the International Astronomical Union's rules and did not announce his real intended name for 2003 UB313, leading to rumors that he had officially proposed Xena.
Meanwhile, Dr. Brown, on family leave until the end of year, found a new set of data to work with: his daughter Lilah's sleeping and eating patterns.
In the hospital, he and his wife had, like many new parents, written down a record of feeding and sleeping times.
Dr. Brown wrote a computer program to generate colorful charts from the information and put them online at lilahbrown.com.
"Who wouldn't be fascinated?" Dr. Brown asked. "Well, I guess, most people."
Black bars indicate the times that his wife, Diane Binney, is breast-feeding Lilah. Blue bars indicate when Dr. Brown is feeding a bottle to her. Green bars indicate the hours Lilah is awake and content; red bars indicate the fussy times.
Dr. Brown said he hoped to find a pattern in Lilah's sleep cycle - she has been waking up, on average, every 2.5 hours. If one nap lasted only 1.5 hours, would that mean the next nap would last 3.5 hours, giving her parents a chance to rest?
A chart with cloudlike splatter of data points gave the unfortunate answer. "There is absolutely no correlation," Dr. Brown said.
Illegal Immigrants legally win Arizona Ranch
2 Illegal Immigrants Win Arizona Ranch in Court
By ANDREW POLLACK
DOUGLAS, Ariz., Aug. 18 - Spent shells litter the ground at what is left of the firing range, and camouflage outfits still hang in a storeroom. Just a few months ago, this ranch was known as Camp Thunderbird, the headquarters of a paramilitary group that promised to use force to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking across the border with Mexico.
Now, in a turnabout, the 70-acre property about two miles from the border is being given to two immigrants whom the group caught trying to enter the United States illegally.
The land transfer is being made to satisfy judgments in a lawsuit in which the immigrants had said that Casey Nethercott, the owner of the ranch and a former leader of the vigilante group Ranch Rescue, had harmed them.
"Certainly it's poetic justice that these undocumented workers own this land," said Morris S. Dees Jr., co-founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which represented the immigrants in their lawsuit.
Mr. Dees said the loss of the ranch would "send a pretty important message to those who come to the border to use violence."
The surrender of the ranch comes as the governors of Arizona and New Mexico have declared a state of emergency because of the influx of illegal immigrants and related crime along the border.
Bill Dore, a Douglas resident briefly affiliated with Ranch Rescue who is still active in the border-patrolling Minuteman Project, called the land transfer "ridiculous."
"The illegals are coming over here," Mr. Dore said. "They are getting the American property. Hell, I'd come over, too. Get some American property, make some money from the gringos."
The immigrants getting the ranch, Edwin Alfredo Mancía Gonzáles and Fátima del Socorro Leiva Medina, could not be reached for comment. Kelley Bruner, a lawyer at the law center, said they did not want to speak to the news media but were happy with the outcome.
Ms. Bruner said that Mr. Mancía and Ms. Leiva, who are from El Salvador but are not related, would not live at the ranch and would probably sell it. Mr. Nethercott bought the ranch in 2003 for $120,000.
Mr. Mancía, who lives in Los Angeles, and Ms. Leiva, who lives in the Dallas area, have applied for visas that are available to immigrants who are the victims of certain crimes and who cooperate with the authorities, Ms. Bruner said. She said that until a decision was made on their applications, they could stay and work in the United States on a year-to-year basis.
Mr. Mancía and Ms. Leiva were caught on a ranch in Hebbronville, Tex., in March 2003 by Mr. Nethercott and other members of Ranch Rescue. The two immigrants later accused Mr. Nethercott of threatening them and of hitting Mr. Mancía with a pistol, charges that Mr. Nethercott denied. The immigrants also said the group gave them cookies, water and a blanket and let them go after an hour or so.
The Salvadorans testified against Mr. Nethercott when he was tried by Texas prosecutors. The jury deadlocked on a charge of pistol-whipping but convicted Mr. Nethercott, who had previously served time in California for assault, of gun possession, which is illegal for a felon. He is now serving a five-year sentence in a Texas prison.
Mr. Mancía and Ms. Leiva also filed a lawsuit against Mr. Nethercott; Jack Foote, the founder of Ranch Rescue; and the owner of the Hebbronville ranch, Joe Sutton. The immigrants said the ordeal, in which they feared that they would be killed by the men they thought were soldiers, had left them with post-traumatic stress.
Mr. Sutton settled for $100,000. Mr. Nethercott and Mr. Foote did not defend themselves, so the judge issued default judgments of $850,000 against Mr. Nethercott and $500,000 against Mr. Foote.
Mr. Dees said Mr. Foote appeared to have no substantial assets, but Mr. Nethercott had the ranch. Shortly after the judgment, Mr. Nethercott gave the land to his sister, Robin Albitz, of Prescott, Ariz. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the siblings, saying the transfer was fraudulent and was meant to avoid the judgment.
Ms. Albitz, a nursing assistant, signed over the land to the two immigrants last week.
"It scared the hell out of her," Margaret Pauline Nethercott, the mother of Mr. Nethercott and Ms. Albitz, said of the lawsuit. "She didn't know she had done anything illegal. We didn't know they had a judgment against my son."
This was not the first time the law center had taken property from a group on behalf of a client. In 1987, the headquarters of a Ku Klux Klan group in Alabama was given to the mother of a boy whose murder was tied to Klansmen. Property has also been taken from the Aryan Nations and the White Aryan Resistance, Mr. Dees said.
Joseph Jacobson, a lawyer in Austin who represented Mr. Nethercott in the criminal case, said the award was "a vast sum of money for a very small indignity." Mr. Jacobson said the two immigrants were trespassing on Mr. Sutton's ranch and would have been deported had the criminal charges not been filed against Mr. Nethercott.
He criticized the law center for trying to get $60,000 in bail money transferred to the immigrants. While the center said the money was Mr. Nethercott's, Mr. Jacobson said it was actually Ms. Nethercott's, who mortgaged her home to post bail for her son.
Mr. Nethercott and Mr. Foote had a falling out in 2004, and Mr. Foote left Camp Thunderbird, taking Ranch Rescue with him. Mr. Nethercott then formed the Arizona Guard, also based on his ranch.
In April, Mr. Nethercott told an Arizona television station, "We're going to come out here and close the border with machine guns." But by the end of the month, he had started his prison sentence.
Now, only remnants of Camp Thunderbird remain on his ranch, a vast expanse of hard red soil, mesquite and tumbleweed with a house and two bunkhouses. One bunkhouse has a storeroom containing some camouflage suits, sleeping bags, tarps, emergency rations, empty ammunition crates, gun parts and a chemical warfare protection suit.
In one part of the ranch, dirt is piled up to form the backdrop of a firing range. An old water tank, riddled with bullet holes, is on its side. A platform was built as an observation post on the tower that once held the water tank.
Charles Jones, who was hired as a ranch hand about a month before Mr. Nethercott went to prison, put up fences and brought in cattle to graze. He has continued to live on the property with some family members.
But now the cattle are gone, and Mr. Jones has been told that he should prepare to leave. "It makes me sick I did all this work," he said.
Ms. Nethercott said she was not sure whether her son knew that his ranch was being turned over to the immigrants, but that he would be crushed if he did.
"That's his whole life," she said of the ranch. "He'd be heartbroken if he lost it in any way, but this is the worst way."
On the Kosher Sock Guy
We All Scream for...Kosher Socks?
By ANDREW JACOBS
ULSTER HEIGHTS, N.Y., Aug. 18 - Never has a cloud of dust brought so much pleasure.
For residents of Bayit Vegan, a bungalow colony with 100 cottages and a summer's worth of pent-up consumer demand, the dust signaled the arrival of Murray Goldwag and his rolling shop of discounted wonders. The buzz began even before he could navigate the camp's crater-pocked driveway and unload the boxes of black knee-highs, ankle-length skirts, challah covers, and most important, cheap plastic toys.
"The kosher sock guy is here, the kosher sock guy is here," the children shouted, followed by that interrogative dear to a merchant's ears: "Mommy, can I have a dollar?"
Despite the words on his apron - "Murray's Kosher Socks" - Mr. Goldwag is not just a purveyor of hosiery. His world-weary van, packed like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, is loaded with a five-and-dime's worth of summer necessities: laundry bags, nose plugs, rubber balls, flashlights, bathing caps, rain ponchos, fly swatters and those plastic spray bottles that come in handy on a sweltering afternoon. Except for the paddleball rackets and the women's clothing, nearly everything can be had for $3 or less.
"If I don't sell it, you don't need it," said Mr. Goldwag, 60. "I'm not in this for the money. I just like the exercise I get from all this shlepping."
Like Izzy the Knishman, Sy the Shoe Guy and the parade of men and women who deal in manicures, religious books and kosher ice cream, Mr. Goldwag travels between the 200 or so Catskill bungalow colonies that enliven the mountains here like so many Polish shtetls. He and his shlepping brethren deal in dry goods and borscht belt diversions, helping to relieve the ennui of a long summer day while providing refreshments or a desperately needed replacement for the skullcap that ended up at the bottom of the lake. "These people are like family, we can't wait to see them," said Tova Lichtenstein, a math teacher from Brooklyn. "And their prices, they aren't bad either."
Back when working-class families were lucky to have one car and husbands needed it to get between the mountains and their weekday city jobs, the Catskill peddler was a critical part of summer subsistence for families left behind during the week. There was the Chow Chow Cup man who sold Chinese food in an edible bowl, Lassie the Classy toy hawker and the "movie guy" who would show up year after year and project the same films - usually "The Guns of Navarone" - on the handball court wall.
"It's was Lower East Side pushcart culture transferred to the country, full of bantering and bargaining," said Phil Brown, a professor of sociology at Brown University who organizes an annual conference on Catskill nostalgia. "The P.A. system would constantly be announcing the arrival of yet another peddler in the parking lot."
Although the two-car household is much more prevalent and the number of colonies has declined, many families still spend the summer here without their own vehicles. At the Satmar-dominated camps, where women do not drive, the traveling salesmen are cherished even more.
"When you have eight children who are constantly losing their socks, you look forward to Murray's arrival," said Faige Rothstein, 42, who was stocking up on hosiery for her six boys, each of whom were far more interested in Mr. Goldwag's tangle of yo-yos, water guns and trinkets.
Like many of the other vendors, Mr. Goldwag, who lives off-season on Long Island, practically grew up in the area's bungalow colonies and has fond memories of the region's charismatic salesmen. He first tried out his peddling legs selling neckties and suspenders in the 1970's, during the reign of "Mork & Mindy," when everyone wanted to dress like Robin Williams. The peddling bug stuck, and even though he is a mathematics teacher in Brooklyn during the school year, he returns to the Catskills each Memorial Day to sell to the observant Jews who have been reviving scores of decrepit colonies.
He and his wife also run a storefront in nearby South Fallsburg, but Mr. Goldwag prefers to hit the road as often as he can, usually with his daughter, Elana, 19. Mr. Goldwag seems to thrive on the intense kibitzing that accompanies his visits. He has memorized entire family trees, and almost every customer seems to know about the impending marriage of his daughter. His son, Ari, is a celebrated entertainer in the Jewish community, but he is often referred to as "Murray the Sockman's son."
Mr. Goldwag's main competitor, Not Just Hose, is Avi Rosenzweig, who started selling in 1981 out of the trunk of his Buick Century. Mr. Rosenzweig is something of an upstart, although with a recently purchased truck , he can now offer much more merchandise. Like Kosher Socks, Not Just Hose is a family affair, with Mr. Rosenzweig's son helping unload the truck at each stop and setting the boxes atop weather-beaten sheets of plywood suspended on creaky sawhorses. During the school year, Mr. Rosenzweig, 47, a father of five, works as an administrator at a Brooklyn Yeshiva, and his wife, Gitty, oversees their storefront in downtown Flushing, not far from the family's home.
All the women's clothing is geared toward modesty, and Mr. Rosenzweig's mobile operation is largely designed to clear the shelves for arriving fall merchandise. This year's hot item? Plastic Chinese sandals that are worn during the nine-day holiday known as Tisha B'Av, when the wearing of leather shoes is forbidden.
"My wife's specialty is fashion; my end of it is the schlep," said Mr. Rosenzweig, sweating as he and his youngest son, Tsvi, 19, set up shop at Sefarady's, an Ultra Orthodox colony in Monticello.
They try to hit three colonies a day, and the work is both grueling and increasingly challenging. The new Wal-Mart in Monticello has drained away business, and each year, another colony or two has turned into a suburban-style subdivision, its residents ensconced inside air-conditioned citadels. The takeover of formerly secular colonies by the Hasidic families - who tend to dress with less variation - has also reduced the demand for clothing. "For me, the mountains have gotten smaller," he said. "I'm working harder to make less money."
With the crayons safely shaded by an umbrella and errant underwear placed in the appropriate boxes, Mr. Rosenzweig grabbed his bullhorn, wiped his brow and began to wander through the constellation of cottages, their porches draped with towels and bathing suits drying in the sun. He pushed a button on the megaphone and out came a sound like the amplified buzz of a dive-bombing mosquito. Then he began his spiel: "Attention all smart shoppers. Not Just Hose is back with more clothing at lower prices. Ladies, girls, preteens, shabbos clothing, tickles, snoods and toys galore. Look for the yellow truck on the other side of the shul."
By the time he returned to his open-air bazaar, the tables were mobbed with the eager and the unimpressed. One woman approached Mr. Rosenzweig with finger wagging. "I'm very angry at you," she said, breaking into a smile. "Where have you been? We've been waiting for you all summer."
On "assisted" marriage
With a slideshow
Courtship Ideas of South Asians Get a U.S. Touch
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
At 10 a.m. one Saturday in July, a few weeks after he finished his medical residency at Brown University, Ronak Shah married Kunal Patel, another doctor, in a union that embraced every ritual of the Hindu nuptial script.
Dr. Shah arrived at the Hanover Marriott in Whippany, N.J., by horse and carriage. He wore a traditional sherwani. And he greeted, before all others, his bride's mother, in a gesture that signified the importance of parental engineering in Indian marriage.
But for Dr. Shah and Dr. Patel, both 28, and thousands of young Indians raised in the United States, that engineering is undergoing a change. The venerable South Asian tradition of arranged marriages has taken on an American reinvention. Dr. Patel's mother and father had a hand in their daughter's selection. They were in touch with friends, cousins and cousins of cousins for suggestions about whom she should marry. But Dr. Patel was free to reject them all.
Only over dinner with Dr. Shah - her ninth suitor - did she finally begin a courtship that was fueled as much by chemical attraction as by familial interest. Her marriage, as some young Indians refer to it, was "love-cum-arranged."
Less than a decade ago, the decision about whom a South Asian woman here might marry was still often left to her parents, the prospective bride's individual preference for tall dentists or contemplative artists notwithstanding. But recently, purely arranged marriage has evolved into a new culture of what might be called "assisted" marriage, in which parents are free to arrange all they like - allowing their sons and daughters choice among nominees screened for caste, lineage and geography, among other measures - and giving the children veto power.
These young people may have come of age in an America of "Moonstruck" and "Dawson's Creek," but in many cases they have not completely accepted the Western model of romantic attachment. Indeed, some of the impetus for assisted marriage is coming from young people themselves - men and women who have delayed marriage into their late 20's and early 30's, said Ayesha Hakki, the editor of Bibi, a South Asian bridal and fashion magazine based in New Jersey.
"That has been the most remarkable trend," Ms. Hakki said, citing the example of a male acquaintance, who, after dating on his own, turned to his parents for guidance.
As Madhulika Khandelwal, a historian who has studied Indians here, said, "Young people don't want to make individual decisions alone."
The Patel-Shah union was instigated by the chance encounter two years ago of Dr. Shah's mother and Dr. Patel's at Famous Pizza, a restaurant in Queens that is favored by Indian immigrants. Friends from the town of Nadiad in India, the two had not seen each other in 30 years. Their conversation moved to the subject of their still-single children.
In large part, Ms. Khandelwal said, the transition from formally arranged marriage reflects social changes in India itself, where assisted marriage is now common among the educated, urban middle class. That is because, she said, there are fewer extended-family living arrangements and more women pursuing higher education.
The purpose of assisted marriage here is not simply to preserve Indian cultural identity, but more pointedly to maintain class, religious and regional identities in a place where they might easily be diffused, those who have studied the Indian diaspora say. When Mona Mahajan, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School from New Jersey, married an Indian she met on her own, she was the first in five generations of her family not to have wed a Punjabi.
Arranged and assisted marriage have left Indians with the lowest rate of intermarriage of any major immigrant group in the United States. Among South Asian men and women here in their 20's and 30's, the vast majority of whom are foreign born, fewer than 10 percent marry outside their ethnic group, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau's 2003 American Community Survey conducted for this article. "In the beginning I was pretty against all of this," Dr. Patel said of this newer approach. "Growing up here, you feel that you're supposed to fall in love, but once you figure out that everyone goes on blind dates it doesn't feel quite as strange."
Among Indian parents here who are traditionally inclined, many begin to seek husbands when their daughters are 22 or 23, but the search may be forestalled if the woman is pursuing a graduate degree, Indian women report. Men begin looking for wives with their families' help at about age 26; within more liberal households, children often marry those they meet on their own.
Preceding any planned meeting is the exchange of the all important "bio-data" between families, the term used for a portfolio with the potential bride or groom's profile.
The embrace of more traditional habits is apparent in other ways. Weddings are often elaborate and last three or four days. Families of the betrothed often still consult a Hindu astrologer who schedules wedding ceremonies according to the stars. When Anamika Tavathia, 24, was engaged to a young Indian she met in college, his family visited hers to propose on his behalf and the priest determined they should marry on June 26 of this year between 10:30 and 11 a.m.
This fall is expected to be an unusually busy wedding season in Indian communities, because many couples postponed weddings last year when many days were deemed inauspicious.
Royal Albert Palace, a five-year-old catering facility in Woodbridge, N.J., with a 21-foot statue of a former deputy prime minister of India out front, has become the locus for Indian weddings, and it was there, at a wedding last month, that two young women discussed assisted marriage.
"My dad's parents didn't even see each other until the day they were married," said Kesha Patel, 25, who came to the United States as a child and is looking for someone, with her family's help. "So when I think about that, I'm grateful for the system we have."
Kesha Patel has taken trips to India to meet prospective partners, and her family has arranged for her to meet men here, as well.
"Sometimes you'll get the bio-data and it will be great, and then when you meet the person, you're disappointed," she said. "My parents won't understand, they'll say, 'But he's from a good family, he's a doctor, he's a doctor, he's a doctor.' And I'll say, 'But he's short.' "
Alienating one's parents is anathema to Indian culture, and most young people wish to avoid doing so through marriage. Four years ago, Preet Singh, a 28-year-old teacher in Chicago, fell in love with a woman seven years his senior and not a Sikh. He hoped to marry her and live with her in his parents' home.
"My mother might have accepted the marriage but she would not have lived with us," he said. "It was one of the nastiest breakups of all because that person helped me mature into a man." Not long ago, Mr. Singh's sisters posted his profile on an Indian matrimonial Web site, and he will marry this fall.
Part of his parents' displeasure with the previous relationship was the fact that he was dating at all. Though a Bibi magazine survey conducted three years ago revealed that the majority of married men and women questioned had had sex before marriage, dating, as Mr. Singh put it, "does not exist in our culture." This view leaves parents encouraging children to resolve the marriage question quickly.
The parents of Leena Singh waited until she was older than 25 and had earned a master's degree in mathematics and an M.B.A. to find a husband. Ms. Singh's father eventually found someone to her liking, Sanjeev Tavathia, a young man studying engineering in Iowa. They met in the company of relatives, then went out alone. Back in San Diego, where she was living with her parents, she called Mr. Tavathia and told him she was ready for marriage. He said he was 90 percent certain. They married several months later.
"From the beginning, I felt there was a physical chemistry," Ms. Singh said, "but it took years to develop a mature bond, and I guess you could call that love."
Despite its groundings in pragmatism, assisted marriage is spoken about among some young Indians in highly romanticized terms - implicit in it is the cinematic idea that immediate attraction should result in an eternity spent together.
Kesha Petal's sister married a man to whom she was introduced through her aunts. She decided to marry him the day after they met. "A lot of my friends," Kesha Petal said, her eyes gleaming, "tell me you know in an instant."
On the recently discovered dinosaur footprint at BC....
Not the Biggest Man on Campus, but Surely the Biggest Foot
By MICHAEL BRICK
Here is a good way to hide dinosaur tracks: Wait tens of millions of years while the footsteps fossilize under a shallow sea that will later become Texas, dig up the tracks just before World War II, put plaster around the sides, paint the whole thing a whimsical muddy red, take it to Brooklyn and bolt it to a classroom wall with an unadorned case.
By accident, this method worked until just this summer for Roland T. Bird, a Harley-riding excavator who called himself a dinosaur hunter. When Brooklyn College started renovating its lecture halls in May, scientists began packing what they had assumed was a case containing a plaster cast of dinosaur tracks, a teaching tool held in such regard that it was often obscured by a projector screen.
Removing the case, they found that the block on the wall of Room 3123, so phony-looking it could be mistaken for something carbon-frozen in "The Empire Strikes Back," was a real rock embedded with tracks more than 100 million years old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and holding immense archaeological value.
"It was there all the time," said Wayne G. Powell, the chairman of the geology department, who was among the scientists removing the block from the wall. "It really never occurred to us that it could possibly be real."
Up three flights of stairs, behind a wooden door marked Geology Lecture Room, with the words Please Lock the Door underneath, the rock is found. It stands 55 inches high and 32 inches across.
A worker was laying a coat of epoxy on the floor yesterday, and the room smelled like the makings of a headache. The college has enlisted the American Museum of Natural History for help in removing the rock to clean it and put it back on display, but there are other considerations. Classes start in two weeks.
Considering what it has already been through, though, the rock can be called a survivor. No marker described its provenance, and those who knew what it was had died or moved on over the years. It also was able to hide in plain sight for decades largely because of changes in curatorial sensibilities The scientists who installed it in the 1940's would never have thought to tell anyone it was real; that would be like telling people your hair is real.
Their latter-day counterparts would never imagine treating a rare fossil so cavalierly as to, for starters, paint it.
Mr. Powell, who describes his specialty as "not dinosaurs," removed the rock's case at the close of the spring semester with a paleontology professor, John Chamberlain, and a student, Matt Garb. Because real dinosaur tracks are hard to come by, colleges and museums routinely display replicas, and the rock looked like one, partly because plaster was visible on its side.
Behind the case, though, written in pencil on the wall, they found the name R. T. Bird and the date, presumably of its installation, of May 16, 1942. Mr. Garb recognized the name, and the men got a copy of Mr. Bird's memoir, "Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter."
In the book, Mr. Bird, who dropped out of junior high school and worked as a cowboy before barnstorming the country on his motorcycle showing archaeological finds for the American Museum of Natural History, described discoveries in the limestone around the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Tex. The trackways there, now famous as the site where some creationists claim human footprints were laid contemporaneously with dinosaur tracks, have been preserved as Dinosaur Valley State Park, so fossils can no longer be removed.
But back in the late 1930's and early 1940's, Mr. Bird was making up his own rules. In his memoir, he described the way he and Erich Schlaikjer, an assistant professor of geology from Brooklyn College, distributed the blocks of tracks. He wrote: "Erich came up with a proposal. 'And I'd like one of the smaller ones for Brooklyn College.' "
Mr. Schlaikjer got his wish, bolted to the wall of the lecture hall and painted the same reddish-brown color bones that usually appear in history museums.
"They probably wanted tracks to match the bones," Mr. Powell said.
Kathleen Kovach, a facilities worker at the college, said, "That's more decorating than curating."
There are two tracks in the rock, a shallow one a couple of feet across and a deeper, narrower one the shape of a crescent. Based on the kinds of tracks common to the Paluxy River bed, the scientists at Brooklyn College said the big one was probably made by a Pleurocoelus, a 20-ton herbivore that has been named the Texas state dinosaur. The smaller one may have come from an Acrocanthosaurus, a sharp-toothed monster Pleurocoeluses sought to avoid meeting in dark cretaceous alleys.
Mr. Bird would have his own ideas about the tracks' origins, and would know why they had painted the rock, bolted it to the wall and lined it with plaster. But he died a long time ago, and left only scattered hints of the way he had lived.
On school supplies
It's Not Your Mother's List of School Supplies
By ALINA TUGEND
THESE days, students, especially in middle and high schools, are beginning to resemble airline passengers with their backpacks on wheels stuffed to the brim with books, gadgets and who knows what else.
When I was a student I didn't even have a backpack. We just carried our books and shoved those we didn't need in a locker.
But that is not all that has changed. Once upon a time, the new school year meant buying a folder or two, loose-leaf paper, a few pens and the ubiquitous sharpened No. 2 pencils. Now children are given arm-length lists that require a good hour trolling through supply stores for, say, just the right mechanical crayon (that's right, this year, the hot new product is mechanical crayons, also known as twist-up crayons).
And when students grow older, the list becomes top-heavy with expensive items, like computers and printers.
But back to backpacks. Since some sort of pack is de rigueur, the question for befuddled parents is how to choose one that won't cause physical harm.
Potential backpack injuries have become such a concern that some health care workers, school administrators and legislators have recommended that backpack use be restricted or eliminated.
In response, the American Academy of Pediatrics conducted a study, published in the magazine Pediatrics in 2003, that examined acute backpack injuries in children.
The study looked at some records from 100 emergency departments throughout the country. It found that 247 children from age 6 to 18 had backpack injuries. The mean age was 11, and the injuries were divided fairly evenly between boys and girls.
Surprisingly, it wasn't the weight of the backpacks that was the most common cause of injuries; it was tripping over the backpack, which occurred in 28 percent of the time. Getting hit by the backpack caused 13 percent of the injuries.
Another 13 percent of the injuries - to the neck, backpack and shoulders - were caused by wearing the backpack.
"The 'nonstandard' use of the backpack (tripping, hitting, etc.) resulted in 77 percent of all backpack injuries that required an emergency room visit," the study noted. Therefore, training students to put their backpacks in a safe place and not to use them as weapons against another person would eliminate many backpack-related injuries.
The study, however, did not consider minor injuries that do not require an emergency-room visit, or chronic pain from heavy backpacks.
Besides telling your child to safely stow the pack and not to whack someone with it, the academy does offer suggestions on what to look for when buying a backpack.
First, the backpack should never weigh more than 10 percent to 20 percent of a student's weight. And the straps should be tight enough so the pack is close to the body, and about two inches above the waist.
The pack should have wide, padded shoulder straps (two of them; one strap that runs across the body cannot distribute the weight evenly). It should be lightweight and have a padded back and a waist strap to distribute the load evenly.
The rolling or wheeled backpacks are an option, of course, although those still have to be carried upstairs, and may be difficult to manipulate in snow.
Some administrators suggest buying two sets of textbooks, or at least doubles of the very heavy ones; one to leave at home and one in the locker. That, however, is a costly alternative.
And, after all, it's not as if parents don't have enough items to buy.
Last year, my elementary-school children's lists of school supplies included composition books, pencils, folders, markers (specific brand of thick and thin), glue sticks, erasers, pencil sharpeners, low- odor dry-erase markers and Post-its.
There were also requests for paper towels, Ziploc bags and tissues.
It turns out that the ever-lengthening school-supply list has become a national problem that worries both parents and teachers.
"Parents across the country are finding that the lists get longer all the time," said Anna Marie Weselak, president of the National PTA. "Budgets are being cut so schools are looking to supplement shortfalls."
That means, Ms. Weselak said, schools are asking parents to not just provide academic materials and supplies, but also cleaning supplies, "right down to the toilet paper."
In addition, she said, parents are increasingly paying extra for items or activities that used to be included free in their child's education, like towel fees for physical education classes.
In 2004, her organization conducted a national survey that found that school financing surpassed safety as the chief concern of parents for the first time in many years.
It's not just parents feeling a pinch. Staci Maiers, a spokeswoman for the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union, said teachers were increasingly spending more of their own money to buy classroom necessities.
In 1996, the association asked teachers for the first time how much of their own money they had spent during the last school year for their students. The average was $408 annually.
When the question was repeated for its most recent survey in 2001, the number had grown to an average of $443 yearly. An online survey this past March of about 700 association members found that they spent an average of $1,200 in the previous year. Anecdotally, many teachers say they routinely spend $50 to $100 monthly on items for their classes for everything from books to aquariums.
"It's one of the issues we hear over and over again, and it's pretty much the same for large and small school districts," Ms. Maiers said.
There is even legislation pending before Congress now, the Teacher Tax Relief Act of 2005 (nicknamed the Crayola Credit) that would increase to $400 annually from $250 the amount teachers can deduct from their taxes for nonreimbursed expenses, like books, lesson materials and, yes, even crayons. Sponsored by Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan, it was referred to the Ways and Means Committee in June.
Parents of older students laugh heartily at such worries. They know that the folders, markers and glue sticks are literally child's play compared with the variety of electronics students need as they move up the education ladder.
Besides computers (laptop or desktop? Windows or Macintosh) and printers, cellphones and MP3 players are practically mandatory college equipment nowadays.
The Back to School Guide of Consumer Reports (www.consumerreports.com) has tips on what to look for when buying electronics.
For example, the magazine suggests that families may want to insure an expensive phone. It notes that all major carriers provide insurance that covers lost, stolen or damaged phones, typically for about $4 to $5 a month, with a $35 to $50 deductible.
With MP3 players, Consumer Reports warns buyers to remember some key points. First, make sure that any player you're considering is compatible with your Windows or Macintosh computer.
Second, do you really need an MP3 player that can pump out music for weeks without repeating a tune? If a lower price, smaller size, less weight and long playback times are more important to you than a huge selection of music, Consumer Reports suggests considering a flash-memory model. That means you can add on memory cards to expand the song capacity.
But, if you have a large music collection that you want available through your MP3 player, then a hard disk may be the right move.
Let's recheck our list: there is the ergonomically correct backpack, school supplies and electronics carefully researched for quality and price.
What next? Well, according to the National Retail Federation, more than 93 percent of consumers plan to buy clothes in anticipation of the new school year.
Mall trip anyone?
A Good Report on AIDS, and Some Credit the Web
By DEAN E. MURPHY
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 17 - The conversation over tossed salad, dinner rolls and iced tea was about dating. Mostly predictable stuff, like where to meet guys and the hottest men-seeking-men Web sites.
But the gathering last week at a coffee shop in the largely gay Castro district here was not a casual pickup session. The dozen or so men were infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and the talk was of "responsible sex," not through condoms, necessarily, but through choosing sex partners who are already infected.
"I don't think I could sleep at night if I knew I had infected another human being," said one of the men, Don Stewart, who tested positive for the virus, H.I.V., five years ago.
The monthly social event, called Positive Space and organized by an AIDS prevention group, is among the scores of educational meetings, workshops, seminars and parties that health officials here say may be contributing to a significant decline in the incidence of H.I.V. among gay men in San Francisco.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in a report in June that new infections in San Francisco among men who have sex with men were occurring at about half the rate previously calculated by city health officials - 1.2 percent a year instead of 2.2 percent. That is the lowest rate reported in San Francisco since 1997 and the lowest among five cities with significant gay populations studied by the disease control agency.
Since the report's release, health officials here, known for their cautious approach to shifts in AIDS trends, have been scrambling to confirm the results and offer an explanation. Some officials have said that the decline has been fueled by conventional efforts like stepped-up H.I.V. treatment programs, easier and more regular tests, and so-called harm-reduction strategies like discouraging the use of crystal methamphetamine, a drug blamed for helping to spread the disease by lowering inhibitions.
But other signs, like the proliferation of matchmaking Web sites for men infected with H.I.V. and the relatively high number of men here who know their H.I.V. status, point to a growth in the number of men looking for partners with the same status. The practice is known as sero-sorting, which involves men choosing sex partners based on their common serostatus, a term that refers to the presence of antibodies to a particular infectious agent in the blood.
"Studies have shown when people have knowledge of their sero-status, they take that knowledge and use it to protect their partners," said Dr. Patrick S. Sullivan, chief of the behavioral and clinical surveillance branch at the disease control centers. "Sero-sorting is one piece of that whole benefit that arises from people learning their status through H.I.V. testing."
Since the AIDS epidemic began nearly 25 years ago, San Francisco has often been a laboratory of sorts, with many behavioral changes, both good and bad, occurring here before spreading to other cities.
Though the disease control centers' report is just one in a sea of statistical analyses and studies about H.I.V., containing the usual caveats about possible reporting errors and potentially skewed sampling, the emerging consensus in San Francisco is that the new numbers signal a reversal in a sharp rise in infections that began about seven years ago.
The highest incidence of new infection among men who have sex with men, 8 percent, was found in Baltimore, followed by Miami with 2.6 percent, New York with 2.3 percent and Los Angeles with 1.4 percent, according to the report's preliminary estimates, which were based on H.I.V. tests conducted among 1,767 men from June 2004 to April 2005.
"When I first saw the data, I was skeptical and had to be convinced," said Jeff Sheehy, an adviser on AIDS issues to Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco. "There's a lot of fortunate events coming together to drive this. It's incredibly important to start people really looking at the factors driving the downward trend and reinforce and encourage those factors."
The federal report did not delve into possible causes, and there is no specific evidence to support any definitive conclusion. Dr. Sullivan said that the report was a "snapshot in time," and that there would not be directly comparable data available until another survey was conducted in 2007.
He said there was a variety of possible contributors to the lower incidence of infection in San Francisco. But some of the men gathered at the coffee shop in the Castro, the H-Cafe, suggested that sero-sorting - while imperfect because it relies on men being truthful about their H.I.V. status and gives some an excuse to avoid using condoms - was among the most important reasons for the decline.
"I very rarely date a negative person," said Stan Pugh, a massage therapist who said he had been H.I.V. positive since the early 1980's. "If I do, it is only safe sex. But when you have two positives together, we tend to have sex any way we want to."
The surge in recent years in men turning to the Internet to find casual sex partners has made sero-sorting easier. Web dating often eliminates the awkward and too often skipped face-to-face discussion just before sexual relations about who is infected with what.
"Everything is going well and you dread finding the right moment to come out with that," said Matt Kennedy, who tested positive for H.I.V. a year ago and who works for the Stop AIDS Project, the nonprofit group that organizes the meetings at the H-Cafe.
Matchmaking Web sites for men who are H.I.V. positive have flourished, and many personal ads on more general sites, like Craigslist.com, also include details and demands from prospective sex partners about H.I.V. status.
In the shorthand of the sexually explicit personals, "POZ UB2" indicates a man who is H.I.V positive seeking the same. In a recent Craigslist item under the headline "Long Party Sessions Wanted," one San Francisco man asked to meet "sometime today" and posted his age, height, hair and eye colors, and the message "neg (u2 plz)."
Though San Francisco has a high percentage of men who are H.I.V. positive - about a quarter of the roughly 60,000 gay men here, according to city estimates - health officials said sero-sorting was easier here than in many other cities because the men were relatively well informed about their status. The disease control centers estimated in June that 77 percent of the city's infected men knew they were infected, compared with estimates of 48 percent in New York and 38 percent in Baltimore.
J. Jeff McConnell, who directs a study of about 300 people who are H.I.V. positive at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology at the University of California, San Francisco, said recent data showed that sero-sorting patterns were "becoming stronger" among the study's gay participants.
Data from three recent months showed that the 176 gay participants engaged in 5,500 acts of sexual intercourse with other men, with about 80 percent of the acts occurring with men known to be H.I.V. positive.
Despite concerns that the Internet facilitates high-risk sex, Mr. McConnell said, "Ultimately, sex that occurs from the Internet is no more risky than sex from any other venues because of sero-sorting."
Yet there are drawbacks. Herb Topping, another of the H-cafe patrons, said that many men who are H.I.V. positive worried about the possibility of becoming infected with a new strain of the virus. Mr. Topping said he insisted on safe-sex practices, like use of condoms, even when having sex with a positive partner, but that other worried positive men seek out willing negative partners.
"I think that is a struggle in the community right now," said Mr. Topping, who tested positive for H.I.V. five years ago.
Health officials recommend safe-sex practices regardless of the partner. But Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, who oversees sexually transmitted disease prevention at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said worries about acquiring a second strain were mostly unfounded.
Dr. Klausner said research had shown that the risk was low, particularly after the first year or two of infection, and paled in comparison with the risks associated with men who are H.I.V. positive having sex with men who are not.
"From a public health perspective," he said, "it is much more important that people have sexual contacts of the same status."
Though it will take months for health officials to come up with firm numbers of their own, preliminary reviews of some data collected at city health clinics and in surveys by the Stop AIDS Project indicate a trend similar to that reported by the disease control centers.
Moreover, statistics released last week on syphilis, which researchers say often tracks closely with H.I.V., show that the number of new infections in San Francisco dropped 27 percent in the first six months of this year, the first decline since 1998.
"We interpret this C.D.C. report as good news, and there are some other encouraging trends and results of other studies," Dr. Willi McFarland, director of the H.I.V. seroepidemiology unit at the San Francisco health department, said in an e-mail message. "But we definitely do need to corroborate and independently confirm any decrease in H.I.V. incidence by carefully examining other data. We also need to figure out if this is true, then why."
On giving greenhouses to Palestinians... that's a bad summation
How Old Friends of Israel Gave $14 Million to Help the Palestinians
By ANDY NEWMAN
It was perhaps an odd request to make of a man noted for his commitment to Israeli causes and his fierce criticism of the Palestinian Authority.
Please raise $14 million to help buy the Jewish settlers' lucrative greenhouses in the Gaza Strip so that the Palestinians can take them over when the settlers are gone. Oh, and can you get it done by the weekend, before the pullout starts? If not, the settlers will destroy the greenhouses on their way out of Gaza to keep them out of Arab hands.
Last Wednesday, though, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, real estate magnate and publisher of The Daily News, received just such a pitch from his friend James D. Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank, current Middle East envoy for the White House and would-be broker of the deal.
Mr. Zuckerman, who is also former head of the American-Israel Friendship League, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Soviet Jewish Zionist Forum, said he thought about the ironies. But not for too long.
"Despite my skepticism," Mr. Zuckerman said in an interview on Tuesday, "I thought to myself, 'This is perhaps the only illustration or symbol of what could be the benefits of a co-operational, rather than a confrontational attitude.' "
So he in turn picked up the phone and called a few of his friends and fellow billionaires, who also happened to be prominent Jewish philanthropists.
Not all of them shared his enthusiasm. "Some people said, 'Well, if these people are so anti-Semitic, why should we do anything to help them?' " Mr. Zuckerman said.
But Lester Crown of Chicago, whose family owns General Dynamics, said yes. Leonard Stern, the chairman of the Hartz Mountain real estate empire and former owner of The Village Voice, called Mr. Zuckerman back from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and said yes. A foundation that prefers to remain anonymous said yes.
Within 48 hours, Mr. Zuckerman said, he had his $14 million. And the Palestinians had a shot at inheriting relatively intact the greenhouses whose vegetables and flowers have been a major source of Israeli export income, and, not incidentally, about 3,500 desperately needed Palestinian jobs.
When the deal was announced Friday, the donors were anonymous, apart from Mr. Wolfensohn, who put up $500,000 of his own. But word about these things tends to leak out, and yesterday morning, Mr. Stern said he got a call at his beach house in the Hamptons from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
"She said that she wanted to let me know that myself and every member of the group that helped make this possible had made a very positive contribution to the peace," he said. Mr. Stern, 67, was asked the last time he received a call from Ms. Rice. "Before my bar mitzvah," he joked, before answering, "Never."
The purchase of the greenhouses had been months in the making. The Israeli government is giving the settlers $55 million for the greenhouses themselves, but Israeli law allows compensation only for buildings and land, not for movables like the greenhouses' computerized irrigation systems.
Without those, the Palestinians would not be able to make a go of running the greenhouses, Mr. Zuckerman said. It was those, the greenhouse guts, that carried the $14 million price tag.
The United States Agency for International Development was willing to put up the money, but could not give it directly to the Israelis because Israel does not qualify for the agency's help, Mr. Zuckerman and Mr. Stern said.
The simple way around that obstacle would have been for the agency to give the money to the Palestinian Authority to hand over to the settlers. But there, Mr. Zuckerman said, "The attitude was, 'We are not going to put our fingerprints on anything that helps the Jews.' "
The donors arranged to funnel their money to the Aspen Institute, a private advocacy group that has been working on investments in the Palestinian areas, and a private Israeli group helped broker the deal with the settlers.
Mr. Stern said he was not used to writing a seven-figure check to a cause he had not had time to research himself.
"But when you know people and you know they're passionate, and you have a great respect for their judgment," he said of Mr. Zuckerman, "I listened to him, and I asked him one question. 'Are you contributing?' He said yes. I said 'Well, O.K., then I will.' "
Mr. Zuckerman is hardly naïve about the prospects for peace in the Middle East.
On Monday in U.S. News & World Report, which he also publishes, he wrote an editorial excoriating both the Palestinian Authority's leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and his more violent, increasingly powerful rivals in Hamas.
"The sad fact," Mr. Zuckerman wrote, "is that everything is going wrong."
But some hope, he said, is better than no hope.
"It's not an easy thing to be up against," Mr. Zuckerman yesterday, "when someone is swearing and yelling at you, and you're saying, 'O.K., well, I'm going to give you $14 million so that you can do better.' But this is the one thing that might be seen as a constructive effort."
On planets
10 Planets? Why Not 11?
By KENNETH CHANG
PASADENA, Calif. - Between feedings and diaper changes of his newborn daughter, Michael E. Brown may yet find an 11th planet.
Once conducted almost exclusively on cold, lonely nights, observational astronomy these days is often done under bright California sunshine.
When he has a few spare minutes, Dr. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, downloads images taken during a previous night by a robotically driven telescope at Palomar Observatory 100 miles away. Each night, the telescope scans a different swath of sky, photographing each patch three times, spaced an hour and a half apart.
In any one of the photographs, a planet or some other icy body at the edge of the solar system looks just like a star. Unlike a star it moves between the exposures.
Dr. Brown's computer programs flag potential discovery candidates for him to inspect. He quickly dismisses almost all of them - double images caused by a bumping of the telescope, blurriness from whirls in the atmosphere or random noise.
Sometimes, like last Jan. 5, he spots a moving dot.
Dr. Brown had rewritten his software to look for slower-moving and more distant objects.
On that morning, he was sitting in his Caltech office - unremarkable university turf sparsely decorated with a not-full bottle of Jack Daniel's, a dragon mobile, a dinosaur toothbrush, a Mr. Potato Head and other toys and knickknacks that long predated parenthood - and re-examining images from nearly a year and a half earlier, Oct. 21, 2003.
The first several candidates offered by the computer were the usual garbled images.
Then he saw it: a bright, unmistakably round dot moving across the star field.
He did a quick calculation. Even if this new object reflected 100 percent of the sunlight that hit it - and nothing is perfectly reflective - it would still be almost as large as Pluto.
That meant, without any additional data, Dr. Brown knew he had discovered what could be the 10th planet.
He noted the time: 11:20 a.m. Dr. Brown knew that astrologers would ask because they had asked after earlier discoveries of smaller Kuiper Belt objects.
He thought about a bet he had made with a friend, for five bottles of Champagne, that he would discover something larger than Pluto by Jan. 1, 2005, five days earlier. He sent her an e-mail message asking for a five-day extension.
Dr. Brown seems destined for future astronomy textbooks, either as the discoverer of the first new planet in 75 years or as the man who pushed Pluto out of the planetary pantheon. Astronomers have long argued over whether Pluto should be a planet and speculated that ice balls larger than Pluto might be hiding in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of debris beyond the orbit of Neptune. Several objects approaching the size of Pluto have been discovered in recent years.
Dr. Brown and two colleagues, David Rabinowitz of Yale and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, are the first to point to something that is almost certainly larger than Pluto.
"If people want to get rid of Pluto, I'm more than happy to get rid of Pluto and say this one isn't a planet, either," Dr. Brown said.
"If culturally we would be willing to accept a scientific definition, that would be great," he continued. "The only thing that would make me unhappy is if Pluto remained a planet, and this one was not one."
So far, little is known about the new planet, which carries the temporary designation of 2003 UB313. It is currently nine billion miles from Sun, at the farthest point of its 560-year orbit.
A couple of centuries from now, its elliptical trajectory will take it within 3.3 billion miles of the Sun, closer than some of Pluto's orbit. And the orbit is surprisingly askew.
While most of the solar system circles the Sun in a flat disc, the new planet's orbit is tilted about 45 degrees from the disc.
Planet finding was not a career goal for Dr. Brown. Until recently, he was among those who argued that nothing in the Kuiper Belt deserved to be called a planet, not even Pluto.
Dr. Brown, 40, grew up in Alabama, a child of the 1970's, which left a mark in his speech patterns. For things he likes, he inevitably calls them "cool."
His father, an engineer at I.B.M., had moved to Huntsville to work on the giant Saturn rockets, which were being designed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to carry astronauts to the Moon.
When he was finishing up his undergraduate degree in physics at Princeton, he thought he would pursue theoretical work in cosmology, devising ideas about how the universe came together.
Then James Peebles, a physics professor at Princeton, mentioned to him how astronomy needed more observers actually looking at the sky.
"That was it," Dr. Brown recalled. "As soon as he said it, I was like, O.K."
In graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, he still planned to work on the far, far away - distant galaxies that blast out loud radio signals. His thesis adviser, Hyron Spinrad, made his graduate students also work on comets, because he was interested in them and could not get help otherwise. Dr. Brown was captivated as well. "I thought, This stuff is cool," he said.
That brought his interests inside the solar system. Later Dr. Brown came across a tiny, little-used 24-inch telescope at the Lick Observatory outside San Jose. "You find the telescope first and then find your thesis program," he said.
His thesis topic turned out to be the volcanoes on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, and how the gases from the volcanoes are swept up into Jupiter's magnetic fields, accelerated into orbit around Jupiter and then slammed back into Io at 125,000 miles per hour.
He entered the planet-searching business through a chance opportunity. When he arrived at Caltech a decade ago, the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar was just finishing up a large sky survey. While many astronomers clamor for use of Palomar's main 200-inch telescope, Dr. Brown realized he could easily get ample time on the smaller one.
So, just as he did at Lick, he looked for a project to fit the telescope.
The first Kuiper Belt object had been discovered a few years earlier, and Dr. Brown thought it would be useful to do a systematic sweep of the sky to look for them. In past centuries, the trick to discovering a planet was knowing exactly where to look. Now, computers and automated telescopes have allowed a new strategy: look everywhere.
Dr. Brown has a love of code names, so he and his colleagues decided if they ever found something larger than Pluto, they would give it the code name Xena, after the television series starring Lucy Lawless as an ancient Greek warrior.
It was also partly a nod to Planet X, a long-hypothesized massive planet in the outer solar system.
In 2002, Dr. Brown and Dr. Trujillo turned up their first big find: a Kuiper Belt object about 775 miles wide, or about as large as Pluto's moon, Charon. They named it Quaoar, after a god in Native American mythology, and learned their first lesson in astronomical discovery: find a pronounceable name. (Quaoar is pronounced KWAH-o-wahr.)
A year later, Dr. Brown, Dr. Trujillo and Dr. Rabinowitz of Yale found something stranger, an object larger than Quaoar and much father out, eight billion miles. And stranger yet, its 11,000-year orbit carries it out as far as 84 billion miles, far beyond anything else known in the solar system.
Initially, they excitedly thought it might be larger than Pluto and called it Xena for a few days. But further measurements and calculations indicated it was probably, at most, three-quarters the diameter of Pluto. When they announced the discovery last year, they gave it the name of Sedna, after an Inuit goddess.
The name was easily pronounceable, but it peeved some astronomers, especially amateur asteroid searchers, who felt Dr. Brown had again flouted the International Astronomical Union's naming rules. The rules prohibit discoverers from publicly announcing any name, even a tentative one, before the union approves it, a process that takes months to years. The critics wanted the union to rebuke Dr. Brown and reject the name.
One amateur astronomer, Reiner M. Stoss, even proposed Sedna as a name for a small, earlier discovered asteroid, to thwart Dr. Brown.
Dr. Brown admitted, "I consciously broke the rules," but he felt that the preliminary designation, 2003 VB12, was too obscure and confusing for a noteworthy addition to the solar system. "I thought, This is stupid," he said. "This object needs to have a name before it goes public."
After Sedna, the astronomers also realized that there could be more discoveries lurking in their photographs.
Dr. Brown finds that betting is an effective way to spur scientific progress. He would have found the planet sooner or later, but late last year he realized that his best hope for winning the Champagne bet was to sift through thousands of candidates in the old images.
On Dec. 20, going through the images from the previous May, he discovered a new bright Kuiper Belt object.
It was big, but not big enough. He gave that one the code name of Santa.
When he later discovered a moon around Santa, he gave the moon the code name Rudolph. (When he discovered yet another Kuiper Belt object in April, he continued in the holiday vein and code named that one Easter Bunny. He even had a code name for his daughter before she was born and he and his wife had not yet settled on a name. The whiteboard in his office had a list of tasks labeled "TDBP" - To Do Before Petunia.)
He spent Christmas through New Year's examining old images.
Nothing turned up.
Then on Jan. 5 - not Jan. 8 as he had said at his news conference - he finally found one he could call Xena. "What if it's the size of Mercury?" he mused in his notes.
This time, Dr. Brown decided to play by the International Astronomical Union's rules and did not announce his real intended name for 2003 UB313, leading to rumors that he had officially proposed Xena.
Meanwhile, Dr. Brown, on family leave until the end of year, found a new set of data to work with: his daughter Lilah's sleeping and eating patterns.
In the hospital, he and his wife had, like many new parents, written down a record of feeding and sleeping times.
Dr. Brown wrote a computer program to generate colorful charts from the information and put them online at lilahbrown.com.
"Who wouldn't be fascinated?" Dr. Brown asked. "Well, I guess, most people."
Black bars indicate the times that his wife, Diane Binney, is breast-feeding Lilah. Blue bars indicate when Dr. Brown is feeding a bottle to her. Green bars indicate the hours Lilah is awake and content; red bars indicate the fussy times.
Dr. Brown said he hoped to find a pattern in Lilah's sleep cycle - she has been waking up, on average, every 2.5 hours. If one nap lasted only 1.5 hours, would that mean the next nap would last 3.5 hours, giving her parents a chance to rest?
A chart with cloudlike splatter of data points gave the unfortunate answer. "There is absolutely no correlation," Dr. Brown said.
Illegal Immigrants legally win Arizona Ranch
2 Illegal Immigrants Win Arizona Ranch in Court
By ANDREW POLLACK
DOUGLAS, Ariz., Aug. 18 - Spent shells litter the ground at what is left of the firing range, and camouflage outfits still hang in a storeroom. Just a few months ago, this ranch was known as Camp Thunderbird, the headquarters of a paramilitary group that promised to use force to keep illegal immigrants from sneaking across the border with Mexico.
Now, in a turnabout, the 70-acre property about two miles from the border is being given to two immigrants whom the group caught trying to enter the United States illegally.
The land transfer is being made to satisfy judgments in a lawsuit in which the immigrants had said that Casey Nethercott, the owner of the ranch and a former leader of the vigilante group Ranch Rescue, had harmed them.
"Certainly it's poetic justice that these undocumented workers own this land," said Morris S. Dees Jr., co-founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which represented the immigrants in their lawsuit.
Mr. Dees said the loss of the ranch would "send a pretty important message to those who come to the border to use violence."
The surrender of the ranch comes as the governors of Arizona and New Mexico have declared a state of emergency because of the influx of illegal immigrants and related crime along the border.
Bill Dore, a Douglas resident briefly affiliated with Ranch Rescue who is still active in the border-patrolling Minuteman Project, called the land transfer "ridiculous."
"The illegals are coming over here," Mr. Dore said. "They are getting the American property. Hell, I'd come over, too. Get some American property, make some money from the gringos."
The immigrants getting the ranch, Edwin Alfredo Mancía Gonzáles and Fátima del Socorro Leiva Medina, could not be reached for comment. Kelley Bruner, a lawyer at the law center, said they did not want to speak to the news media but were happy with the outcome.
Ms. Bruner said that Mr. Mancía and Ms. Leiva, who are from El Salvador but are not related, would not live at the ranch and would probably sell it. Mr. Nethercott bought the ranch in 2003 for $120,000.
Mr. Mancía, who lives in Los Angeles, and Ms. Leiva, who lives in the Dallas area, have applied for visas that are available to immigrants who are the victims of certain crimes and who cooperate with the authorities, Ms. Bruner said. She said that until a decision was made on their applications, they could stay and work in the United States on a year-to-year basis.
Mr. Mancía and Ms. Leiva were caught on a ranch in Hebbronville, Tex., in March 2003 by Mr. Nethercott and other members of Ranch Rescue. The two immigrants later accused Mr. Nethercott of threatening them and of hitting Mr. Mancía with a pistol, charges that Mr. Nethercott denied. The immigrants also said the group gave them cookies, water and a blanket and let them go after an hour or so.
The Salvadorans testified against Mr. Nethercott when he was tried by Texas prosecutors. The jury deadlocked on a charge of pistol-whipping but convicted Mr. Nethercott, who had previously served time in California for assault, of gun possession, which is illegal for a felon. He is now serving a five-year sentence in a Texas prison.
Mr. Mancía and Ms. Leiva also filed a lawsuit against Mr. Nethercott; Jack Foote, the founder of Ranch Rescue; and the owner of the Hebbronville ranch, Joe Sutton. The immigrants said the ordeal, in which they feared that they would be killed by the men they thought were soldiers, had left them with post-traumatic stress.
Mr. Sutton settled for $100,000. Mr. Nethercott and Mr. Foote did not defend themselves, so the judge issued default judgments of $850,000 against Mr. Nethercott and $500,000 against Mr. Foote.
Mr. Dees said Mr. Foote appeared to have no substantial assets, but Mr. Nethercott had the ranch. Shortly after the judgment, Mr. Nethercott gave the land to his sister, Robin Albitz, of Prescott, Ariz. The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the siblings, saying the transfer was fraudulent and was meant to avoid the judgment.
Ms. Albitz, a nursing assistant, signed over the land to the two immigrants last week.
"It scared the hell out of her," Margaret Pauline Nethercott, the mother of Mr. Nethercott and Ms. Albitz, said of the lawsuit. "She didn't know she had done anything illegal. We didn't know they had a judgment against my son."
This was not the first time the law center had taken property from a group on behalf of a client. In 1987, the headquarters of a Ku Klux Klan group in Alabama was given to the mother of a boy whose murder was tied to Klansmen. Property has also been taken from the Aryan Nations and the White Aryan Resistance, Mr. Dees said.
Joseph Jacobson, a lawyer in Austin who represented Mr. Nethercott in the criminal case, said the award was "a vast sum of money for a very small indignity." Mr. Jacobson said the two immigrants were trespassing on Mr. Sutton's ranch and would have been deported had the criminal charges not been filed against Mr. Nethercott.
He criticized the law center for trying to get $60,000 in bail money transferred to the immigrants. While the center said the money was Mr. Nethercott's, Mr. Jacobson said it was actually Ms. Nethercott's, who mortgaged her home to post bail for her son.
Mr. Nethercott and Mr. Foote had a falling out in 2004, and Mr. Foote left Camp Thunderbird, taking Ranch Rescue with him. Mr. Nethercott then formed the Arizona Guard, also based on his ranch.
In April, Mr. Nethercott told an Arizona television station, "We're going to come out here and close the border with machine guns." But by the end of the month, he had started his prison sentence.
Now, only remnants of Camp Thunderbird remain on his ranch, a vast expanse of hard red soil, mesquite and tumbleweed with a house and two bunkhouses. One bunkhouse has a storeroom containing some camouflage suits, sleeping bags, tarps, emergency rations, empty ammunition crates, gun parts and a chemical warfare protection suit.
In one part of the ranch, dirt is piled up to form the backdrop of a firing range. An old water tank, riddled with bullet holes, is on its side. A platform was built as an observation post on the tower that once held the water tank.
Charles Jones, who was hired as a ranch hand about a month before Mr. Nethercott went to prison, put up fences and brought in cattle to graze. He has continued to live on the property with some family members.
But now the cattle are gone, and Mr. Jones has been told that he should prepare to leave. "It makes me sick I did all this work," he said.
Ms. Nethercott said she was not sure whether her son knew that his ranch was being turned over to the immigrants, but that he would be crushed if he did.
"That's his whole life," she said of the ranch. "He'd be heartbroken if he lost it in any way, but this is the worst way."
On the Kosher Sock Guy
We All Scream for...Kosher Socks?
By ANDREW JACOBS
ULSTER HEIGHTS, N.Y., Aug. 18 - Never has a cloud of dust brought so much pleasure.
For residents of Bayit Vegan, a bungalow colony with 100 cottages and a summer's worth of pent-up consumer demand, the dust signaled the arrival of Murray Goldwag and his rolling shop of discounted wonders. The buzz began even before he could navigate the camp's crater-pocked driveway and unload the boxes of black knee-highs, ankle-length skirts, challah covers, and most important, cheap plastic toys.
"The kosher sock guy is here, the kosher sock guy is here," the children shouted, followed by that interrogative dear to a merchant's ears: "Mommy, can I have a dollar?"
Despite the words on his apron - "Murray's Kosher Socks" - Mr. Goldwag is not just a purveyor of hosiery. His world-weary van, packed like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, is loaded with a five-and-dime's worth of summer necessities: laundry bags, nose plugs, rubber balls, flashlights, bathing caps, rain ponchos, fly swatters and those plastic spray bottles that come in handy on a sweltering afternoon. Except for the paddleball rackets and the women's clothing, nearly everything can be had for $3 or less.
"If I don't sell it, you don't need it," said Mr. Goldwag, 60. "I'm not in this for the money. I just like the exercise I get from all this shlepping."
Like Izzy the Knishman, Sy the Shoe Guy and the parade of men and women who deal in manicures, religious books and kosher ice cream, Mr. Goldwag travels between the 200 or so Catskill bungalow colonies that enliven the mountains here like so many Polish shtetls. He and his shlepping brethren deal in dry goods and borscht belt diversions, helping to relieve the ennui of a long summer day while providing refreshments or a desperately needed replacement for the skullcap that ended up at the bottom of the lake. "These people are like family, we can't wait to see them," said Tova Lichtenstein, a math teacher from Brooklyn. "And their prices, they aren't bad either."
Back when working-class families were lucky to have one car and husbands needed it to get between the mountains and their weekday city jobs, the Catskill peddler was a critical part of summer subsistence for families left behind during the week. There was the Chow Chow Cup man who sold Chinese food in an edible bowl, Lassie the Classy toy hawker and the "movie guy" who would show up year after year and project the same films - usually "The Guns of Navarone" - on the handball court wall.
"It's was Lower East Side pushcart culture transferred to the country, full of bantering and bargaining," said Phil Brown, a professor of sociology at Brown University who organizes an annual conference on Catskill nostalgia. "The P.A. system would constantly be announcing the arrival of yet another peddler in the parking lot."
Although the two-car household is much more prevalent and the number of colonies has declined, many families still spend the summer here without their own vehicles. At the Satmar-dominated camps, where women do not drive, the traveling salesmen are cherished even more.
"When you have eight children who are constantly losing their socks, you look forward to Murray's arrival," said Faige Rothstein, 42, who was stocking up on hosiery for her six boys, each of whom were far more interested in Mr. Goldwag's tangle of yo-yos, water guns and trinkets.
Like many of the other vendors, Mr. Goldwag, who lives off-season on Long Island, practically grew up in the area's bungalow colonies and has fond memories of the region's charismatic salesmen. He first tried out his peddling legs selling neckties and suspenders in the 1970's, during the reign of "Mork & Mindy," when everyone wanted to dress like Robin Williams. The peddling bug stuck, and even though he is a mathematics teacher in Brooklyn during the school year, he returns to the Catskills each Memorial Day to sell to the observant Jews who have been reviving scores of decrepit colonies.
He and his wife also run a storefront in nearby South Fallsburg, but Mr. Goldwag prefers to hit the road as often as he can, usually with his daughter, Elana, 19. Mr. Goldwag seems to thrive on the intense kibitzing that accompanies his visits. He has memorized entire family trees, and almost every customer seems to know about the impending marriage of his daughter. His son, Ari, is a celebrated entertainer in the Jewish community, but he is often referred to as "Murray the Sockman's son."
Mr. Goldwag's main competitor, Not Just Hose, is Avi Rosenzweig, who started selling in 1981 out of the trunk of his Buick Century. Mr. Rosenzweig is something of an upstart, although with a recently purchased truck , he can now offer much more merchandise. Like Kosher Socks, Not Just Hose is a family affair, with Mr. Rosenzweig's son helping unload the truck at each stop and setting the boxes atop weather-beaten sheets of plywood suspended on creaky sawhorses. During the school year, Mr. Rosenzweig, 47, a father of five, works as an administrator at a Brooklyn Yeshiva, and his wife, Gitty, oversees their storefront in downtown Flushing, not far from the family's home.
All the women's clothing is geared toward modesty, and Mr. Rosenzweig's mobile operation is largely designed to clear the shelves for arriving fall merchandise. This year's hot item? Plastic Chinese sandals that are worn during the nine-day holiday known as Tisha B'Av, when the wearing of leather shoes is forbidden.
"My wife's specialty is fashion; my end of it is the schlep," said Mr. Rosenzweig, sweating as he and his youngest son, Tsvi, 19, set up shop at Sefarady's, an Ultra Orthodox colony in Monticello.
They try to hit three colonies a day, and the work is both grueling and increasingly challenging. The new Wal-Mart in Monticello has drained away business, and each year, another colony or two has turned into a suburban-style subdivision, its residents ensconced inside air-conditioned citadels. The takeover of formerly secular colonies by the Hasidic families - who tend to dress with less variation - has also reduced the demand for clothing. "For me, the mountains have gotten smaller," he said. "I'm working harder to make less money."
With the crayons safely shaded by an umbrella and errant underwear placed in the appropriate boxes, Mr. Rosenzweig grabbed his bullhorn, wiped his brow and began to wander through the constellation of cottages, their porches draped with towels and bathing suits drying in the sun. He pushed a button on the megaphone and out came a sound like the amplified buzz of a dive-bombing mosquito. Then he began his spiel: "Attention all smart shoppers. Not Just Hose is back with more clothing at lower prices. Ladies, girls, preteens, shabbos clothing, tickles, snoods and toys galore. Look for the yellow truck on the other side of the shul."
By the time he returned to his open-air bazaar, the tables were mobbed with the eager and the unimpressed. One woman approached Mr. Rosenzweig with finger wagging. "I'm very angry at you," she said, breaking into a smile. "Where have you been? We've been waiting for you all summer."
On "assisted" marriage
With a slideshow
Courtship Ideas of South Asians Get a U.S. Touch
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
At 10 a.m. one Saturday in July, a few weeks after he finished his medical residency at Brown University, Ronak Shah married Kunal Patel, another doctor, in a union that embraced every ritual of the Hindu nuptial script.
Dr. Shah arrived at the Hanover Marriott in Whippany, N.J., by horse and carriage. He wore a traditional sherwani. And he greeted, before all others, his bride's mother, in a gesture that signified the importance of parental engineering in Indian marriage.
But for Dr. Shah and Dr. Patel, both 28, and thousands of young Indians raised in the United States, that engineering is undergoing a change. The venerable South Asian tradition of arranged marriages has taken on an American reinvention. Dr. Patel's mother and father had a hand in their daughter's selection. They were in touch with friends, cousins and cousins of cousins for suggestions about whom she should marry. But Dr. Patel was free to reject them all.
Only over dinner with Dr. Shah - her ninth suitor - did she finally begin a courtship that was fueled as much by chemical attraction as by familial interest. Her marriage, as some young Indians refer to it, was "love-cum-arranged."
Less than a decade ago, the decision about whom a South Asian woman here might marry was still often left to her parents, the prospective bride's individual preference for tall dentists or contemplative artists notwithstanding. But recently, purely arranged marriage has evolved into a new culture of what might be called "assisted" marriage, in which parents are free to arrange all they like - allowing their sons and daughters choice among nominees screened for caste, lineage and geography, among other measures - and giving the children veto power.
These young people may have come of age in an America of "Moonstruck" and "Dawson's Creek," but in many cases they have not completely accepted the Western model of romantic attachment. Indeed, some of the impetus for assisted marriage is coming from young people themselves - men and women who have delayed marriage into their late 20's and early 30's, said Ayesha Hakki, the editor of Bibi, a South Asian bridal and fashion magazine based in New Jersey.
"That has been the most remarkable trend," Ms. Hakki said, citing the example of a male acquaintance, who, after dating on his own, turned to his parents for guidance.
As Madhulika Khandelwal, a historian who has studied Indians here, said, "Young people don't want to make individual decisions alone."
The Patel-Shah union was instigated by the chance encounter two years ago of Dr. Shah's mother and Dr. Patel's at Famous Pizza, a restaurant in Queens that is favored by Indian immigrants. Friends from the town of Nadiad in India, the two had not seen each other in 30 years. Their conversation moved to the subject of their still-single children.
In large part, Ms. Khandelwal said, the transition from formally arranged marriage reflects social changes in India itself, where assisted marriage is now common among the educated, urban middle class. That is because, she said, there are fewer extended-family living arrangements and more women pursuing higher education.
The purpose of assisted marriage here is not simply to preserve Indian cultural identity, but more pointedly to maintain class, religious and regional identities in a place where they might easily be diffused, those who have studied the Indian diaspora say. When Mona Mahajan, a recent graduate of Harvard Business School from New Jersey, married an Indian she met on her own, she was the first in five generations of her family not to have wed a Punjabi.
Arranged and assisted marriage have left Indians with the lowest rate of intermarriage of any major immigrant group in the United States. Among South Asian men and women here in their 20's and 30's, the vast majority of whom are foreign born, fewer than 10 percent marry outside their ethnic group, according to an analysis of the Census Bureau's 2003 American Community Survey conducted for this article. "In the beginning I was pretty against all of this," Dr. Patel said of this newer approach. "Growing up here, you feel that you're supposed to fall in love, but once you figure out that everyone goes on blind dates it doesn't feel quite as strange."
Among Indian parents here who are traditionally inclined, many begin to seek husbands when their daughters are 22 or 23, but the search may be forestalled if the woman is pursuing a graduate degree, Indian women report. Men begin looking for wives with their families' help at about age 26; within more liberal households, children often marry those they meet on their own.
Preceding any planned meeting is the exchange of the all important "bio-data" between families, the term used for a portfolio with the potential bride or groom's profile.
The embrace of more traditional habits is apparent in other ways. Weddings are often elaborate and last three or four days. Families of the betrothed often still consult a Hindu astrologer who schedules wedding ceremonies according to the stars. When Anamika Tavathia, 24, was engaged to a young Indian she met in college, his family visited hers to propose on his behalf and the priest determined they should marry on June 26 of this year between 10:30 and 11 a.m.
This fall is expected to be an unusually busy wedding season in Indian communities, because many couples postponed weddings last year when many days were deemed inauspicious.
Royal Albert Palace, a five-year-old catering facility in Woodbridge, N.J., with a 21-foot statue of a former deputy prime minister of India out front, has become the locus for Indian weddings, and it was there, at a wedding last month, that two young women discussed assisted marriage.
"My dad's parents didn't even see each other until the day they were married," said Kesha Patel, 25, who came to the United States as a child and is looking for someone, with her family's help. "So when I think about that, I'm grateful for the system we have."
Kesha Patel has taken trips to India to meet prospective partners, and her family has arranged for her to meet men here, as well.
"Sometimes you'll get the bio-data and it will be great, and then when you meet the person, you're disappointed," she said. "My parents won't understand, they'll say, 'But he's from a good family, he's a doctor, he's a doctor, he's a doctor.' And I'll say, 'But he's short.' "
Alienating one's parents is anathema to Indian culture, and most young people wish to avoid doing so through marriage. Four years ago, Preet Singh, a 28-year-old teacher in Chicago, fell in love with a woman seven years his senior and not a Sikh. He hoped to marry her and live with her in his parents' home.
"My mother might have accepted the marriage but she would not have lived with us," he said. "It was one of the nastiest breakups of all because that person helped me mature into a man." Not long ago, Mr. Singh's sisters posted his profile on an Indian matrimonial Web site, and he will marry this fall.
Part of his parents' displeasure with the previous relationship was the fact that he was dating at all. Though a Bibi magazine survey conducted three years ago revealed that the majority of married men and women questioned had had sex before marriage, dating, as Mr. Singh put it, "does not exist in our culture." This view leaves parents encouraging children to resolve the marriage question quickly.
The parents of Leena Singh waited until she was older than 25 and had earned a master's degree in mathematics and an M.B.A. to find a husband. Ms. Singh's father eventually found someone to her liking, Sanjeev Tavathia, a young man studying engineering in Iowa. They met in the company of relatives, then went out alone. Back in San Diego, where she was living with her parents, she called Mr. Tavathia and told him she was ready for marriage. He said he was 90 percent certain. They married several months later.
"From the beginning, I felt there was a physical chemistry," Ms. Singh said, "but it took years to develop a mature bond, and I guess you could call that love."
Despite its groundings in pragmatism, assisted marriage is spoken about among some young Indians in highly romanticized terms - implicit in it is the cinematic idea that immediate attraction should result in an eternity spent together.
Kesha Petal's sister married a man to whom she was introduced through her aunts. She decided to marry him the day after they met. "A lot of my friends," Kesha Petal said, her eyes gleaming, "tell me you know in an instant."
On the recently discovered dinosaur footprint at BC....
Not the Biggest Man on Campus, but Surely the Biggest Foot
By MICHAEL BRICK
Here is a good way to hide dinosaur tracks: Wait tens of millions of years while the footsteps fossilize under a shallow sea that will later become Texas, dig up the tracks just before World War II, put plaster around the sides, paint the whole thing a whimsical muddy red, take it to Brooklyn and bolt it to a classroom wall with an unadorned case.
By accident, this method worked until just this summer for Roland T. Bird, a Harley-riding excavator who called himself a dinosaur hunter. When Brooklyn College started renovating its lecture halls in May, scientists began packing what they had assumed was a case containing a plaster cast of dinosaur tracks, a teaching tool held in such regard that it was often obscured by a projector screen.
Removing the case, they found that the block on the wall of Room 3123, so phony-looking it could be mistaken for something carbon-frozen in "The Empire Strikes Back," was a real rock embedded with tracks more than 100 million years old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and holding immense archaeological value.
"It was there all the time," said Wayne G. Powell, the chairman of the geology department, who was among the scientists removing the block from the wall. "It really never occurred to us that it could possibly be real."
Up three flights of stairs, behind a wooden door marked Geology Lecture Room, with the words Please Lock the Door underneath, the rock is found. It stands 55 inches high and 32 inches across.
A worker was laying a coat of epoxy on the floor yesterday, and the room smelled like the makings of a headache. The college has enlisted the American Museum of Natural History for help in removing the rock to clean it and put it back on display, but there are other considerations. Classes start in two weeks.
Considering what it has already been through, though, the rock can be called a survivor. No marker described its provenance, and those who knew what it was had died or moved on over the years. It also was able to hide in plain sight for decades largely because of changes in curatorial sensibilities The scientists who installed it in the 1940's would never have thought to tell anyone it was real; that would be like telling people your hair is real.
Their latter-day counterparts would never imagine treating a rare fossil so cavalierly as to, for starters, paint it.
Mr. Powell, who describes his specialty as "not dinosaurs," removed the rock's case at the close of the spring semester with a paleontology professor, John Chamberlain, and a student, Matt Garb. Because real dinosaur tracks are hard to come by, colleges and museums routinely display replicas, and the rock looked like one, partly because plaster was visible on its side.
Behind the case, though, written in pencil on the wall, they found the name R. T. Bird and the date, presumably of its installation, of May 16, 1942. Mr. Garb recognized the name, and the men got a copy of Mr. Bird's memoir, "Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter."
In the book, Mr. Bird, who dropped out of junior high school and worked as a cowboy before barnstorming the country on his motorcycle showing archaeological finds for the American Museum of Natural History, described discoveries in the limestone around the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Tex. The trackways there, now famous as the site where some creationists claim human footprints were laid contemporaneously with dinosaur tracks, have been preserved as Dinosaur Valley State Park, so fossils can no longer be removed.
But back in the late 1930's and early 1940's, Mr. Bird was making up his own rules. In his memoir, he described the way he and Erich Schlaikjer, an assistant professor of geology from Brooklyn College, distributed the blocks of tracks. He wrote: "Erich came up with a proposal. 'And I'd like one of the smaller ones for Brooklyn College.' "
Mr. Schlaikjer got his wish, bolted to the wall of the lecture hall and painted the same reddish-brown color bones that usually appear in history museums.
"They probably wanted tracks to match the bones," Mr. Powell said.
Kathleen Kovach, a facilities worker at the college, said, "That's more decorating than curating."
There are two tracks in the rock, a shallow one a couple of feet across and a deeper, narrower one the shape of a crescent. Based on the kinds of tracks common to the Paluxy River bed, the scientists at Brooklyn College said the big one was probably made by a Pleurocoelus, a 20-ton herbivore that has been named the Texas state dinosaur. The smaller one may have come from an Acrocanthosaurus, a sharp-toothed monster Pleurocoeluses sought to avoid meeting in dark cretaceous alleys.
Mr. Bird would have his own ideas about the tracks' origins, and would know why they had painted the rock, bolted it to the wall and lined it with plaster. But he died a long time ago, and left only scattered hints of the way he had lived.
On school supplies
It's Not Your Mother's List of School Supplies
By ALINA TUGEND
THESE days, students, especially in middle and high schools, are beginning to resemble airline passengers with their backpacks on wheels stuffed to the brim with books, gadgets and who knows what else.
When I was a student I didn't even have a backpack. We just carried our books and shoved those we didn't need in a locker.
But that is not all that has changed. Once upon a time, the new school year meant buying a folder or two, loose-leaf paper, a few pens and the ubiquitous sharpened No. 2 pencils. Now children are given arm-length lists that require a good hour trolling through supply stores for, say, just the right mechanical crayon (that's right, this year, the hot new product is mechanical crayons, also known as twist-up crayons).
And when students grow older, the list becomes top-heavy with expensive items, like computers and printers.
But back to backpacks. Since some sort of pack is de rigueur, the question for befuddled parents is how to choose one that won't cause physical harm.
Potential backpack injuries have become such a concern that some health care workers, school administrators and legislators have recommended that backpack use be restricted or eliminated.
In response, the American Academy of Pediatrics conducted a study, published in the magazine Pediatrics in 2003, that examined acute backpack injuries in children.
The study looked at some records from 100 emergency departments throughout the country. It found that 247 children from age 6 to 18 had backpack injuries. The mean age was 11, and the injuries were divided fairly evenly between boys and girls.
Surprisingly, it wasn't the weight of the backpacks that was the most common cause of injuries; it was tripping over the backpack, which occurred in 28 percent of the time. Getting hit by the backpack caused 13 percent of the injuries.
Another 13 percent of the injuries - to the neck, backpack and shoulders - were caused by wearing the backpack.
"The 'nonstandard' use of the backpack (tripping, hitting, etc.) resulted in 77 percent of all backpack injuries that required an emergency room visit," the study noted. Therefore, training students to put their backpacks in a safe place and not to use them as weapons against another person would eliminate many backpack-related injuries.
The study, however, did not consider minor injuries that do not require an emergency-room visit, or chronic pain from heavy backpacks.
Besides telling your child to safely stow the pack and not to whack someone with it, the academy does offer suggestions on what to look for when buying a backpack.
First, the backpack should never weigh more than 10 percent to 20 percent of a student's weight. And the straps should be tight enough so the pack is close to the body, and about two inches above the waist.
The pack should have wide, padded shoulder straps (two of them; one strap that runs across the body cannot distribute the weight evenly). It should be lightweight and have a padded back and a waist strap to distribute the load evenly.
The rolling or wheeled backpacks are an option, of course, although those still have to be carried upstairs, and may be difficult to manipulate in snow.
Some administrators suggest buying two sets of textbooks, or at least doubles of the very heavy ones; one to leave at home and one in the locker. That, however, is a costly alternative.
And, after all, it's not as if parents don't have enough items to buy.
Last year, my elementary-school children's lists of school supplies included composition books, pencils, folders, markers (specific brand of thick and thin), glue sticks, erasers, pencil sharpeners, low- odor dry-erase markers and Post-its.
There were also requests for paper towels, Ziploc bags and tissues.
It turns out that the ever-lengthening school-supply list has become a national problem that worries both parents and teachers.
"Parents across the country are finding that the lists get longer all the time," said Anna Marie Weselak, president of the National PTA. "Budgets are being cut so schools are looking to supplement shortfalls."
That means, Ms. Weselak said, schools are asking parents to not just provide academic materials and supplies, but also cleaning supplies, "right down to the toilet paper."
In addition, she said, parents are increasingly paying extra for items or activities that used to be included free in their child's education, like towel fees for physical education classes.
In 2004, her organization conducted a national survey that found that school financing surpassed safety as the chief concern of parents for the first time in many years.
It's not just parents feeling a pinch. Staci Maiers, a spokeswoman for the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union, said teachers were increasingly spending more of their own money to buy classroom necessities.
In 1996, the association asked teachers for the first time how much of their own money they had spent during the last school year for their students. The average was $408 annually.
When the question was repeated for its most recent survey in 2001, the number had grown to an average of $443 yearly. An online survey this past March of about 700 association members found that they spent an average of $1,200 in the previous year. Anecdotally, many teachers say they routinely spend $50 to $100 monthly on items for their classes for everything from books to aquariums.
"It's one of the issues we hear over and over again, and it's pretty much the same for large and small school districts," Ms. Maiers said.
There is even legislation pending before Congress now, the Teacher Tax Relief Act of 2005 (nicknamed the Crayola Credit) that would increase to $400 annually from $250 the amount teachers can deduct from their taxes for nonreimbursed expenses, like books, lesson materials and, yes, even crayons. Sponsored by Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan, it was referred to the Ways and Means Committee in June.
Parents of older students laugh heartily at such worries. They know that the folders, markers and glue sticks are literally child's play compared with the variety of electronics students need as they move up the education ladder.
Besides computers (laptop or desktop? Windows or Macintosh) and printers, cellphones and MP3 players are practically mandatory college equipment nowadays.
The Back to School Guide of Consumer Reports (www.consumerreports.com) has tips on what to look for when buying electronics.
For example, the magazine suggests that families may want to insure an expensive phone. It notes that all major carriers provide insurance that covers lost, stolen or damaged phones, typically for about $4 to $5 a month, with a $35 to $50 deductible.
With MP3 players, Consumer Reports warns buyers to remember some key points. First, make sure that any player you're considering is compatible with your Windows or Macintosh computer.
Second, do you really need an MP3 player that can pump out music for weeks without repeating a tune? If a lower price, smaller size, less weight and long playback times are more important to you than a huge selection of music, Consumer Reports suggests considering a flash-memory model. That means you can add on memory cards to expand the song capacity.
But, if you have a large music collection that you want available through your MP3 player, then a hard disk may be the right move.
Let's recheck our list: there is the ergonomically correct backpack, school supplies and electronics carefully researched for quality and price.
What next? Well, according to the National Retail Federation, more than 93 percent of consumers plan to buy clothes in anticipation of the new school year.
Mall trip anyone?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-08-24 01:43 am (UTC)My lothario went through chemistry class taking tests designed for calculator usage with scrap paper and a log table, because his mother couldn't afford to buy him an expensive calculator. He managed it alright because he's way above average, but you're clearly at a disadvantage, and some kids won't be able to compensate.
They're whittling away at the idea of public education. And trying to pretend they're not so they can still blame the poor.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-24 03:17 am (UTC)I guess I'm going to have to be perfectly honest, this is going to be a bit of a tangent.
My best friend is gay, and also sexually active. Though I know AIDS isn't a "gay disease" and the largest growing group of people being infected is straight African American women, I cannot help but worry constantly about whether or not he is going to be infected. Luckily, right now he is monogamous with a guy I know isn't infected... But... Thank you for posting that article because the best thing that can happen with HIV is for people to become informed.
It was good to read about people, in my area, getting HIV under control. Recently I found out that if you knew you were infected and had unprot. sex with an uninfected person, it is considered assault with a deadly weapon. I guess that pretty much sums up my ideas about the disease and sex right now. Too risky to take part in.
I'm also slightly germaphobic... so... no interest in sex.
But about my friend, I always feel guilty because I am not in the least homophobic, but I have this bias. I just want him to be safe.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-24 01:43 am (UTC)My lothario went through chemistry class taking tests designed for calculator usage with scrap paper and a log table, because his mother couldn't afford to buy him an expensive calculator. He managed it alright because he's way above average, but you're clearly at a disadvantage, and some kids won't be able to compensate.
They're whittling away at the idea of public education. And trying to pretend they're not so they can still blame the poor.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-24 03:17 am (UTC)I guess I'm going to have to be perfectly honest, this is going to be a bit of a tangent.
My best friend is gay, and also sexually active. Though I know AIDS isn't a "gay disease" and the largest growing group of people being infected is straight African American women, I cannot help but worry constantly about whether or not he is going to be infected. Luckily, right now he is monogamous with a guy I know isn't infected... But... Thank you for posting that article because the best thing that can happen with HIV is for people to become informed.
It was good to read about people, in my area, getting HIV under control. Recently I found out that if you knew you were infected and had unprot. sex with an uninfected person, it is considered assault with a deadly weapon. I guess that pretty much sums up my ideas about the disease and sex right now. Too risky to take part in.
I'm also slightly germaphobic... so... no interest in sex.
But about my friend, I always feel guilty because I am not in the least homophobic, but I have this bias. I just want him to be safe.